Data Check

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-anger
• https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-rohingya-world-court-gambia/with-memories-of-rwanda-the-gambian-minister-taking-on-suu-kyi-idUKKBN1Y91HR

"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.

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).

This week’s podcast with Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst explores the University of Vermont’s new “Religious Literacy for Professionals” certificate. Framing religious literacy as social justice, Morgenstein Fuerst explains how her program is trying to reach undergraduates in other professional tracks at the 10 colleges around her university. With a powerful message for her students about the impact and relevance of religious studies coursework, this new program looks to prepare students for the modern America where religious affiliation is down but the need to be skilled “readers” of religion in culture is more pressing than ever.

What is Artificial Intelligence and why might we want to consider it in relation to ‘religion’? What religion-related questions might be raised by AI? Are these ‘religious’ questions or ‘Christian’/’post-Christian’ ones? What ‘religious’ functions might AI serve? In what ways do popular discourses about AI intersect with religion-related discourses? Do narratives of AI form part of a teleological atheist narrative, or do they perpetuate prevalent tropes associated with ‘established’ or ‘new’ religious movements? And what are the intersections of AI and religion with issues such as slavery, human identity, affect and agency? This week, Chris is joined by Dr Beth Singler of the University of Cambridge to discuss these issues and many more.

This podcast builds on a roundtable discussion released on the RSP in February 2017, featuring Beth, Chris, Michael Morelli, Vivian Asimos and Jonathan Tuckett, titled “AI and Religion: An Initial Conversation" and a special issue of the RSP journal Implicit Religion, co-edited by Dr Singler, on Artificial Intelligence and Religion, published in 2017.

In this episode of Discourse, host Breann Fallon sat down with Sierra Lawson and Sidney Castillo to discuss current affairs issues that relate to religion. Sidney raised the very recent congress elections in Peru (held on January 26) and the role Christianity and New Religious Movements have on voting. Sierra brought to the table a novel which is receiving much media attention, perhaps not for the right reason, Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt. Cummins accepted a seven-figure sum for this book on the immigrant experience. Both the book and the American publishing industry at large have received negative attention for their lack of Latino representation and the homogenising of both Latino and immigrant narratives. Using this as a springboard, Sierra, Sidney, and Breann discuss notion of diversity in the Religious Studies publishing world as well as the prominence of "American-civil-religion" stabilising narratives in the American literature and entertainment scene.

Tim Fitzgerald is one of the foundational figures in the critical study of religion, and his seminal volume, The Ideology of Religious Studies, was published twenty years ago this year. In this interview - the first of a two-part retrospective - we discuss his career and how his studies in Hinduism and his time spent in Japan led him to question the relationship of categories like caste and ritual to the broader category 'religion'. His realisation was that religion is such a broad category that it can include almost everything. We discuss the historical development of the category, and its roots in Protestant theological ideas, and the political movements of the eighteenth century. This leads into a critique of the essentialist assumptions hidden by the category, and the phenomenological ideas in its use in academia, and its function as a tool in power relations.

Can a new journal expand how we think of America when we focus on religion? These two categories, religion and America, are at the center of American Religion, a new semiannual publication from Indiana University Press edited by Sarah Imhoff and M. Cooper Harriss. In this episode recorded at the 2019 AAR conference in San Diego, Imhoff and Harriss speak about what it's like to found a new journal and where it will fit in the landscape of scholarship on religion in America. Be sure to visit the journal's website, which hosts a number of digital-only features and details on subscriptions: american-religion.org/.

Beliefs are not written in stone. They change over time and sometimes we hold contradictory beliefs. Taking beliefs as changing and nuanced rather than fixed reveals the role of narratives and cultural context in shaping beliefs.  In this week’s episode, Sidney Castillo's conversation with Ülo Valk introduces us to some of the ways in which this process occurs in the form of vernacular religion. Focusing on the personal nature of these changes, Valk sees beliefs as fluid, which problematizes the stability of other categories such as knowledge and truth. Especially when we express beliefs as narratives, we change the way we understand the world. Valk's research in Mayong, a village in northeast India, shows how beliefs about the use of magic, divination, gods, and mantras, allow for personalized and open-ended cultural traditions ripe for innovation.

This podcast was recorded and produced in the context of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR), “Religion - Continuations and Disruptions” held in Tartu, June 25 to June 29, 2019. We kindly thank the EASR Committee and the University of Tartu scientific committee, organising team, and volunteers for the support provided during this process.

Religious Nationalism is the focus of a newly released book by journalist Katherine Stewart called The Power Worshippers (Bloomsbury Press). Framing her work as a decade-plus interest in the political and rhetorical moves of conservative Christians in the United States, Stewart raises an alarm about the distributed assault she sees on the wall separating Church and State. In a politically charged moment in the United States, Stewart's work emerges within a growing body of public-facing literature that sees intimate connections between radical religious groups and the ongoing struggle for the political and cultural power to shape American life.