The Religious Studies Project

The construction of the introductory textbook in the academic study of religion is an incredibly fraught enterprise. What will you include? What will you exclude? What organizing rubrics will you have in mind? Which voices will you highlight and who will be excluded? And particularly in our contemporary world, where attention spans are short and so many resources are online, what would even be the purpose of producing a textbook? This week, RSP co-founder Chris Cotter is joined by Paul Hedges, who has taken on that monumental task in his recently published Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies.

During the interview, they discuss the role of the positionality of the author/scholar, the use of case studies, the selection of topics and themes, what the term ‘critical’ might mean in such an endeavour, and what decolonization mean in the context of textbook production.

This month’s episode of Discourse! covers issues of misinformation as it pertains to the upcoming Philippine presidential elections in May 2022 and to debates in the Orthodox church following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Be sure to tune in with Paul-François Tremlett, Daniel Gorman Jr., and Andie Alexander to find out more!

• The Ukrainian Catholic Church is in full communion with Rome. Learn more here.

• “A Church (Further) Divided: Putin’s Patriarch Now Faces a Rebellion from within the Russian Orthodox Church” Religion Dispatches
• “The bride wore fatigues. The wedding party carried rifles and RPGs.” The Washington Post
• Russian Orthodox Church in America
• “Head of US Ukrainian Catholic Church urges Americans to ‘call out people like Tucker Carlson’” Insider
• “Why white evangelical Christians are Putin’s biggest American fan base” MSNBC
• “Putin is ‘making it a religious war’ — Head of U.S. Ukrainian Orthodox Church slams Russian leader, Moscow Patriarch Kirill” The Salt Lake Tribune
• “Pope Francis criticizes the war while Orthodox Patriarch Kirill echoes Putin’s rationale for fighting” The Washington Post
• “Pat Robertson Insists Putin ‘Compelled by God’ to Invade Ukraine and Kick Off ‘End Times’” The Daily Beast
• “‘Baka matanso kayo’: Moreno warns Muslim youth of ancestors’ sacrifices during martial law” Inquirer News
• “Duterte said kill the bishops – and his word became flesh” Rappler

In this episode, Dr. Méadhbh McIvor joins Savannah Finver to discuss her recent book Representing God: Christian Legal Activism in Contemporary England. Dr. McIvor provides our listeners with the background for her project; the method of ethnography, as well as its challenges and implications for the study of religion; and how the belief in a certain kind of afterlife impacts the kinds of legal and political activism that her interlocutors are willing to engage in.

Throughout the entirety of WWII and the Cold War, U.S. intelligence agencies invested an immense amount of resources into the “religious approach” to information gathering and distribution. Beginning with the leadership of William Donovan, the OSS and CIA implemented these religion-focused initiatives with the assistance of Orientalist scholarship, such as the World Religions Paradigm. Imperial Japan, Colonial Vietnam, Soviet Russia, and the Puppet-state of Iran all felt the impacts of these operations, often resulting in widespread propaganda, resistance, and war. In this episode, Dr. Michael Graziano and Jacob Noblett discuss the misguided strategies used by these agencies and their partners with the goal of establishing the United States as a global champion of freedom over “Atheistic” Communism.

This month’s episode of Discourse! is hosted by Candace Mixon who’s joined by Craig Martin and Suzanne Owen. Their articles all coalesced into thinking through the importance of technicalities and words in the study of religion—when we are used to seeing the big picture, why does it matter to pay attention to things that seem small? Whether legalism comes through within a church community, local or federal judicial and legislative bodies, or nationalistic rhetoric, the stories we review all deal with the small details that make a big difference, and of course considers power and who gets to decide which details count, and why.

• Dhume, Sadanand (2022). “India’s Hijab Debate Is Both Nuanced and Nasty.” The Wall Street Journal.
• Liptak, Adam (2022). “Supreme Court to Hear Case of Web Designer Who Objects to Same-Sex Marriage.” The New York Times.
• Migdon, Brooke (2022). “Virginia House passes bill to exempt religious organizations from nondiscrimination laws.” The Hill.
• Triesman, Rachel (2022). “An Arizona priest used one wrong word in baptisms for decades. They’re all invalid.” NPR.

In this edition of RSP Remix, we go deep into our archives to explore the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion. We explore questions such as “What is an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’?” and “How do scholars of religion study and engage ‘insiders’?” to begin unpacking what all is at stake in this process of group formation.

This episode features clips from the following episodes:

• “The Insider/Outsider Problem” with George Chryssides (2012)
• “Should Scholars of Religion be Critics or Caretakers?” roundtable with excerpts from Russell T. McCutcheon and Linda Woodhead (2012)
• “Identity or Identification?” roundtable with excerpts from Steven Ramey and K. Merinda Simmons (2013)
• “The Critical Study of Religion” with Bruce Lincoln (2015)
• “Categorising ‘Religion’: From Case Studies to Methodology” with Teemu Taira (2016)
• “Discourse Analysis & Ideology Critique in the Study of Religion” with Craig Martin (2021)

Over the past few years, a number of religious studies scholars have collaborated on events on the theme of ‘spiritual abuse’. While this has been a topic of research and debate for some time, these events have worked especially hard to bring together survivors, researchers, practitioners and pastoral workers in respectful dialogue. This roundtable brings together a few of those scholars, in the wake of the Spiritual Abuse conference at the University of Chester, and a series of online seminars for INFORM. Join host Theo Wildcroft and panelists Wendy Dossett, Dawn Llewellyn, Suzanne Newcombe, and Lisa Oakley as they discuss the difficulties and opportunities of such events, where they might develop next, interdisciplinary boundaries, and the limits of professional commitments to justice. Is this perhaps the start of an ‘ethical turn’ in the study of religion?

What sort of discursive traps to we fall into when talking about ‘Islam’ or ‘the West’? How might we reframe our discussions with a critical humanist approach? In this episode, Khurram Hussain joins Andie Alexander to discuss his recent book, The Muslim Speaks (Zed Books, 2020). Hussain unpacks issues of binary discourses about “the Muslims world” and “the west” and explores the benefits of critically engaging Islam in a way that works to re-politicize rather than de-politicize Muslim voices by taking seriously the human-focused study of religion.

How does the media report religion when religion doesn’t “behave”? What happens when religion becomes part of discourse that promotes civil disobedience, or to promote conspiracy theories? What if someone wants to make a robot rabbi or name their child something you think is blasphemous? When religion doesn’t behave — that is, doesn’t fit the implicit idea that it should be quiet, personal, liberal and “nice” — we are given an opportunity to observe boundary-making in the public sphere in real time.

The first Discourse! of 2022 is hosted by Michael Munnik (Cardiff), who is joined by guests Beth Singler (Cambridge) and Richard Newton (Alabama) to discuss how the media is talking about “religion” this month.

• “Tim LaHaye had some choice words for Wheaton College when the evangelical school hosted a memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr.“
• “After opposition to her MLK Day speech, Nikole Hannah-Jones swapped her words for his“
• Mason Mennenga on Twitter
• “Presenter Maajid Nawaz is axed by LBC: Anti-extremism activist who was accused of tweeting ‘deranged rubbish’ about vaccines by host Iain Dale and faced criticism for spreading Covid conspiracy theories leaves radio station“
• “Lior Cole Is the Model Combining Artificial Intelligence With Religion“
• “Parents hit back at trolls over baby name and say ‘we are not Satanists’“

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the “psychedelic renaissance” for the development of medical psychotherapy and spiritual growth in countries of the global north. From alternative therapy centers in the USA and Canada, to tourist retreats in the Amazon, and spiritual communities in Europe, psychedelics have taken a new breath of life for the past 20 years in each of these locations. Their current popularity is due to the surprising results they achieve in the betterment of mental health disorders and personal fulfillment. Thus, plants and substances like the San Pedro cactus, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, LSD, MDMA, and more prominently, ayahuasca, have become “magic bullets” of sorts, all-powerful solutions to all-pervasive problems of the western world. Unfortunately, critical issues related to their consumption are lost from sight in the face of the enthusiasm and amazement of their effects.

On the other hand, psychedelic substances, i.e., substances that enable powerful bodily and visionary experiences, have been used in different societies across the world, and for a wider array of purposes than the previously described. For instance, indigenous peoples of the Peruvian rainforest like the Awajún, Huni Kuin, or Matsigenka ritually consume ayahuasca for purposes of divination, rite of passage, bolstering of social bonds, healing, exercise and countering witchcraft, etc. Thus, a key question comes forward, why does such a gap of emphasis exist between the purposes that arise in western contexts and the ones from other societies? Moreover, in the case of ayahuasca, why the particular concoction of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis Caapi) and the Chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis) has become so salient in the contemporary psychedelic landscape, despite being one of the possible plant admixtures among the many that indigenous people use?

In this episode, Sidney Castillo talks with Dr. Bernd Brabec de Mori and Dr. Olivia Marcus about their respective research on critical approaches for studying ayahuasca. Both have carried out ethnographic research in the Peruvian amazon in different settings; Brabec de Mori with the Shipibo of the Ucayali region, and Marcus among the mestizo populations of Tarapoto and Iquitos. Their critical discussion elaborates on the meanings and motivations for the indigenous and mestizo people to use ayahuasca, framing into context the major socio-cultural processes that allowed for it to be discovered, spread, and “rediscovered” in recent times. In this sense, they address issues of inequality, power relations, ownership, and reciprocity that lie at the core of ayahuasca consumption in the Peruvian Amazon. In consequence, they discuss what would decolonize our approaches to ayahuasca entail, if this is a possibility at all, and what would be the course of action for this to happen.

This episode results from the workshop “From Ritual to Justice: Towards a Decolonial and Feminist Approach to Ayahuasca”, organized by Olivia Marcus and Silvia Mesturini. It was part of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) XIII Biennial Conference, June 21-June 25 and June 28-July 2, 2021. Hosted virtually by the University of Virginia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.