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Scholars in dialogue with our weekly podcast

Scholars in Dialogue with our weekly podcast

Our Latest response
September, 9 2022

To My Comrade in Deconstructive Critique

Mitsutoshi Horii, in his response to our season 11 episode with Jason Ā. Josephson Storm, furthers Storm's discussion of the importance of problematizing our systems of classification and highlights the critical scholarship in religious studies doing some of this work.
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Browse past responses

Gods and Demons, Scholars and Lawyers: Brief Reflections on American Religion and Law

Some religion scholars got into studying the law through studying New Religious Movements (NRMs) or minority religions, as they tend to be treated differently under the law.
Talking to lawyers is a real skill, and is very good at it. In the subfield of traditional American church-state studies, legal historians, lawyers, lobbyists, and religion scholars convene for conservation and debate, mostly about First Amendment jurisprudence.

February 11, 2016

Theologically Incorrect

If neither of these concepts, physical or mental continuity between reincarnations, are theologically incorrect, it’s hard to make the case that they are borne out of some more fundamental agent-recognition cognitive structures.
Foremost, I want to commend Dr. Claire White on her research on the cognitive science of reincarnation beliefs. Examining how humans cognitively recognize agents based on the continuity…

February 6, 2016

Not Just Any Body Will Do!

White’s research, in conjunction with my own and others’, calls into question a theoretical assumption held by many CSR scholars that the body plays a negligible role in beliefs about supernatural agents.
Dr. Claire White’s research addresses the religious topic of reincarnation that, although perhaps more adhered to by human cultures across time and space than the belief that we have only one earthly life followed by eternal reward or punishment, has received little serious scientific investigation—especially from the question through which Dr. White addresses it.

February 5, 2016

Not In That Dead Body

Significantly more people are willing to entertain the plausibility of reincarnation than are likely to wholeheartedly adopt reincarnation into their existing belief structure.
Interdisciplinary pioneers of otherwise uncharted territory in the (CSR) are apt to ask some of the most provocative yet fundamental questions of human existence. These questions extend not only across the lifespan, but also into the realm of continued existence after death.

February 4, 2016

Report: 2015 Joint Conferences of the New Zealand and Australian Associations for the Study of Religion

The biennial conference of the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religions (NZASR) and the annual conference of the Australian Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) were held together in Queenstown, New Zealand from December 8-10 2015. Interdisciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches across the humanities and social sciences were evident in the wide-range of papers presented. Islam, and Asian religions more generally, were the most consistent objects of focus, perhaps unsurprising given Australasia’s proximity to Asia and recent increased media attention to the Islamic State.

January 28, 2016

New Religious Movements and Contemporary Discourses About Religion

Increased attention to religion by international governments and NGOs has not necessarily resulted in less problematic models of religion being used by these governments and groups.
As I listened to Susan Palmer’s RSP interview and read about her new co-authored book (with Stuart A. Wright) Storming Zion: Government Raids on Religious Communities (2015), I was reminded why NRMs make such useful case studies in the religious studies classroom. From a pedagogical perspective, …

December 17, 2015

How Meanings are Made and Taken Apart: Reflections on Discursive Analysis

We must be aware of how our participation in certain discussions may shape the world around us.
In an interview with the Religious Studies Project, professor Kocku von Stuckrad outlines interesting possibilities for discursive analysis. He describes an approach that “goes beyond terms” and also beyond examining political power structures. The interview brought up many important, broad themes that are discussed in the study of religion. .

December 11, 2015

There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Cat: Comments on Kocku von Stuckrad’s Discursive Approach

It seems to me to be perfectly possible for someone to agree on the problem of representation, highlight the importance of reflecting on the situatedness of observer, challenge essentialism and still show no particular interest in problematizing analytical definitions of religion.
There is more than one discursive approach in religious studies. In his interview with the RSP, professor Kocku von Stuckrad outlines some of the key issues that are relevant for constructing a discourse theoretical framework for religious studies.

December 10, 2015

Climates of Queer Concerns

What might a queer feminist engagement with Latour’s proposals look like?
It’s that hectic time of year for academics when papers and exams pile up and the end-of-year holidays loom large. In the midst of it all, I’ve been dividing my attention between the knowledge projects that interest me most: queer feminist theory, religious studies, and feminist science studies – particularly those engaged with the climate change and the politics of our new global epoch which some have christened the Anthropocene.

December 4, 2015

NAASR 2015 Annual Meeting: A Report from the Field

The North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) held its annual meeting last week in connection with the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) conference in Atlanta, GA. Conference report for The Religious Studies Project by Matt Sheedy.The theme for this year’s NAASR panels was “,” which aimed to signal a basic problem in the study of religions;

December 3, 2015

Surveying the Sacred and Secular

With a good representative sample, we can learn about how religion shapes the way people answer new questions, rather than what they believe about the issues alone.
The RSP’s interview with Darren Sherkat arrives at a time when research on religion has caught a bit of the media spotlight. Both The Atlantic and Religion Dispatches recently touched on issues with surveys in their reviews of Robert Wuthnow’s new book, Inventing American Religion. In this book, …

November 27, 2015

In Praise of Polyvocality

Perhaps my greatest argument against ‘non-religion’ has been based on the notion that it stands as a relational umbrella…
A few weeks back, I found myself engaged in a one-sided debate with a colleague friend over the use of the term ‘non-religion.’ As it was at the end of a two-day conference, it was one of those casual conversations wherein certain sophisticated aspects of the preceding academic discourse spill over into the informality of a chat over drinks.

November 12, 2015

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