The Religious Studies Project

The 2019 conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions, at Leeds Trinity University, was loosely themed on the topic ‘Visualizing Cultures: Media, Technology and Religion’, and this provided an excellent focal point for a discussion of Media and the Study of Religion more broadly. With that in mind, we convened a virtually mediated roundtable discussion with Suzanne Owen (conference organizer), Vivian Asimos and Tim Hutchings speaking with RSP co-founder Chris Cotter. These contributors bring a broad range of expertise and experience to the discussion, with work focusing upon online and digital spaces, the built environment, art, literature, broadcast media, social media, podcasting, and more. Discussion begins with the conference, before turning to how a media approach can help the study of religion, what we might mean by media and mediation, challenges of taking a media approach, the utilization of media in teaching, how to avoid reifying ‘religion’ in the process, and more. This discussion works well as a companion piece with a number of previous RSP podcasts, including Religion and the News (with Eileen Barker, Tim Hutchings, Christopher Landau, and David Gordon Wilson), Religion and the Media  (with Teemu Taira), Religious Authority and Social Media (with Pauline Hope Cheong), Religion, Violence and the Media (with Jolyon Mitchell), and Visual Culture and the Study of Religion (with Birgit Meyer).

“It’s possible,” says Professor Bradley Onishi, “to hold an enchanted secularity” if we stop thinking of secularism as mere rationalism. In this week’s podcast, we hear about the ways in which philosophy of religion has thought “with” religion rather than for or against religion. Tracing alternative models of secularity through Martin Heidegger, Geoges Bataille, and others, Onishi calls on us to rethink how the philosophy of religion can help religious studies find different ways to frame the categories of secular and religious. As a resource in the academy, he says, religions themselves provide ways to question our basic assumptions about what religion does for us and look at our normative assumptions about anew. Transcription forthcoming.

This decade’s first episode of Discourse! is hosted by Vivian Asimos, with guests Aled Thomas and Michael Munnick. This time, the theme is “communication” – fittingly enough. The conversation covers stories about different models of Christianity among evangelical Trump supporters, the recent resurgence of the use of “cult” in popular media, Greta Thunberg as a charismatic leader and media’s downplaying of Islamic Solidarity in the Gambian justice minister’s genocide charge at the UN against Myanmar. Read the current events sources discussed in today’s episode here: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/christian-right-worships-donald-trump-915381/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/emotional-incontinents-like-trump-cannot-cope-with-greta-thunberg-controlled-angerhttps://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-rohingya-world-court-gambia/with-memories-of-rwanda-the-gambian-minister-taking-on-suu-kyi-idUKKBN1Y91HR

The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in a key religious freedom case, Espinoza v. Department of Revenue, in January 2020. In that case, the Court will decide whether a taxpayer-funded scholarship program can, even indirectly, fund a private religious school. The case has ignited a debate about no-aid clauses to religion in state constitutions and, more broadly, the separation of church and state. But is it possible ever truly to separate church and state? And how do courts decide what is religious–and therefore separable from government? In this podcast, noted religious liberty lawyers Maggie Garrett (Americans United for Separation of Church and State) and Jennifer Hawks (BJC) discuss the Espinoza case before diving into other pivotal, recent decisions–including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, and Employment Division v. Smith–that raise questions about how courts define religion and religious freedom. We discuss how claims for religious exemptions offer insight into operating definitions of religion and the ways those definitions are predicated on sincerely held beliefs and/or actions (whether those actions take place within the four walls of a house of worship or beyond those walls). In other words, what do religious exemptions tell us about what counts as “truly” religious? Are beliefs alone protected? Or behaviors too? And how does a Court decide whether it has the authority to grant an exemption to a neutrally applicable rule or to forbid actions linked to sincerely held beliefs, religious or not? Along the way we discuss taxes and religion, dignitary harm, the “religious marketplace” and more.

For our eighth(!) annual special, Only Sixty Seconds returns! This time, Chris Cotter is your host, as David G. Robertson returns to defend his 2018 crown against Bettina Schmidt, Douglas Davies and Theo Wildcroft. We may not have avoided repetition, but I do not hesitate in promising you no deviation from hilarity! Thanks to our audience for being so encouraging, to our sponsors and patrons for making this possible, and to you – Thanks for Listening! If this gets you in the festive mood, you might want to check out our back catalogue of festive specials: 2012 – Only 60 Seconds!2013 – Nul Point!2014 – Masterbrain!2015 – Fourteen to One!2016 – The Unverifiable Truth-Claim!2017 – Scrape My Barrel!2018 – The Deadline

Religious studies scholars (and policy experts) Susan Hayward and Peter Mandaville join the Religious Studies Project for Discourse in December 2019. They discuss how classifying conflicts as religious or not can clarify–or obscure–the complexities of those conflicts. The conversation includes examples from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the United States. News stories referenced include: https://m.khaleejtimes.com/uae/abu-dhabi/tolerance-is-the-only-way-to-peace-say-world-leaders- https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/442726/Tehran-raps-U-S-interference-in-China-s-affairs https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-world-court-quotebox/demonstrations-mark-case-against-myanmar-at-u-n-s-world-court-idUSKBN1YE1TD http://www.ft.lk/front-page/BBS-to-disband-after-General-Elections/44-689999 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/politics/trump-antisemitism-executive-order.html

In this episode, Professor Molly Bassett, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University, speaks about her program’s efforts to develop applied religious studies master’s certificates in “Religion and Aging” and “Nonprofit Management.” Her department’s partnerships with GSU’s Gerontology Institute as well as the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies reveal a progressive approach to professionalization of religious studies degree programs. Within recent conversations about the threat of humanities and liberal arts programs at many universities, the applied approach at GSU offers many benefits, not only in developing inter-university faculty and program partnerships, but also for recruiting majors and successfully showing how the skills of a religious studies degree can be vital for a student’s career aspirations.

In the popular imaginary, Israel/Palestine is – and has always been – a contested territory, associated with sacred sites, the ‘Abrahamic’ religions, religion-related conflicts, and a volatile political climate. However, this unnuanced stereotype takes little account of the lived realities on the ground, particularly among the constituency at focus in today’s podcast, a large group of around 860,000 ‘secular’ millennials, who have come of age during a phase of national conflict when some Palestinian and Israeli government leaders, and not just fringe figures, have utilized religio-ethnic symbols to motivate and divide. In this podcast, Chris Cotter is joined by Dr Stacey Gutkowski to discuss what it means to be a ‘secular Jewish Israeli millennial’. What insights might the study of religion and secularity gain from taking a closer look at this constituency? Does it even make sense to refer to them as a constituency? How do they relate to Judaism, to Israel, and to Palestine? And much more…

Unbelief has often been defined as either ignorance or rejection of religious systems, but this week’s guests David Herbert and Josh Bullock see far more diversity in the ways one can be nonreligious. Sharing lessons from their project “Reaching for a new sense of connection? Towards a deeper understanding of the sociality of generation y non-believers in northern and Central Europe,” we hear about a more nuanced phenomenon of unbelief, where a diverse array of positions are constantly anchored, defined, and recreated in social settings. Collected from nationwide surveys, social media, and interview data, the project presents the tendencies of nonreligious young adults in the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Poland, and Romania. One of the takeaways from this podcast is that unbelief has widespread national differences as reflected in analysis of social media, but regional similarities from historical contexts show the effects of wider geo-political alignments. For example, in the Netherlands, Norway, and Eastern Germany non-religious people are more likely to express no interest in religious matters, while in Poland and Romania people vocally expressed their unbelief in politicized ways. For more perspectives on Hebert and Bullock’s project, visit https://newsenseofconnection.blog/

In this week’s podcast, Skidmore College Professor Bradley Onishi speaks about Straight White American Jesus, a podcast he co-hosts with Dan Miller that blends insider religious experience with academic expertise about American Evangelicalism. “The goal is never reduction,” Onishi argues about the mix of insider/outsider frames. Instead, he shares how the podcast tries to provide better access to complex religious worlds and how careful historical framing and rigorous critical analysis can humanize rather than demonize evangelicals. Looking honestly at religion, warts and all, is worth the effort since it leads us to increased religious literacy outcomes designed to understand the “human condition writ large.”