Religious Studies Podcastleri

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 Mov…

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 issu…

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”. Watch the video ep…

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 Religi…

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 justic…

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…

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! Watch the video epis…

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 certa…

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,…

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 legalis…

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 featur…

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…

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” …