Who or what are the actors in Posthuman and New Materialist narratives, asks Peter J. Bräunlein in this response to our interview with Paul-Francois Tremlett. In the face of populist “great simplifiers like Trump Bolsonaro or Modi,” what will scholars do with our increasingly complex and diverse narratives about religious change?
“A lot of definitional magic has been spent to save religion from secularisation theory,” writes Titus Hjelm in this response to our episode with Paul-François Tremlett, “but at the end of the day, incommensurability is a real issue in this debate.” So what can be said today of the ongoing differences between lived religious perspectives at the level of the individual and those scholarly perspectives that look at broader social and cultural forces and trends.
In her response to our episode on Ancient Christian Origins with Bill Arnal, Michelle Sdao cites the risks of “methodolatry” and highlights emerging scholarship and methods on the edges of the disciplinary divides among religious studies, textual criticism, New Testament Studies and other allied fields.
The “easy decision” to decline the stance of the faithful when dealing with sacred texts means considerable challenges for the scholar of religion, argues Willi Braun in this response to our episode with Bill Arnal on “Ancient Christian Origins”
“No matter where we do our reading, we bring ourselves to the task,” writes Dr. Allison L. Gray in this response to our interview with William Arnal on “Ancient Christian Origins”
Why is the mimetically scriptural presumed to be good, asks Vincent Wimbush in this response to our interview with Richard Newton on “Roots as Scripture and Scriptures as Roots.”
In Joseph L. Tucker Edmond’s response to our interview with Richard Newton, we see a continuation of the extended, organic metaphors of Newton’s scriptural lens for studying Alex Haley’s Roots. What does it mean to tend a future, asks Tucker Edmonds, and who tends the futures for Black subjects?
Restoring marginalized voices to the scholarship on religion and ecology is essential decolonial praxis, writes Amanda J. Baugh in this response to our episode with Gretel Van Wieren on “Climate Change(s).”
How can Jewish Studies help us rethink concepts like “the political”? In this response to our episode featuring Carsten Wilke interviewed by Sidney Castillo, Jonathan Garb highlights additional aspects of “the rise of kabbalah as a potent cultural force in the early modern period” that challenge the limits of cross-cultural comparison.
What are the limits of scripture as a performative concept? In this response to this season’s episode with Richard Newton, M. Cooper Harriss examines Newton’s hybrid understanding of scripture as a forceful and malleable process of signification.
How will excluded, “interested” voices return to the academy through decolonization? Find out in this response to our interview with Natalie Avalos by Eleanor Tiplady Higgs.
Recognizing the influence of “Christian colonialist attitudes” on scholarly discourses about the value of sacred objects means understanding how we are all implicated by our field’s ongoing use of the term “fetish.”
Echoing the lessons from Breann Fallon’s interview with Prof. J. Lorand Matory, respondent Colby Dickinson calls us to account for the ways in which “we are all hypocritical in our assigning of values to certain things and downplaying the value in other things.” This includes, he writes, the theories of fetishism by Marx and Freud to which our field seems inescapably connected.
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