The Religious Studies Project

The Research Excellence Framework (or REF) is a major aspect of the institutional environment of academia in the UK—a time-consuming process of ranking departmental research that decides how funding is distributed. While controversial, the process tells us a good deal about the health of different subjects, including religious studies. In today’s episode, the chair of the Theology and Religious Studies panel, Gordon Lynch, joins David Robertson to outline the process for those lucky enough not to have experienced it for themselves, and to tell us what it says about the situation for the discipline, and the social sciences and Arts and Humanities more broadly.

Our first Discourse! episode for the season features host Emily D. Crews, who is joined by long-time friends of the RSP, Richard Newton and Theo Wildcroft. This excellent and wide-ranging episode addresses present issues of history and identity, social activism and new religious movements, doulas and abortion rights, and much, much more! You won’t want to miss it. Be sure to tune in and check out the video episode!

• “Abortion doulas look to spiritual rituals as they brace for increased demand“
• “Atonement as Activism“
• “How Social Justice Became a New Religion: Our Society Is Becoming Less Religious. Or Is It?“
• “Is History History?: Identity Politics and Technologies of the Present“
• “How Ireland’s Hare Krishna Island went from dream to folly to recovery“
• “Japan PM’s popularity dives over party links to Unification church“

For our first episode of Season 12, Falguni A. Sheth joins RSP editor Andie Alexander to discuss her new book Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab. In this episode, Sheth explores issues of liberalism, racial discrimination, and religious freedom with regard to Muslim women of color and Black Muslim women in the US through a variety of legal case studies. Sheth demonstrates that the exclusion of Muslim women of color and Black Muslim women works to regulate and manage liberal subjects.

Our June episode of Discourse!, featuring episode host Benjamin P. Marcus, Jade Hui, and Lauren Horn Griffin, covers religion and the news in the United States and Hong Kong. Kicking off the discussion with current issues of religion and the U.S. Supreme Court, they explore notions of religion, history, tradition, and authority in Justice Alito’s leaked draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and consider what the Court’s recent decision in Carson v. Makin might reveal to us about American assumptions vis-à-vis religion, the secular, and religious freedom. They conclude by discussing grieving rituals and performance art that occurred on the streets of Hong Kong on June 4th, 2022. Their discussion of religion in Hong Kong surfaces many of the same questions about history, tradition, authority, and the value of placing discussions about religion in one country in an international context. Be sure to tune in!!

This episode was recorded before the 24 June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

• Carson v. Makin
• “Alito’s Leaked Draft Fully Overruling Roe Is Jaw-Dropping and Unprecedented“
• “McConaughey urges gun measures in surprise White House appearance“
• “Tentative Thoughts On The Jewish Claim To A “Religious Abortion“

Whose beliefs get to count and in what contexts? Join Carmen Becker, Susannah Crockford, and Savannah Finver in this month’s episode of Discourse! for their discussion about the leaked US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson which may overturn Roe v. Wade, the UK’s response to particular kinds of “disruptive” climate protests, and international coverage of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Which beliefs are rendered sayable or unsayable? What kinds of comparisons between views are we allowed to make? Tune in to find out!

This week, we dive back into the RSP archives to explore conversations about cults and new religious movements. This video aims to disrupt the assumptions about “cults” that students bring to the average 100-level religious studies class. In Part I of Cults & NRMs: An RSP Remix, we address questions like: What is a cult? What is a New Religious Movement? Are cults inherently violent? Be sure to tune in!

• Studying “Cults”, with Eileen Barker (2012)
• Minority Religions and the Law, with Susan J. Palmer and David G. Robertson (2015)
• Millennialism and Violence?, featuring excerpts from Tristan Sturm, Joseph Webster, and Eileen Barker (2017)
• New Directions in the Study of Scientology, with Stephen Gregg (2018)

What is curanderismo and where is it practiced? How does it connect to the borderlands? Is it a “folk” religion, and what exactly does that mean? For our first episode on curanderismo, RSP co-editor Andie Alexander is joined by Brett Hendrickson, Jennifer Koshatka Seman, and RSP Features editor, Israel Domínguez. In this discussion, we explore issues of power, identity, historical narrative, cultural contact, race, and much more. Be sure to tune in!

In this month’s Discourse!, Sidney Castillo is joined by Chris Cotter and Sierra Lawson to discuss the contemporary localized manifestations of Easter and Passover celebrations, a current US Supreme Court Case relating to the First Amendment, and the entanglement of Catholicism and national identity in television’s “Derry Girls”.

• “Semana Santa en América Latina: religión y tradición“
• “Easter Celebrations Peruvian Style“
• “Catholic Traditions of Holy Week and Easter in Latin America“
• “‘Blackness Deserves a Seat at the Seder’“
• “Black Jews Get a Spotlight at the Seder“
• “U.S. Supreme Court taking on case of high school football coach fighting for right to pray on 50-yard line“
• “Language in Derry Girls was atrocious yet we just accept it as comedy“
• “Derry Girls creator explains why Spice Girls Union Jack dress was missing from latest episode“

In this episode, Dan Gorman and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm follow up on their 2018 conversation for the RSP. The topic is Storm’s book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Storm shifts away from the deconstructive and genealogical approach to religion that he pursued in his earlier books The Invention of Religion in Japan and The Myth of Disenchantment. Although Storm finds great value in the critical theories known in the United States as “postmodernism,” he is concerned that postmodernism has led to an intellectual dead end. Humanities scholars can get caught in an infinite cycle of questioning the assumptions of their academic fields. Knowing anything with any degree of certainty seems impossible. Storm argues that scholars should engage in self-reflection and critique, but they must not give up on the pursuit of knowledge. We can learn about the world, even if our subjectivity and the limits of language prevent us from achieving truly objective knowledge. This metamodern mentality balances critique with investigation, emphasizes the process of knowledge-making over static categories or terms, encourages a healthy but moderate skepticism (Zeteticism), and situates human-made signs as part of the larger natural world (hylosemiotics). Join the RSP on a journey down the philosophical rabbit hole.

The musical excerpt at the beginning of the episode is from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. The song, “Move On”, is performed by Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal (2017 Broadway Cast Recording). ℗ 2017 Arts Music.

J. Brent Crosson joins the RSP to discuss his most recent award-winning book, Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad (Chicago, 2020). Based on more than a decade of fieldwork during and after Trinidad declared a state of emergency in 2011, Crosson explores how religion in Trinidad took to the streets to demand justice in the face of brutal governmental crackdowns against protestors crying out against rampant police brutality. Many marching the streets believed that if the legal justice system could not deliver justice for those wrongfully killed by the police, then perhaps obeah could. Using Trinidadian spiritual workers’ own descriptions of their religious practice—obeah—as “science” and “experiments with power,” Crosson examines how these spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion.