The Religious Studies Project

Fourteen contestants. One tetchy quizmaster. Three microphones. Numerous cases of wine. One glamorous assistant. Many bruised egos. A boisterous studio audience. A splash of irreverence. Dozens of questions. Four years of podcasts! A rapidly diminishing reservoir of academic credibility. And far, far too many in-jokes… it can only mean one thing, right? It’s time for the Religious Studies Project Special 2015! Back in August. as many of you will be aware, the RSP had the pleasure of being well-represented at the XXI World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Having previously recorded fun-filled festive specials at BASR and EASR conferences, we decided that it would be a crying shame if we didn’t manage to continue to collect the full set… and thus was born the audio delight that we present to you now, in celebration of the end of our fourth year “on the air.” This year we welcome back Jonathan Tuckett as host, with score-keeping assistance from Ethan Quillen, technical wizardry from David Robertson and atmospheric jeers and cheers from our studio audience, to bring you Religious Studies Fourteen-to-One. in this academic royal rumble, fourteen contestants enter, but only one can emerge victorious. Can Carole Cusack keep the coveted RSP Special crown? Listen to find out! In order of appearance, our fourteen unlucky victims contestants are: Christopher Cotter Kim KnottEileen BarkerJack TsonisCarole CusackStephen Gregg Kevin Whitesides Teemu TairaBeth SinglerWilliam ArfmanMoritz KlenkAnders PetersenMarkus DavidsenLiam Sutherland Listeners may also be interested in our previous mid-year specials — Only 60 Seconds, Nul Point, and MasterBrain — as well the serious interviews we recorded in Erfurt, with Whitney Bauman, Tomoko Masuzawa, Susan J. Palmer, S. Brent Plate, Johannes Quack, and Kocku von Stuckrad. General, inoffensive and non-specific greetings to all our listeners, and best wishes for 2016! We are, of course, well aware that the RSP year is dictated to a large part by the hegemonic cultural norms in Scotland, and in ‘the West’ more broadly… we hope that you can forgive any uncritical uses of the “C-word” in this podcast! (No, not that one…) We’ll be back in January for year five — even bigger and better than ever. Many thanks to everyone who took part in this recording — the contestants, the hosts, Anja Pogacnik for awesome photography and the studio audience. Thanks to the IAHR team in Erfurt for facilitating this recording at incredibly short notice. And, finally, and perhaps most importantly, thanks for listening.

Surely we have moved past the idea of sinister cults brainwashing innocent victims? When it comes to the law, not so, says Susan J. Palmer, which uses the terms “cult” and “sect” uncritically. Nevertheless, outside of academia, the language of “cults” continues to be used, and particularly through the law, has an affect on the lives of real people. In this episode, Susan J. Palmer, co-editor of Storming Zion: Government Raids on Religious Communities, joins David G. Robertson to discuss the intersection between new or minority religions and the law. Professor Palmer describes how she came to study these minority groups, and to realise that they were often being misrepresented, or at least unduly targeted. Discussion ranges from Scientology in France to the Branch Davidians and the Nuwaubians in the US, with issues of secularity, race and “brainwashing” come to the fore. A fascinating overview for anyone interested in how the discourse on “religion” operates in the contemporary world.

Discursive analysis of one kind or another is perhaps the most prominent methodology in the study of religion today. The linguistic turn took longer to influence Religious Studies than many other areas of the social sciences, but in recent years this approach has produced some hugely influential works which challenge many of the traditional assumptions of the field. In this interview recorded at the 2015 IAHR Congress in Erfurt, Kocku von Stuckrad tells David G. Robertson how discursive approaches might help solve the challenges of contemporary Religious Studies: the crisis of representation; the situated observer; and the dilemma of essentialism and relativism. Bruce Lincoln and Titus Hjelm, and feature essays by Ethan Quillen, David Gordon White, Martin Lepage, Emily Stratton, and Craig Martin. You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, wooden chess sets, monkey nuts, and more!

When we think about gender, we often understand it as something that is utlimately socially constructed. As for sex, it is mostly understood as something biological, set by a binary opposition between men and women. But how does this intersect with the study of religion? How do these categories influence the ways in which we look at religion? What is the role of religious institutions in this promotion of the gender binary? What about sexual orientation? What connections can we make between identities, the body and emotions in religious contexts? In this interview, Dr. Mary Jo Neitz continues the conversation about religion and gender by focusing on theories from LGBT studies and queer studies. Using her work as an ethnographer, as well as the work of American philosopher Judith Butler, Neitz distinguishes the categories of gender and sex by showing how performance and experiences are at the heart of the social construction of gender and sexual identities. Neitz also discusses the role of religious institutions and practices in the agency experienced by some of her informants, as well as the place of the body and essentialist politics in the study of religion. Listeners might also be interested in our previous interviews with Meredith McGuire, Marta Trzebiatowska, Anna Fedele, and Lizbeth Mikaelsson, and feature essays by Erika Salomon, Claire Miller Skriletz, and George Ioannides. You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, glasses cases, sonic screwdrivers and more!

In this week’s podcast we focus on religious demography and identification, survey tools used for religious demography in America, differences between religious identities and identifications, Americans’ shifting religious identifications, correlations between religion and social positions such as ethnicity or generational cohort, and correlations with various social and political issues. Expanding beyond the introduction to quantitative sociology of religion the RSP conducted earlier with David Voas, this conversation with Darren Sherkat covers religious demography in the American context. Unlike in the UK, or elsewhere, the U.S. census does not include questions about religion. U.S. religious demographers rely on privately-funded surveys, such as the General Social Survey (GSS), the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey, Baylor Religion Survey, and Gallup polls, among others, for large-scale nationally representative data on religion. Sherkat evaluates the reliability of various surveys as well as the quality of the data on non-Christian populations in the U.S., given that the vast majority of respondents self-identify as Christians or as “nones.” demography (Ariela Keysar), belief and belonging (Abby Day), and identity and identification (with the Culture on the Edge group). Based on findings explored further in his book, Changing Faith (2014), Sherkat explains how generational cohort, lifecourse position, immigration, ethnicity, and religious switching affect religious identifications in America, as well as correlations between religious identifications and sexuality, among other topics. You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, model airplanes, snow globes and more!

What happens when two vastly different civilizations meet each other? History tells us that on the one hand, they could make war or, on the other, begin to establish kinship or state alliances. The colonization process of Peru is one that had a lot of the first, and a bit of the second. Just as the people came to conflict, so did their gods. However, the local gods who lost this conflict did not vanish in oblivion, but remained in other forms, even in some places in their original one. In his interview with Sidney Castillo, Dr. Luis Millones discusses some of the traditions that have formed the basis for his research, particularly in the northern coast, northern highlands and south highlands of Peru. He mentions that, with the impact of colonization, many of the indigenous beliefs were replaced or mixed (to some extent), in order to facilitate the installation of a status quo that incorporated many of the ethnic groups’s beliefs (among other, more ‘earthly’ institutions) that were present prior to the Spaniards’ arrival (Millones 2005). And this is when when different traditions emerge commonly know as folklore (see also vernacular religion). Ranging from different conceptions of the devil – less as a punisher and more as a trickster (Millones & López Austin 2013) – to the festival in honor of Felipe, Santiago de Zebedeo’s horse (Millones 2015), and from Jesus as a punisher, and the existence of an actual hell on earth (Millones 2010), to being joyful at children’s funerals (Millones 2007), Dr. Millones provides a clear articulation of how these local beliefs makes sense in everyday life. Fortunately, in this worldview, one thing is for sure: we all will go to heaven. Listeners may also be interested in our previous podcasts on vernacular religion (in general, and in the US), situational belief, the category of ‘indigenous’, Meso-American religion You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, tea bags, exercise machines and more! References Millones, L. (2010). Después de la muerte. Voces del Limbo y el Infierno en territorio andino. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú. Millones, L. (2005). Ensayos de historia andina. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos-Fondo Editorial. Millones, L. (2015). “Las muchas caras de Santiago, por Luis Millones”. El Comercio. Lima, 01 of August. Accesed on: 04 de agosto de 2015.http://elcomercio.pe/opinion/columnistas/muchas-caras-santiago-luis-millones-noticia-1829935 Millones, L. (2007). Todos los niños van al cielo. Lima: Instituto Riva Agüero. Millones, L. & Lopez Austin, A. (2013). Cuernos y colas. Reflexiones en torno al Demonio en los Andes y Mesoamérica. Lima: Asamblea Nacional de Rectores.

It is an unfortunate fact that in popular ‘Western’ imagination, the land of India is frequently orientalised, and naively conceptualized as ‘the quintessential land of religion, spirituality, and miracles.’ Although we would certainly not want to completely invert this stereotype by substituting one unnuanced and inaccurate construct for another, what happens when we take a closer look at a constituency who challenge this narrative, those who identify as ‘rationalists’ and engage in the criticism of ‘religion’ in India? One scholar who has done just that is Johannes Quack in his book Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India, published by Oxford in 2012. In this podcast, we discuss Johannes’ ‘relational’ approach to ‘nonreligion,’ before moving to concrete examples from his work in India. What is a ‘relational approach’ to nonreligion? What does it achieve? What are some of the key characteristics of organized rationalism in India? What does all of this have to do with ‘religion’, ‘non-religion’, ‘atheism’ etc? What does this in-depth ethnographic work in this very particular context contribute to wider academic debates within the study of nonreligion, and religion more broadly? You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, magic wands, faux leather belts and more!

Whitney Bauman discusses with George Ioannides some of the potential and difficult answers to these questions and more, revealing how the field of religion and ecology can go some way in helping to visualise and constitute a planetary, hybrid, ethical community of ecospiritual, biohistorical, and multispecies subjects. Speaking of religions as “eco-social constructions across multiple species, over multiple generations, and over multiple histories,” Bauman puts forward an ethics of understanding ourselves and others as planetary creatures, and understanding religion, science, and nature as non-foundational, non-substantive categories. You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, biodegradable refuse sacks, poppy seeds and more! Listeners may also be interested in our previous podcasts with Bron Taylor on Religion after Darwin, and Bruno Latour, Gaian Animisms, and the Question of the Anthropocene.

When thinking about ‘religion and film’ it might be quite tempting to take a simplistic and narrow view, reducing the topic to the study of ‘Biblical Epics’ such as The Robe or The Ten Commandments, or the more recent Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings. Or perhaps we might think of ‘religious’ censorship of ‘controversial’ films. Or maybe be tempted to view the ubiquity of modern movie-watching as a ‘religious’ practice. However, when we take even a moment to think more critically about what we might mean by these three key terms – RELIGION, AND, FILM – things become much more complicated. To introduce us to this fascinating and important area of research, this week’s podcast features Chris speaking with S. Brent Plate at the recent XXI World Congress of the IAHR in Erfurt. The interview begins with Plate’s personal research journey into this relatively young field, charting the history of the field in the process. Discussion then turns to the key terms involved… what are we meaning by “religion and film”? The relationship of established “world religions” to cinema? Religion/s on Film? Documentaries? Critiques and Parodies? Religions that exist only in Film? Films as Religious Experiences? Audience reactions to film? Films as myth? Films as a modern form of religion? And so on… We then discuss further aspects of Plate’s own work, the practicalities of carrying out such research on “fictions”, and whether the word “religion” is necessary in this context at all. You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us . And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, movies, liquid nitrogen and more! Listeners may also be interested in our previous podcasts on Religion and Cultural Production, Religion and Comic Books and Religion and the Built Environment.

The Religious Studies Project, as an academic endeavour studying religion, is of course devoutly secular. In fact, we tend to take the connection between secularity and the academy completely for granted. But was this always the case? If not, how did it become so? And what does secular mean in this context? In this interview recorded at the 2015 IAHR Congress in Erfurt, Tomoko Masuzawa tells David G. Robertson how the medieval university was transformed — first through the introduction of the collegiate system in the 1700s, which gave private donors a say in who could study, and then again in the late 19th Century, with the Berlin model being exported throughout Europe and the colonies. What we discover is not a dialogue between the religious and the secular, but between different Christian sects. What does this say about our present-day academic endeavours?