The Shiloh Podcast

Yehudis Fletcher and Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen talk to Rosie about their friendship, the need to highlight abuse in Jewish contexts and the painful study of Scriptures. Warning - you may find some of the content of this conversation distressing.

This guest episode of the Shiloh podcast comes from four University of Leeds students as part of a project called ‘Investigating Spiritual Abuse in Church Settings’. The project aims to destigmatise and spread awareness of spiritual abuse through its engagement with the local community and campus.

Rosie's guest on this episode is Professor Lisa Oakley, one of the country's leading experts on spiritual abuse. What is spiritual abuse? Why is it important to recognise it as a distinct category of abuse? And how does she ensure that the research she carries out is trauma informed and survivor-focused? Lisa was talking to Rosie as she prepared to give her inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Chester.

The Abuse in Religious Contexts project looks at the peculiar factors which allow abuse to take place within religious settings.

In this episode Amy Langenberg, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Eckerd college Florida, and Ann Gleig, Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at University of Central Florida, discuss their work on abuse in convert Buddhist communities.

The Abuse in Religious Contexts project looks at the peculiar factors which allow abuse to take place within religious settings. Rosie's guests in this episode are Dr Rahmanara Chowdhury, senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Nottingham Trent University and Farooq Mullah, chaplain for Nottingham health trust.

Please be aware that this episode contains disclosures of sexual abuse, The AIRC project has an information and resource service which you can contact on [email protected]

The Abuse in Religious Contexts project looks at the peculiar factors which allow abuse to take place within religious settings.

Today we hear about one such setting – the 3H0( Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization) founded by Yogi Bhajan who introduced Kundalini yoga to the United States.  After his death in 2004 scores of his female followers came forward to say they had been sexually and spiritually abused by him.

The story is told to Rosie here by Los Angeles journalist and essayist, Stacie Stukin and Philip DeSlippe, an academic researcher and historian of yoga based at University of California, Santa Barbara.

This is the third webinar-podcast from “Abuse in Religious Contexts,” an AHRC-funded research project, which explores the ways cultures and structures of a wide variety of faith communities cause, facilitate, legitimate, justify, and hide abuse.

Speakers in this episode include;

- Richard Scorer, a lawyer specialising in child and vulnerable adult abuse, human rights and public inquiries law at Slater and Gordon Lawyers (UK).

- Yehudis Fletcher an Independent Sexual Violence Adviser and co-founder of Nahamu which combats culturally specific harms in the Jewish community.

- Yasmin Rehman, a feminist, human rights activist and researcher and the CEO of Juno Women's Aid.  

The Abuse in Religious Contexts project is happy to be engaging with Nell Hardy, an actor and theatre director, who has written a play which tackles issues around spiritual and other intersectional faith-based abuses.   It will be premiered in London on October 30th - listen for details! 

Over the summer Nell has been holding a series of workshops with survivors to design the show so that it communicates the experiences of survivors in a way that is as safe as possible for them to engage with. Rosie went along to one of them.....

Abusing God; Reading the bible in the #MeToo age is an AHRC funded project which held its second colloquium in Manchester on the topic of hypermasculinity.

Rosie Dawson gathered some reflections from participants Abi, Jo, Charlotte Thomas, Sarah Molyneux-Hetherington, Andy Boyake and Will Moore.

This is the second webinar-podcast from “Abuse in Religious Contexts,” an AHRC-funded research project, which explores the ways cultures and structures of a wide variety of faith communities cause, facilitate, legitimate, justify, and hide abuse.

In this episode  - about the role of Scripture in justifying or challenging abuse -   Dr Rahmanara Chowdhury, Dr Holly Morse and Professor Johanna Stiebert talk about their work. You will also hear contributions and responses from webinar participants, including those who support survivors and those with lived experience of abuse in religious contexts.