Migration

Health, Wealth, & Spiritual Warfare: The UCKG from Brazil to Australia

Response
Get a global perspective on the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), whose Australian branches were discussed in our recent episode with Dr. Kathleen Openshaw. Describing the UCKG as a leader in a global Pentecostal vanguard influencing the Catholic Church, respondents Professor Andrew Chesnut and Dr. Kate Kingsbury outline how the UCKG's focus on health, wealth, and spiritual warfare have been critical to its success with migrants in Australian and around the world.

Navigating stasis and mobility: The journey of anointing oil

Podcast
How do material objects accrue spiritual capital? In this episode, Dr. Kathleen Openshaw shares a poignant story from a member of the Australia branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. As we hear about the global journey of a vial of anointing oil, she explains how we invest objects with significance and connect them to sacred spaces. Especially for the migrant community of UCKG members in Australia, these connections work to collapse the false binary between stasis and mobility that seems so stark in our present moment.

The ‘secular’, the ‘religious’, and the ‘refugee’ in Germany

Podcast
Ever since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, the ‘refugee’ in Germany has been constructed in a variety of ways that are implicated in specific co-constitutive notions of the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ that exert symbolic power by naturalizing certain notions of the religious and thereby the secular while excluding others and feeding back into the subject formation (or subjectivation) of people classified as ‘refugees’. In this process certain positions are produced as hegemonic while others are classified as not acceptable (e.g., “radical”, “not European” or “anti-humanist”).

Religion, Migration and Diaspora

Podcast
“We had so many studies focusing on institutions and on official discourse, and so few studies on the silent majority, which never shows up in these institutions... So we over-emphasize the religious belongings. All the muslims are supposed to know the Quran, although they don't. Some of them have never opened it.

D. Mitra Barua on Immigrant Buddhism in the West

Podcast
"...Rebranding the Buddhist concept of Harmony to be a more politically comparable term to the Canadian mosaic..." Dr. D. Mitra Barua is an instructor of Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, and has a Masters in Buddhist Philosophy undertaken in Sri Lanka.
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