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Interdisciplinarity

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10 May 2021

Manifestos and the Academic Study of Religion

Podcast
What are manifestos? How are they employed in society? What can the academic study of religion offer to help understand them? The faculty and students in the Dept. of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney have a few thoughts on that. Tune in to learn more!
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15 February 2021

Beyond Ecological Essentialism: Critical and Constructive Muslim Environmentalisms

Podcast
The diversity of Muslim environmentalisms shows the urgency of decolonizing Religious Studies and Environmental Humanities amid escalating global climate crises, says Prof. Anna Gade in this week's episode. Based on her decades of fieldwork in Indonesia, Dr. Gade sketches new intersections of religion and the environment that decenter conversations long dominated by Western ecological models.
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22 January 2021

Encountering the Historical Jesus-People

Response
"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"
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11 September 2020

How Ritual Reveals Margins and Marginalization in Buddhist Studies

Response
Elaine Lai's response to our roundtable on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Buddhist Ritual highlights the advantages of working across disciplines. In sum, Lai argues, this roundtable and all such interdisciplinary collaborations remind us of how embedded and contingent our terms can be. Those differences matter, especially as we work to decolonize the academy and democratize access to its efforts, for we must "remember that we are all first and foremost human... and it's time to show up for one another with care," she concludes.
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7 September 2020

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Buddhist Ritual

Podcast
How does discipline impact the way we see Buddhist ritual? How can more diverse disciplinary conversations help scholars see ritual in new ways? Five scholars from four time zones come together from around the world to discuss the impacts of interdisciplinary approaches to Buddhist ritual.
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21 February 2020

Intellectual Journeys: Insights from Timothy Fitzgerald’s Work

Response
Craig Martin writes of the lesson he learned from Timothy Fitzgerald's work: "Reading widely outside of religious studies allows us to integrate the knowledge from different fields or disciplines, making connections where theories or claims overlap, or noting where some approaches allow us to answer some of my questions in a more sophisticated way than other approaches."
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6 April 2017

Higher Education in the Digital Age In response to Simmons and Altman

Response
The Religious Studies Project in the UK and State of Formation in the US stand out as two exemplary religious studies projects, often, as with these two, in collaboration with other universities, (as opposed to individual departments or programmes) that utilise social media daily to reach and interact with their intended audience.
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26 February 2016

Rethinking the Cognitive Science of Religion in Light of Explanatory Pluralism

Response
It is my belief that the failure of CSR to adequately address its inherently interdisciplinary nature has been a detriment to the field and that by addressing these issues it will help the field to grow as well as to help non-CSR specialists understand more of the subtlety of this scientific approach to our subject. In his recent RSP interview, Dr. Robert McCauley provides a brilliant overview of some of the founding philosophical principles that have been a foundation for the study of religion.
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23 April 2015

Keeping the Bar Steady: The Complexities of Interdisciplinary Approaches to Religion

Response
While evolution does provide a biologically rooted framework that affords cognitive psychologists the theoretical rationale for extrapolating that all cultures utilize the same mental facilities (albeit quite differently depending on their environment), in order to explain religion in all its variants both past and present, cognitive psychology is both necessary and sufficient.
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23 March 2015

Religious Experience: Understanding and Explaining (Video)

Response
The RSP collaborated with Society for the Scientific Study of Religion at their 2014 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis to offer and video record an interdisciplinary panel on the study of religion. Each of the papers presented are not only from different fields in the study of religion but also methodologically or theoretically apply an interdisciplinary approach. The authors represent the best in their fields. Some are established scholars with a body of work while others are up-and-coming talent.
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12 March 2015

Dressing in Skins of Gods: New Approaches to Aztec Religion

Response
Recent scholarship on Mesoamerican religions has been influenced by Mircea Eliade in a persistent fashion that has yet to be critically addressed. Molly Bassett is an enthusiastic advocate for studying Mesoamerican religion, a welcome new direction in Religious Studies. She credits the critical mentorship of David Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin America Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. Although she does not mention this, his influence makes her an intellectual “granddaughter” of Mircea Eliade, ...
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27 March 2014

The Collaborative Experience of Religion and Health Research

Response
I am beginning to worry that clergy feeling the need to conduct their own research to prove their value in healthcare settings may be a sign that the faithful are starting to identify with (or at least play by the rules of) their scientific captors. A Jew, Muslim, Christian, and non-believer were all in the same room for the same reason: Where were they? They were at Duke University attending Dr. Harold Koenig's summer workshop on conducting research in religion and health this past summer.
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