On Religion

Liz Bucar, "Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us" (Penguin, 2026)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified intenSati and Kripalu yoga instructor. Her popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion and Pious Fashion. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. For more about how religion shapes us all, even if we don’t believe, subscribe to Liz’s newsletter at LizBucar.com.

In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats, and follow the right celebrity gurus. But is this true? Or are we picking and choosing from a self-care salad bar in ways that satisfy our hunger but don’t truly nourish us?
When we approach practices like yoga and ayahuasca as fitness routines and life hacks, we miss out on the sacred wisdom they have to offer us. But by digging into the real and often ancient religious traditions behind these practices, from Buddhism to Christianity and beyond, we can make them more meaningful, ethical, and effective—without the often unpleasant baggage of joining an organized religion.
In this engaging and deeply personal book, award-winning scholar and writer Liz Bucar embarks on a quest to get to the heart of “spiritual but not religious” activities from detox diets to sound baths. As she tries out each practice for herself, she asks how we can get more out of it by tuning out the hype and taking the religious meaning behind it seriously—with emotionally profound and often surprising results. Whether it’s as simple as setting an intention for a yoga asana or as complex as reevaluating what a “higher power” is, it’s time to understand, experience, and simply get more out of our spiritual practices. It’s time to dig deeper with Beyond Wellness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.

McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state.

This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era.

Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Elyse Ambrose, "A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive" (T&T Clark, 2024)

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aizaiah G. Yong, "Multiracial Cosmotheandrism: A Practical Theology of Multiracial Experiences" (Orbis, 2023)

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Multiracial Cosmotheandrism: A Practical Theology of Multiracial Experiences (Orbis, 2023), Aizaiah G. Yong critically considers how the lives and spiritual experiences of mixed-race people can transform efforts for racial justice across the planet. Yong is inspired by the life and philosophy of Raimon Panikkar, a twentieth-century interreligious spiritual leader whose own experiences of the world were foundationally shaped by his life as a mixed-race person. This book focuses on the experiences of mixed-race people and challenges practical theology to broaden its own attention to practices of spirituality beyond mono-racial paradigms. Mixed-race people have profound resources for confronting and healing from racism and racial oppression within their lives and their stories, and this book demonstrates calls for strengthened collective efforts to tend to the beautiful depths of spiritual formation for mixed-race people.

Rev. Aizaiah G. Yong (Ph.D., Practical Theology, Claremont School of Theology) serves as Assistant Professor of Spirituality at the Claremont School of Theology in Southern California, USA. He is an ordained Pentecostal Christian minister within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a recognized facilitator in the Compassion Practice and an Internal Family Systems Practitioner. Growing up in a multiracial and immigrant family, he is committed to sustaining transformational and collective efforts that address ongoing realities of social oppression with presence, passion, and peace.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Danielle Dulsky, "Bones & Honey: A Heathen Prayer Book" (New World Library, 2023)

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Bones & Honey: A Heathen Prayer Book (New World Library, 2023)l is a collection of nature-inspired prayers, mythic incantations, stories, and pagan poetry that can be enjoyed slowly or all at once. It will resonate with anyone looking to soothe the wounds of modernity with eco-devotional language, spellwork, and daily spiritual nourishment.

Danielle Dulsky speaks to the expanding movement of those returning to slow, simple living and cultivating an Earth-inspired, sustainable existence. Organized around thirteen archetypes and their themes, ranging from the Mountain Mage (solitude) and Bone-Witch (grievers) to the Heathen Queen (empowerment) and Shepherd (nurturing), Bones & Honey will carry you to the “third road,” the unforeseen way that arises from the tension of opposites.

Danielle Dulsky is an Aquarian mischief maker, painter, and word-witch. Author of The Holy Wild Grimoire (New World Library, 2022), Sacred Hags Oracle (New World Library, 2021), Seasons of Moon and Flame (New World Library, 2020), The Holy Wild (New World Library, 2018), and Woman Most Wild (New World Library, 2017), Danielle is the founder of The Hag School and believes in the power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning Witches, and rebellious artists in tending to the world’s healing. Mother to two wildlings and partner to a potter, Danielle fills her world with nature, family, old stories, and intentional awe. Find her in the haunted wilds of central New York or the whiskey-soaked streets of a Pennsylvania steel town; she calls both places home.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darnise C. Martin, "Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church" (NYU Press, 2005)

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Darnise C. Martin's Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (NYU Press, 2005) draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances. This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, "The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice" (U Notre Dame Press, 2023)

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein's book The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice (U Notre Dame Press, 2023) explores African theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye’s constructive initiative to include African women’s experiences and voices within Christian theological discourse.

Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a renowned Ghanaian Methodist theologian, has worked for decades to address issues of poverty, women’s rights, and global unrest. She is one of the founders of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, a pan-African ecumenical organization that mentors the next generation of African women theologians to counter the dearth of academic theological literature written by African women. This book offers an in-depth analysis of Oduyoye’s life and work, providing a much-needed corrective to Eurocentric, colonial, and patriarchal theologies by centering the experiences of African women as a starting point from which theological reflection might begin.

Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein’s study begins by narrating the story of Mercy Oduyoye’s life, focusing on her early years, which led to her eventual interest in women’s equality and African women’s theology. At the heart of the book is a close analysis of Oduyoye’s theological thought, exploring her unique approach to four issues: the doctrine of God, Christology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology. Through the course of these examinations, Oredein shows how Oduyoye’s life story and theological output are intimately intertwined. Stories of gender formation, racial ideas, and cultural foundations teem throughout Oduyoye’s construction of a Christian theological story. Oduyoye shows that one’s theology does not leave particularity behind but rather becomes the locus in which the fullness of divinity might be known.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sara Moslener, "Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

First taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ideas about morality since the nineteenth century.

Concentrating on two of today's best known purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing, Sara Moslener's investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. Moslener highlights a number of points in U.S. history when evangelical beliefs and values have seemed to provide viable explanations for and solutions to widespread cultural crises, resulting in the growth of their cultural and political influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders have shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization.

From the purity reformers of the nineteenth century to fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry, Moslener illuminates the evolution of a strain of purity rhetoric that runs throughout Protestant evangelicalism.

Sara Moslener is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the United States. Sara’s work has been featured in The Revealer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Sojourners Magazine, Jezebel, Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, Religion News Service, and The Baffler. She has appeared on numerous podcasts and is a regular contributor to the podcast Straight White American Jesus.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement.

Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023) challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith.

Orit Avishai is an ethnographer at Fordham University, where she teaches in the Sociology Department and in the Program on Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work considers how ideology and culture, broadly defined, shape social institutions, identities, political dialogue, and cultural practices. Her recent public-facing writing has appeared in The Conversation, The Katz Center Blog, and Religion Dispatches. Dr. Avishai has degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, the Yale Law School, and Tel Aviv University Law School.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Prothero, "God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time" (HarperOne, 2023)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions.

One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman’s personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country’s top religion publisher.

Exman’s role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962.

In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Homrighausen, "Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible" (Liturgical Press, 2022)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The illuminations of The Saint John’s Bible have delighted many with their imaginative takes on Scripture. But many struggle to appreciate the calligraphy more deeply than merely noting its beauty. Does calligraphy mean something? How is it beautiful?

Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022), written by a biblical scholar who has spent years working with this Bible, shows how calligraphic art powerfully interplays visual form, textual content, and creative process. Homrighausen proposes five lenses for this artform: gardens, weaving, pilgrimage, touching, and enfleshing words. Each of these lenses springs from the poetry of the Song of Songs, its illuminations in The Saint John’s Bible, and medieval ways of understanding the scribe’s craft. While these metaphors for calligraphic art draw from this particular illuminated Bible, this book is aimed at all lovers of calligraphy, art, and sacred text.

Jonathan Homrighausen, a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible at Duke University, teaches in Judaic Studies at the College of William & Mary. His research explores the intersection of Hebrew Bible, calligraphic art, and scribal craft. He is the author of Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John's Bible (Liturgical Press, 2018) and articles in Religion and the Arts, Image, Teaching Theology and Religion, Transpositions, and Visual Commentary on Scripture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith.

The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Vanden Eykel, "The Magi: Who They Were, How They've Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate" (Fortress Press, 2022)

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

George Tyrrell insisted that the quest for the historical Jesus was no more than scholars staring into a well to see their own reflections staring back. Jesus is the mirror image of those who study him. A similar phenomenon accompanies the quest for the historical Magi, those mysterious travelers who came from the East, following a star to Bethlehem.

In this work, ancient historian and scholar Eric Vanden Eykel helps readers better understand both the Magi and the ancient and modern interpreters who have tried to study them. He shows how, from a mere twelve verses in the Gospel of Matthew, a varied and vast literary and artistic tradition was born. The Magi: Who They Were, How They've Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate (Fortress Press, 2022) examines the birth of the Magi story;its enrichments, embellishments, and expansions in apocryphal writing and early Christian preaching;its artistic expressions in catacombs, icons, and paintings and its modern legacy in novels, poetry, and music.

Throughout, the book explores the fascination the Magi story elicits in both ancient and modern readers and what the legacy of the Magi story tells us about its storytellers--and ourselves.

Eric Vanden Eykel is associate professor of religion and the Forrest S. WIlliams Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Ferrum College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion, Public Health, and the Media

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Amanda Furiasse received her PhD in Religion and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Florida State University in 2018. Her research unfolds at the convergence of religion, health, and technology and explores how African communities use religious ritual as a mechanism to heal from violence and trauma. She is Co-Founder and Curator at the Religion, Art, and Technology Lab where she produces multi-sensory exhibitions for the public on the relationship between faith, aesthetics, and innovation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Rise of the Muslim Sitcom

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press in 2017), and editor of Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation & Harvard University Press, 2021), and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge, 2021). He also co-hosts the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast on the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Migrational Religion and the Latinx Diaspora

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. João Chaves and Dr. Arlene Sánchez-Walsh discuss Brazil and the book Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora, out now from Baylor University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mexican American Religions

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Arlene Sánchez-Walsh is in conversation with Dr. Brett Hendrickson on the book Mexican American Religions: An Introduction (Religion in America), out now from Routledge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Meatpacking, Migration, and Faith

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Kristy Nabhan-Warren is the V. O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies and a professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author, most recently, of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland, out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh, PhD, is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2003).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bradley Onishi, "Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--And What Comes Next" (Broadleaf Books, 2023)

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots in Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--And What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023).

Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country--communities of which Onishi was once a part--to ignite a cold civil war?

Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture that birthed a movement and has taken a dangerous turn. In taut and unsparing prose, Onishi traces the migration of many White Christians to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in what is known as the American Redoubt. Learning the troubling history of the New Religious Right and the longings and logic of White Christian nationalism is deeply alarming. It is also critical for preserving the shape of our democracy for years to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Jewish-Christian Dialogue

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Alana M. Vincent is Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Religion and Imagination at the University of Chester. She works on post-Holocaust Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian dialogue, and popular culture (primarily science fiction and fantasy).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the History of Muslim Books in Catholic Libraries

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

N.A. Mansour is a historian and a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, where she is writing a dissertation on the transition between manuscript and print in Arabic-language contexts. She produces podcasts for different venues, co-edits Hazine.info, and works for different museums and archives. She also writes for the general public on culture, Islam and history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religious Pluralism in South Africa

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Lee-Shae Salma Scharnick-Udemans is the Senior Researcher in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape. With degrees in religious studies and media from the University of Cape Town, she also has extensive experience working in television production. Scharnick-Udemans researches, teaches, and supervises in the areas of religious diversity, pluralism, the political economy of religion, new religious movements, and the media.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Muslim Religious Spaces and the Lives of Muslim College Students

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Krista Melanie Riley (she/her/hers) is a pedagogical advisor at a college in Montreal, Quebec. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University, where her research focused on discussions about gender, bodies, and sexuality on Muslim feminist blogs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Working Beyond the Academy

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shannon Trosper Schorey is a scholar, writer, and researcher in the tech industry. She is an expert in science and technology studies, American religious history, and new religious movements. After leaving higher education, she began working in the private sector and is focused on emerging and cloud technologies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Two Faces of Religious Freedom

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jolyon Baraka Thomas (he/him/his) is assistant professor and interim graduate chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. He is currently finishing a book on religion and public schooling in Japan and the United States, and his articles on religion and capitalism have appeared in Material Religion and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Comedy and Islam

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ithaca College. She speaks and writes about Islam, humor, and the politics that accompany what it means to be socially legible in the United States. Her current book manuscript looks at the ways that Islam and Muslims are articulated through standup comedy and how they speak back to broader transnational practices and discourses of race, masculinity, and secularism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Religion of 'The Young Lords'

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jorge Juan Rodríguez V, the son of two Puerto Rican migrants, was raised by his mother, father, grandmother, and uncle in a small affordable housing community outside of Hartford, Connecticut. He has completed degrees in Biblical Studies, Social Theory, and Liberation Theologies and is currently completing a PhD in History at Union Theological Seminary. In addition to his academic work which explores the intersections of religion and progressive social movements, Jorge serves as the Associate Director for Strategic Programming at the Hispanic Summer Program—an organization that creates educational spaces focused on the academic study of religion and theology from a Latinx perspective.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Weddings, Marriage, and Divorce in Islam

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kecia Ali (Ph.D., Religion, Duke University) is Professor of Religion at Boston University, where she teaches a range of classes on Islam. Her research focuses on Islamic law; women and gender; ethics; and biography. Her books include Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (2006, expanded ed. 2016), Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010), Imam Shafi‘i: Scholar and Saint (2011), and The Lives of Muhammad (2014), about modern Muslim and non-Muslim biographies of Islam’s prophet. She co-edited the revised edition of A Guide for Women in Religion, which provides guidance for careers in religious studies and theology (2014).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion, Science, and the Brain

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Andrew Ali Aghapour (he/him/his) is a scholar and comedian based in Durham, North Carolina. He is the Consulting Scholar of Religion and Science for the Religion in America Initiative at the National Museum of American History, and the co-author, with Peter Manseau, of the forthcoming Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Technology in America (Smithsonian Books, 2021). Andrew holds a Ph.D in religious studies from UNC Chapel Hill and an M.Phil in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. He is the writer/performer of Zara, a one person show about immigration and the history of monotheism. Andrew was the co-founder, with Michael Schulson, of Religion Dispatches' The Cubit, and the managing editor, under Myrna Sheldon, of Harvard Divinity School's Cosmologics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Unraveling of Nepal's Hindu Monarchy

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Anne Mocko is Associate Professor of Asian Religions at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She is a specialist in the religions of South Asia, and has spent several years living in Nepal, but has also spent time in India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. She is primarily interested in the ways ritual performances and ritual change can shape collective ideas and ideology. Her first book on the role of ritual in shaping and changing ideologies (Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, Politics, and the Unraveling of Nepal's Hindu Monarchy) was released by OUP in 2016, and was released in South Asia through Adarsh Books in 2020 under the title Unraveling the Crown. She is currently working on a popular-audience book (entitled Eco-Karma) about how the daily rituals and religious habits of India's Jains might help non-Jains to reimagine environmental impacts and responsibilities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Transnational Online Shinto and Educational YouTube

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kaitlyn Ugoretz (she/her) is a digital anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned a BA and MA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania with a double concentration in Chinese and Japanese studies. Her research interests include Japanese religions, globalization, media, and digital technology. Supported by dissertation fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and Japan Foundation, she is conducting an ethnography of the growth of transnational, online Shinto communities based on social media. Kaitlyn hosts the educational YouTube channel Eat Pray Anime, which explores religion and history in Japanese pop culture, and writes on Asian religions for Religion For Breakfast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Social Media and Hinduism

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is scholar of performance, ritual, yoga, and digital culture in South Asia at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Sundaram's current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively "branding" religious identities through a neoliberal "Vedicizing" of virtual spaces. Her most recent article explores how West Bengal’s Tourism initiatives use Instagram to foster virtual, ethnonationalist, social networks during Durga puja. Spotlighting issues of access/accessibility to religious spaces and the viability and visibility of online counter-narratives, especially those from minoritized/marginalized caste, gender, and class communities, Sundaram shows how Asur tribal groups who seek to recover an alternative history of their ancestor Mahisasura, are not only excluded, but, effaced through this kind of digital cultural marketing campaign. A forthcoming piece examines so-called YouTube yogis and how the commercial landscape of yoga as part of lifestyle "cures" becomes an unwitting partner in Hindu nationalist project of repatriating yoga as a national cultural artifact.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ecological Ethics in the Jewish Community Farming Movement

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Adrienne Krone is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Jewish Life at Allegheny College. She has a Ph.D. in American Religion from Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary religious food justice movements in North America and her current project is an ethnographic and historical study of the Jewish community farming movement.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Ideas about Heaven

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011), and former editor-in-chief of the online magazine of religion, culture and politics Killing the Buddha. She received her PhD in American Religion from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia. An Associate Editor of The Commons at the Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life, Brook is fascinated by utopias, origin stories, religious liberalism, and spirituality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Paid Family Leave and the Catholic Church

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Annie Selak (she/her/hers) is a systematic theologian, specializing in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. from Boston College, and is also a proud graduate of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (M.Div) and Santa Clara University (BA, BS). Dr. Selak's dissertation, "Toward an Ecclesial Vision in the Shadow of Wounds," examined the wounds of racism and sexism in the Roman Catholic Church utilizing contemporary trauma theory and the ecclesiology of Karl Rahner. Her work has been featured in Modern Theology, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Washington Post, America, and Commonweal. Dr. Selak currently serves as Associate Director of the Women's Center at Georgetown University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Muslim Women and French Anti-Separatism

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sahar Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the School of Law at Trinity College, Dublin. Her research examines and offers a reinterpretation of the right to freedom of religion under International Human Rights Law and Islamic jurisprudence. Sahar is from Lahore, Pakistan, where she worked as a barrister for many years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin Waterfield, trans. and ed., "The Complete Works of Epictetus: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Epictetus was born into slavery around the year 50 CE, and, upon being granted his freedom, he set himself up as a philosophy teacher. After being expelled from Rome, he spent the rest of his life living and teaching in Greece. He is now considered the most important exponent of Stoicism, and his surviving work comprises a series of impassioned discourses, delivered live and recorded by his student Arrian, and the Handbook, Arrian’s own take on the heart of Epictetus’s teaching.

In Discourses, Epictetus argues that happiness depends on knowing what is in our power to affect and what is not. Our internal states and our responses to events are up to us, but the events themselves are assigned to us by the benevolent deity, and we should treat them—along with our bodies, possessions, and families—as matters of indifference, simply making the best use of them we can. Together, the Discourses and Handbook constitute a practical guide to moral self-improvement, as Epictetus explains the work and exercises aspirants need to do to enrich and deepen their lives. Edited and translated by renowned scholar Robin Waterfield, The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments (U Chicago Press, 2022) collects the complete works of Epictetus, bringing to modern readers his insights on how to cope with death, exile, the people around us, the whims of the emperor, fear, illness, and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Muslim Philanthropy and the Pillars Fund

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kashif Shaikh is the Co-Founder and President of Pillars Fund. In 2010, Kashif and a small group of Muslim philanthropists founded Pillars to strategically organize wealth within their communities and support American Muslim civic institutions and leaders building a more just, equitable society. For the next five years, Kashif volunteered his time and resources to grow and lead Pillars. In 2016, he was asked to be Pillars’ first full-time executive director and transitioned Pillars from a volunteer-run fund to a fully operational foundation. Under his leadership, Pillars has invested more than $6 million in Muslim community organizations and initiatives to build collective power and transform what is possible for Muslims in the United States.

At the heart of Kashif’s career in philanthropy is a dedication to promoting racial equity and creating opportunities for Muslims and people of color to tell their stories through art. Prior to launching Pillars, Kashif was a program officer at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, where he helped manage a portfolio of more than $20 million and helped scale a variety of Chicago nonprofits working at the intersection of racial justice, poverty, and education. He also managed the Foundation’s corporate partnerships and helped develop corporate social responsibility strategies for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Blackhawks, and Chicago Bulls. His career began at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, where he developed strategies to engage the organization’s largest corporate partners.

Kashif’s expert insight on Muslims in philanthropy has been cited in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and Chicago Sun Times, among others. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Peabody Awards, Chicago Humanities Festival, and Mortar, a nonprofit based in his home town of Cincinnati that helps entrepreneurs from historically marginalized communities access resources to start and run successful businesses. He has been named a Philanthropy Forward Fellow by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions and Neighborhood Funders Group, a New Profit Civic Lab Entrepreneur, and an Ambassadors for Health Equity Fellow. In 2017, Crain’s Chicago Business named him to their 40 Under 40 list.

Kashif holds a BA from Ohio State University and MA from Northwestern University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Medieval Queer Magic

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kersti Francis is a writer, editor, and medievalist based in Tucson and Los Angeles. Francis’ works at the intersections between religion, magic, gender, and sexuality is so interesting. I loved this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. She is on Twitter (@kerstifrancis), where she tweets about feminism, queerness, history, and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Latinx Religion

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Guest host Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh, Ph.D., is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2003). Felipe Hinojosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2009 and joined the faculty at Texas A&M that same year. His research areas include Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, and Social Movements. In addition to serving as Director of the Carlos H. Cantu Hispanic Education & Opportunity Endowment, Prof. Hinojosa serves as editor for the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, and online moderated forum Latinx Talk.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On How God Becomes Real

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Tanya Luhrmann is the author of How God Becomes Real and is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and also an anthropologist of religion. Brian Carwana Brian has a Ph.D. in religion, a business degree, and worked as a strategy consultant. He is the Executive Director of Encounter World Religions where he has been teaching people about ethno-religious communities and facilitating actual “encounters” for 20 years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of religious studies at Rhodes College and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her latest book, Text After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible, is a study of sexual violence and rape in the Hebrew Bible and is out now from Oxford University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Roman Catholic Womanpriests

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jill M. Peterfeso is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Guilford College. She is a cultural historian of American religion whose published scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality, resistance to authority, and social justice, specifically in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.

While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Early Christian Magic

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shaily Patel is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Virginia Tech. She is an expert on ancient magic, early Christian literature, and ideological criticisms of the New Testament. She is currently writing a book about the ways in which early Christian writings featuring Simon Peter are caught between two simultaneous but opposing cultural trends: the allure of “magic” in the Roman imagination and the categorial vilifying of magicians among ancient writers. In her wider work, she is concerned with the problem of representation in historical accounts, especially the representation of groups and ideas that challenge established “orthodoxy.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race.

Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer Zitkála-Sá, who proudly claimed the label of "heathen" for themselves.

Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard UP, 2022) thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Himalayan Buddhist Histories

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Swati Chawla is assistant professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Her doctoral research is focused on migration, citizenship-making, and contemporary Buddhisms in the Himalayan regions of postcolonial South Asia. Her masters and M.Phil. work focused on the Tibetan Buddhist female monastic tradition in exile. She hosts the Twitter channel #himalayanhistories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy and Gorampa Sonam Senge

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Constance Kassor is an assistant professor of religious studies at Lawrence University, where she teaches courses on Buddhist thought and Asian religious traditions. Her research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and she is currently involved in several projects related to the Madhyamaka philosophy of the 15th-century thinker, Gorampa Sonam Senge. She is also interested in religion and comics, women and gender minorities in Buddhism, pedagogy, and digital humanities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Early Christian Deathscapes

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sarah F. Porter (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University with a concentration in New Testament / Early Christianity and a secondary field in archaeology. She holds an M.Div. from Vanderbilt University Divinity School with a certificate in gender, sexuality, and religion, and she earned her B.A. in English and Religion from Southwestern University. Currently, she is a William R. Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her dissertation, “Early Christian Deathscapes,” examines the production and flow of affects through the martyria, cemeteries, and homilies of fourth-century Antioch (modern-day Antakya, Turkey).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Trafficking Hadassah and Book of Esther

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar (she/her/hers) is an adjunct professor at Spelman College (Atlanta, GA) in the Religious Studies Department. She received her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies (Old Testament) in May 2020 from Drew University. Her dissertation is interdisciplinary and focused on how the discipline of biblical studies is increasingly responsive to social issues, namely, sexual trafficking. Dunbar’s dissertation, entitled “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and the African Diaspora,” is a dialogical cultural study of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She assesses sexual trafficking in both contexts, evaluates the traumatic impact of trafficking on Africana collective identity, and examines and critiques ideologies and stereotypes that were espoused to justify sexual abuse against Africana girls and women.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Protestant Sex Scandals

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Suzanna Krivulskaya (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in U.S. and digital history. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion. Her current book project, tentatively titled Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism, investigates how pastoral sex scandals have been covered in the popular press and how Protestant denominations and the reading public responded to the coverage.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion and the HIV/AIDS Crisis in San Francisco

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Lynne Gerber (she/her/hers) is an independent scholar. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual-Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2011). She is currently working on a history of religion and HIV/AIDS in San Francisco.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sacred Sites, Indigenous History, and Spanish Colonialism

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Abel R. Gómez (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religion Department and earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies from the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University. His research focuses on sacred sites, ritual, and decolonization in the context of contemporary Indigenous religions. Abel is currently completing his dissertation, an ethnography of sacred sites protection movements among the Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco and Monterey regions. He is a steering committee member for the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit of the American Academy of Religion and recently served on the committee organizing the annual Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits Powwow in San Francisco. He earned a B.A. in philosophy and religion from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Missouri.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Black Religion, Music, and Friendship

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ambre Dromgoole (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She graduated from Oberlin College & Conservatory in 2015 with a B.A. in Musical Studies and Religion, where she received the Jonathon Kneeland Prize for Religion and the Africana Studies Award for Artistic Excellence and Community Service upon graduation. She then obtained an M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music with a concentration in Black Religion and the Arts receiving the Hugh Porter Prize of Distinction. Ambre is interested in the convergence of Black religion and popular culture, focusing on the emergence of various musical genres from women in the Black Holiness-Pentecostal tradition.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Life as Meditation

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Mark Van Buren is a Mindful Living Trainer, yoga/meditation instructor, personal trainer, and musician, that has been promoting health and wellness for years. He runs workshops and retreats around the New York City and New Jersey regions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a Life in Buddhism

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Gary Gach is the author of Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Ripples in the Universe, QANON, and the January 6 Insurrection

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Susannah Crockford is an anthropologist with interests in spirituality, politics, ecology, economics, and survivalism. She's the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Affect Theory and Religion

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Donovan Schaefer is an assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Schaefer is the author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Brian Carwana is the Executive Director of Encounter World Religions. Brian has a PhD in religion and politics from the University of Toronto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Literary Persecutions, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Megan Goodwin, Ph.D., is Program Director for Sacred Writes, a Luce-funded project promoting public scholarship on religion hosted by Northeastern University. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecutions, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions is available through Rutgers. Visit Dr. Megan Goodwin's website here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Lives of Objects

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Maia Kotrosits is assistant professor of religion at Denison University and is the author of the book The Lives of Objects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Hope in a Secular Age

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

David Newheiser is a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. His first book, Hope in a Secular Age (Cambridge UP, 2019), argues that an uncertain hope is required to sustain commitment of any kind: personal, political, or religious.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On How the Vatican Makes Saints

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Joe Drape is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen and American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise. His book Black Maestro was the inaugural winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award. Today we talked about his book The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Buddhist Life

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Andrea Miller is an editor at Lion’s Roar magazine and is the author of Awakening My Heart: Essays, Articles and Interviews on the Buddhist Life, out now from Pottersfield Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Latinx Islam

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Harold D. Morales' research focuses on the intersections between race and religion and between lived and mediated experience. He draws on these critical lenses to engage Latinx religions in general and Latinx Muslim groups in particular. He is currently focusing on developing public scholarship initiatives through his research on mural art and social justice in the city of Baltimore and through the CSRC and its collaborative projects.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Richard W. Newton Jr. is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His research examines the making of social difference in light of the anthropology of scriptures. He curates his website at: https://www.sowingtheseed.org

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Spiritual Meditations and Reflections

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Steven M. Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality. He is the current chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. His books include Waking From Sleep, The Fall, Out of the Darkness, Back to Sanity, The Calm Center and The Leap. His latest book is Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World. His books have been published in 20 languages, while his articles and essays have been published in over 50 academic journals, magazines and newspapers. He writes blog articles for Scientific American and for Psychology Today. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as "an important contribution to the shift in consciousness which is happening on our planet at present."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Carving the Divine and Busshi

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Yujiro Seki is the documentary filmmaker of the film "Carving the Divine." "Carving the Divine" offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Busshi – practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving at the beating heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Zen of the Firefighter

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Hersch Wilson is a thirty-year veteran volunteer Firefighter-EMT with the Hondo Fire Department in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. He is also a storyteller, committed to explaining how First Responding can change how we see and experience our own lives. In his “real job” he is a writer, speaker, and consultant. He is the author of Firefighter Zen, out now from New World Library.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Hidden Zen

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Meido Moore Roshi was a disciple of the lay Zen master Tenzan Toyoda Rokoji, under whom he endured a severe training in both Zen and traditional martial arts. He also trained under Dogen Hosokawa Roshi, and later under So'zan Miller Roshi. All three of these teachers are in the lineage of the famous Omori Sogen Roshi, perhaps the most famous Rinzai Zen master of the twentieth century. Meido serves as abbot of Korinji, a monastery near Madison, Wisconsin, and is a guiding teacher of the international Rinzai Zen Community, traveling widely to lead retreats.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liz Bucar, "Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Liz Bucar is the Director of Sacred Writes, Professor of Religion, and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. Bucar is an expert in comparative religious ethics who has published on topics ranging from gender reassignment surgery to the global politics of modest clothing. Bucar’s current book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022), is on the ethics of religious appropriation. She is also the author of award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017). Bucar’s public scholarship includes bylines in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and Zocalo Public Square as well as several podcasts. She has a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter @BucarLiz.

You can find an NBN podcast with Bucar talking about Pious Fashion here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Spirituality of Dag Hammarskjöld

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dag Hammarskjöld served as secretary-general of the United Nations from 1953 until his tragic death in a suspicious plane crash in 1961. During those years he saw the fledgling international organization through numerous crises with skill that made him a star on the international stage. As readers of his now-classic diary, Markings, are aware, Hammarskjöld understood political leadership as an honor calling for resourcefulness, humility, moral clarity, and spiritual reflection.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Dharma Relief and the Essence of Chan

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Guo Gu (Dr. Jimmy Yu) is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center (www.tallahasseechan.com) and is also the guiding teacher for the Western Dharma Teachers Training course at the Chan Meditation Center in New York and the Dharma Drum Lineage. He is one of the late Master Sheng Yen’s (1930–2009) senior and closest disciples, and assisted him in leading intensive retreats throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Guo Gu has edited and translated a number of Master Sheng Yen’s books from Chinese to English. He is also a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Pentecostals in America

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Arlene Sánchez Walsh is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity, which was released by Columbia University Press in 2003, as well as the book Pentecostals in America from Columbia University Press in 2018. She has served as a media expert for outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and On Being with Krista Tippett, and served as an expert on Latino/a religious history for the PBS series God in America.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Japanese Buddhist Art

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rachel Quist specializes in East Asian Buddhist imagery with focuses in pre-modern Japan and China. Her research centers on questions of interaction with imagery, materiality and object agency, and the accessibility of image-based practices. She has written on topics such as Buddhist reliquary design and expressivity, the didactic project underlying the hell tableau at Baodingshan, and the construction of a collective memory surrounding the Shingon monk Kōbō Daishi at the temple complex of Mount Kōya. Rachel is currently conducting research on early imperial patronage of Daigoji, a Shingon temple in Kyoto, for her dissertation.

Michael Van Hartingsveldt received an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature before teaching in South Korea in at an English immersion school. While there, he became enamored with the religious art of East Asia. He finished a Master’s degree in East Asian art and its markets from Claremont Graduate University in 2017, after which he worked for two years as an Asian Art collections specialist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael has collaborated with the Los Angeles office of The Japan Foundation in the curation of three exhibitions and two public lecture series. He now studies at the University of Kansas.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion and Film

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 20:00:00 -0000

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate is a writer, editor, public speaker, and college professor. He's interested in how sensuality affects spirituality. His writings all circle around questions of the ways sense perceptions influence ways of being religious, and how religious traditions change our ways of perceiving the world around us. In other words, religion and spirituality are rooted in the body. Along these lines, he has authored and edited fifteen books, while his essays have appeared in many places. Having taught at the University of Vermont and Texas Christian University, he is currently visiting associate professor at Hamilton College, NY.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Men and Catholic Devotion in Brooklyn

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College where she teaches classes on religion and masculinity, Catholics in the Americas, urban religion, and religions of Latin America. She is an ethnographer and her research focuses on material culture, contemporary Catholicism, and gender and embodiment. She is the author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2020).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mindfulness, What it Is and Where it Comes From

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sarah Shaw is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. She has taught and published numerous works on the history and practices of Buddhism, including An Introduction to Buddhist Meditation and The Spirit of Meditation. Today we talked about her book Mindfulness: Where It Comes From And What It Means.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tibetan Buddhism, Gender, and the Life of Mingyur Peldron

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Alison Melnick Dyer is Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Bates College. She is an expert on gender and Tibetan Buddhism. She is currently writing a book about the life of Mingyur Peldrön, an 18th century Buddhist nun and religious leader. Melnick Dyer is especially interested in the ways that privilege influences gender in religious communities. She earned her B.A. at the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Jewish Sexual Ethics

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and is working on a book project on sex, risk, and rabbinic text.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Brett Krutzsch is an expert on LGBTQ politics and religion in the United States and a scholar at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where he serves as editor of The Revealer. He is the author of the 2019 book Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics from Oxford University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Contemporary Black Islam and the Black Islam Syllabus

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Kayla Renée Wheeler is an assistant professor and an expert in contemporary Black Islam in the United States. Dr. Wheeler is writing a book on the history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States. The book is based on five years of research, including interviewing Black Muslim fashion designers and attending fashion shows in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Newark. Dr. Wheeler is also the creator of the Black Islam Syllabus, a free resource guide that highlights the experiences of Muslims of African descent. Her writing has been featured in Sapelo Square and The Conversation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Yoga, Cultural Appropriation, and Racism

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shreena Gandhi is a multi-faceted cultural historian of religion with expertise in religion, race, the Americas and Hinduism. Trained at Swarthmore, Harvard and the University of Florida, Professor Gandhi currently teaches at Michigan State University, where she starts off the first few weeks of all her classes introducing students to the concept of structural white supremacy and why that is important for a better understanding religion in the U.S. Her research and public scholarship are on the history of yoga, and she is revising a manuscript on this using the framework of white supremacy and cultural appropriation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Yoruba Christianity and Music

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Vicki Brennan is an anthropologist who studies religion, sound, music, and urban space in Africa and the African Diaspora. She is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of African Studies at the University of Vermont. Her research is based on more than fifteen years of field research in southwest Nigeria, primarily in Lagos and Ibadan. She has also conducted research in Nigerian immigrant and African American communities in the United States. Her book, Singing Yoruba Christianity (Indiana UP, 2018), examines how members of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church Movement in Lagos, Nigeria use music, dance, and other media as a means of producing moral community and reinforcing ethical values and modes of self-making. She is currently researching how claims to urban space by members of religious communities in Lagos, Nigeria are produced, circulated, experienced, and contested through sound. She is also writing an ethnographic biography of a Nigerian-American visual artist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Surviving Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Brian Clites is a professor at Case Western Reserve University. He is an expert in clergy sexual abuse, and he has spent the last eight years interviewing Catholic survivors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois. In his upcoming book, Surviving Soul Murder, Clites explains how survivors have transformed their pain into legal and political reforms, and how the Catholic scandal has changed the way that other Americans think about sexual assault.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On African-American Catholic Identity, Sex Abuse, and Systemic Racism

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt is a higher education professional, researcher, and inclusion and diversity specialist based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her PhD in sociology from Fordham University. A sociologist of religion, she is an expert in systemic racism with experience researching and writing about how systemic racism impacts African-American Catholics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Vodun, Voodoo, and the Movies

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Emily Crews is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation project traces the relationship between movement and identity formation in the context of Nigerian immigration to the United States, exploring the ways in which Pentecostalism conditions, and is conditioned by, the attempts of people to make themselves feel “at home” in a foreign culture. Her teaching interests are broad, but focus mostly on such areas as migration, gender, sexuality, and the body, as well as religions in the African diaspora.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Modern Witchcraft

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Danielle Dulsky is a heathen visionary, painter, and word-witch. The author of Woman Most Wild and The Holy Wild. She teaches internationally and has facilitated circles, embodiment trainings, communal spell-work, and seasonal rituals since 2007. She is the founder of The Hag School and believes in the emerging power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning witches, and rebellious artists in healing our ailing world. As an Irish-American, Danielle’s witchcraft is deeply rooted in Celtic philosophy and Irish mythology. She believes fervently in the role of ancestral healing, embodiment, and animism in fracturing the longstanding systems supporting white-body supremacy and environmental unconsciousness, is committed to centering the voices and teachings of POC and LGBTQIA+ folks in her work as founder of Living Mandala Yoga, LLC and The Hag School and supports organizations and initiatives that do the same. Parent to two beloved wildlings and partner to a potter, Danielle fills her world with nature, family, art, and intentional sensuousness. Find her praying under pine trees, wandering through the haunted places, and whispering to her grandmothers’ ghosts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Witchcraft in the Early Modern Period

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Julia M. Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University. She specializes in early modern European and Atlantic history with an emphasis on gender, family, and childhood. With funding from the American Historical Association, the Newberry Library, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dr. Gossard wrote her first book, Coercing Children: State-Building and Social Reform in the Early Modern French World, which is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jordan Denari Duffner, "Islamophobia: What Christians Should Know (and Do) about Anti-Muslim Discrimination" (Orbis, 2021)

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jordan Denari Duffner is an author and scholar of Muslim-Christian relations, interreligious dialogue, and Islamophobia. Jordan is currently pursuing a PhD in Theological and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. A former Fulbright scholar, she is also an associate of the Bridge Initiative, where she previously worked from 2014 to 2017 as a research fellow. Jordan’s writing on Islam and Catholicism has appeared in numerous outlets including TIME, The Washington Post, and America. This episode discusses her newest book Islamophobia: What Christians Should Know (and do) about Anti-Muslim Discrimination (Orbis, 2021) You can find her at JordanDenari.com and on twitter @JordanDenari.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mormon Fundamentalism

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Cristina Rosetti completed her Ph.D. in religious studies at the University of California Riverside. She writes about Mormon fundamentalism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Hungry Ghost

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dalena Storm is a writer and educator. Her undergraduate training at Williams College was in Asian Studies with a Religious Studies Concentration, and her experiences in the study and practice of various religious and spiritual traditions, as well as her travels throughout Asia and Europe, influence much of her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, where she participated in a number of workshops that combined the study of fiction and nonfiction. She teaches a Winter Study course at Williams College called "How to Write Auto-Fiction." She is the author of The Hungry Ghost” out from Black Spot Books, an imprint of Vesuvian Media Group.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Apocalypse Stories

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Kelly J. Baker is the author of the award-winning Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011); The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Bondfire Books, 2013); Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (Blue Crow Books, 2017); the award-winning Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (Blue Crow Books, 2018); and Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness (Blue Crow Books, 2019).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Online Churches

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in the relationship between religion, media and culture, with particular attention to digital forms of Christianity. His research has included studies of online worship; digital evangelism and formation; online community; digital publishing and e-reading; apps and games; and death and dying. His research led to the publication of his book Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Staying Grounded in Uncertain Times

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Deborah Eden Tull is the founder of Mindful Living Revolution. She is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, public speaker, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She trained for seven years as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery in Northern California, and she has been traveling to, living in, or teaching about conscious, sustainable communities internationally for the last 25 years. She is the author of two books, The Natural Kitchen, which came out in 2010, and Relational Mindfulness, out in 2018 from Wisdom Publications. She lives in North Carolina and offers retreats, workshops, and consultations nationally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Jukai and Zen Training

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Schaefer is a professional chef and lifelong Buddhist practitioner. He received the Jukai ceremony at the Korinji Rinzai Monastery in Wisconsin under the direction of Roshi Meido Moore.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Naked in the Zendo

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Roshi Grace Schireson is a teacher in the Suzuki Roshi Lineage of Soto Zen, empowered by Sojun Mel Weitsman. She has also practiced in the Rinzai tradition and was encouraged to teach koans by Keido Fukushima Roshi. Grace is the author of Zen Women and co-editor of Zen Bridge. Grace is the head teacher of the Central Valley Zen Foundationi, president of Shogaku Zen Institute, and teaches meditation at Stanford University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religious Literacy and Teacher Education

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Chris Murray is a social studies classroom teacher and religious literacy teacher education facilitator in Maryland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Krampus Conundrum

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Madison Tarleton is a Ph.D. candidate and scholar of Medieval Judaism in Christian Europe, antijudaism and antisemitism. Madison is studying at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology’s joint PhD program.

Read "The Krampus Conundrum" here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tibetan Buddhist Vegetarianism

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Geoffrey Barstow is assistant professor of religious studies at Oregon State University. His research focuses on the history and theory of vegetarianism in Tibet. He is the editor and contributor to the new book The Faults of Meat: Tibetan Buddhist Writings on Vegetarianism, out now from Wisdom Publications. He is also the author of the academic monograph Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet, out in 2018 from Columbia University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Wanderer's Havamal and the Poetic Edda

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Jackson W. Crawford is Instructor of Nordic Studies and Coordinator of the Nordic Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Crawford is the author and translator of The Wanderer’s Havamal and The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Both books are available from Hackett Publishing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Teaching and Sikh Visibility

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Simran Jeet Singh is columnist for Religion News Service, Senior Fellow at the Sikh Coalition, Chaplain at New York University and Columbia University, and serves on the Governor’s Interfaith Advisory Committee for the State of New York.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Chrismukkah

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Samira Mehta a scholar of religion and the politics of the American Family and an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has a degree in divinity from Harvard University, and a PhD from Emory University, Her book is Beyond Chrismukkah: Christian-Jewish Interfaith Families in the United States, from the University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Pious Fashion and Muslim Women

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Liz Bucar is a professor in the department of philosophy and religion and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Bucar is the author of the award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress which came out from Harvard University Press in 2017, and was issued in paperback in July 2019. Furthermore, Bucar writes and teaches about gender, sexuality, and politics in everyday religious practice. Her public scholarship has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los AngelesTimes, and Teen Vogue.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On American Jews on the Frontier

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Shari Rabin is a scholar of modern Judaism and American religions. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2017), was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Rabin is currently an assistant professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ordained as a Soto Zen priest, Brad Warner is also a punk bassist, filmmaker, and blogger. He is the founder of Angel City Zen Center in Los Angeles and the author of Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up, and several other books about Zen Buddhism. His writing appears on SuicideGirls.com and in Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and Alternative Press. He lives in Los Angeles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Conversion Therapy

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in History from UT-Austin in May 2019. His work examines the intersections of religion, medicine, gender, and sexuality in the modern United States. His current in-progress book project, To Cure a Sinful Nation: A History of Conversion Therapy in the United States, will tell the 140 year comprehensive history of conversion therapy practices in the United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Charismatic Christianity and the Life of Kathryn Kuhlman

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Amy Artman teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. Her research interests are in Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity, focusing on women in American religions, such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman. Her other research interests include world religions, and bodies and theories of American religion. Artman's newest book is The Miracle Lady: Kathryn Kuhlman and the Transformation of Charismatic Christianity, out now from Eerdsmans. You can buy the book here. You can follow Artman on Twitter here.

Guest host Dan Jones is an independent scholar in religious studies, media studies, communication, nature studies, and more. He serves as a book review editor at the journal Religious Studies Review. You can follow Dan Jones on Twitter here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Moving from Suffering to Peace

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Mark Coleman has taught meditation retreats and trainings worldwide for twenty years. He is the founder of the Mindfulness Institute and Awake in the Wild Programs. A senior teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, he lives in Northern California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin C. MacLeod, "Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land" (NYU Press, 2014)

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. "Repatriation is a must!" they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora.

In Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014), Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society.

Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it argues that migrant and diaspora identities are the products of negotiation, and it illuminates the implications of this negotiation for concepts of citizenship, as well as for our understandings of pan-Africanism and south-south migration. Providing a rare look at migration to a non-Western country, this volume also fills a gap in the broader immigration studies literature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Charismatic Religions and the Vineyard Movement

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Maren Freudenberg is a research associate at the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and the associate editor of the journal Entangled Religions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Life of Jamgon Kongtrul

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Alex Gardner is the author of the brand new biography, The Life of Jamgon Kongtrul the Great, out now from Snow Lion, an imprint of Shambhala Publications. Gardner is the director and Chief Editor of the Treasury of Lives, which we talk about extensively in this conversation. Gardner completed his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tonglen Meditation

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Lama Palden Drolma is a western teacher trained by Tibetan Buddhist masters. She the founder of Sukhasiddhi Foundation. She is a licensed psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, coach, and has studied Buddhism in the Himalayas with some of the preeminent Tibetan masters of the 20th century. She was authorized to become one of the first western lamas by Kalu Rinpoche.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Our Non-Christian Nation

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jay Wexler is a professor at the Boston University School of Law and is the author of the new book, Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life. The book is out from Stanford University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Prescribing the Dharma

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Ira Helderman is a psychotherapist in private practice and he holds a PhD in religious studies. He's the author of Prescribing the Dharma (University of North Carolina Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Character Gap

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. Miller's research is primarily in contemporary ethics and philosophy of religion. His book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? is just out from Oxford University Press. Miller has also published two other books with Oxford: Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), and Character and Moral Psychology (2014). The edited volume from the Character Project, Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology is out with Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 'Just Enough,' Oryoki, and Japanese Cooking

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Gesshin Claire Greenwood is the author of Bow First, Ask Questions Later and the popular blog That’s So Zen. She trained in Japanese Zen monasteries, including in the kitchen, for several years before returning to the United States to obtain a master’s degree in East Asian Studies. She lives in San Francisco, where she cooks, teaches meditation, and works in the mental-health field.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Epic of Gilgamesh

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Stanley Lombardo is Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Kansas. His previous translations include Homer's Iliad (1997, Hackett) and Odyssey (2000, Hackett), Hesiod's Works & Days and Theogony (1993, Hackett), among others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Myth of Disenchantment

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jason Josephson-Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting positions in the US, France, and Germany. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Enchanted Politics of Marianne Williamson and Jonathan Cahn

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sam Kestenbaum is an independent religion journalist. He writes for The New York Times and is a contributing editor and former staff writer for The Forward. He spent several years working in Asia and the Middle East, where he edited a newspaper in Sana, a website in Ramallah, and a magazine in Beijing.

In recent pieces, Sam explores enchanted politics in his profiles of of Jonathan Cahn, a doomsday prophet-pastor who says the Bible predicted the presidency of Donald Trump, and Marianne Williamson’s run for the presidency in the 2020 Democratic Primary race. Sam’s two most recent long pieces, titled "#MAGA Church: The Doomsday Prophet Who says the Bible Predicted Trump,” and “The Curious Mystical Text Behind Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Bid,” are both out now in The New York Times.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Black Religion and Racial Identity

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Judith Weisenfeld teaches in the Department of Religion at Princeton University where she is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Weisenfeld is the author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, out now in paperback from New York University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Evangelicals in Antebellum America

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Brett Malcolm Grainger is a scholar of American religion and an award-winning journalist. He is Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University and the author of Church In The Wild: Evangelicals In Antebellum American and In The World but Not of It: One Family's Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of the Religious Left

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

L. Benjamin Rolsky received his PhD from Drew University in American Religious Studies. His work has appeared in a variety of academic and popular venues including Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as well as The Christian Century, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and the Religion and Culture Forum at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include religion and politics, the study of popular culture, and critical theory.

Rolsky’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, is forthcoming this Fall from Columbia University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Byzantium and 'Romanland'

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Anthony Kaldellis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. He is the author of many books, including The Christian Parthenon, Hellenism in Byzantium, and The Byzantine Republic. The focus of today’s conversation is his latest book, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, out now from Harvard University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Roman Catacombs: A Discussion with William Gruen

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ever wonder about the Roman catacombs? Look no further. Today I talked to William "Chip" Gruen of Muhlenberg College about his article "Roman Catacombs" from the collection The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries (2019) from Bloomsbury.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Four Foundations of Mindfulness

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ben Connelly is a Minneapolis-based Soto Zen teacher in the Katagiri-lineage. He offers a wide variety of secular mindfulness trainings, including for police departments, corporate settings, correctional facilities, and addiction recovery groups. He teaches at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and is the author of Inside the Grass Hut, Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara, and most recently Mindfulness and Intimacy, out now from Wisdom Publications.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Taoism, Martial Arts, and Mad Monk Manifesto

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Monk Yun Rou was ordained in China as a Taoist monk in 2012. His writings and teachings propagate Taoist ideas and focus on environmental conservation, and political and social justice. Yun Rou began his formal martial arts training in 1980 and practiced a wide range of Chinese kung fu styles before settling on tai chi. A student of some of China’s top tai chi grandmasters, he was named Tai Chi Master of The Year at the 2011 World Congress on Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Yun Rou was the keynote speaker at the International Tai Chi Symposium in Louisville, Kentucky. Yun Rou is the author of Mad Monk Manifesto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Plural Marriage

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Philippa J. Meek is a doctoral fellow at the University of Exeter. Meek researches public perceptions versus the realities of plural marriage within Fundamentalist Mormon communities. This episode gives a detailed overview of the court cases Loving V. Virginia, Obergefell vs. Hodges, Lawrence vs. Texas, and then discusses what possible path forward there is for legalization of plural marriage in the United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Lives of Spiritually Fluid People

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Duane Bidwell works to reduce suffering and promote abundant life in all of his teaching, writing, and research.

Experiences as chaplain, pastor, spiritual director, pastoral counselor, HIV/AIDS professional, and non-profit director inform his work as teacher-scholar-clinician. CST students have given him teaching and mentoring awards three times since 2014. He is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and practitioner of Vipassana (insight meditation) in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

His most recent book, When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People (Beacon, 2018), examines complex religious bonds–the experience of being formed by more than one religious tradition at the same time. The book builds on his work in transreligious pastoral theology and in Buddhist-Christian studies. Library Journal named it a Best Book 2018.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the New Age and Gnosticism

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Mitch Horowitz is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, a lecturer-in-residence at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult America; One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life; Mind as Builder; and the The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality. Mitch has written on everything from the war on witches to the secret life of Ronald Reagan for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, Time.com, and Politico.

He is the voice of popular audio books including Alcoholics Anonymous and The Jefferson Bible. Mitch has discussed alternative spirituality on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, NPR’S All Things Considered, and throughout the national media. His work has been censored in China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brad Warner, "The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being" (New World Library, 2022)

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality -- the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole -- is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being (New World Library, 2022), Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.

Drawing on decades of Zen practice, he traces the interlocking relationship between Zen metaphysics and ethics, showing how a true understanding of reality -- and the ultimate unity of all things -- instills in us a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all beings. When we realize that our feeling of separateness from others is illusory, we have no desire to harm any creature. Warner ultimately presents an expansive overview of the Zen ethos that will give beginners and experts alike a deeper understanding of one of the world's enduring spiritual traditions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Jolyon Thomas is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, out now from the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Thomas is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion, Food, and Eating in America

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Nora Rubel is the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester in New York. Dr. Ben Zeller is associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College in Illinois. They are co-editors of the book Religion, Food, and Eating in North America from Columbia University Press (2014).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Buddhism, Adventures, and Cooking Ethics

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Eric Ripert is chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin on 7th Avenue in Manhattan’s Theater District, author of the autobiography 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line from Random House, numerous cookbooks, and host of the television series AVEC Eric.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Early American Yoga

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Philip Deslippe is a historian of American religion with a background in American Studies and literature. His research focuses on Asian, metaphysical, and marginal religions in modern America. Philip is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and writing a dissertation on the early history of yoga in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Exorcism

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Kate Kingsbury obtained her doctorate in Anthropology from Oxford University. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta where she teaches anthropology courses such as Introduction to Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion and Ethnographic Field Methods.

Dr. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history. Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Buddhism Beyond Modernity

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Ann Gleig is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Central Florida. She is co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism and has published widely on contemporary Buddhism. She is the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, from Yale University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Koans

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Corey Ichigen Hess is an ordained Zen monk and body therapist. He lived a monastic life for many years at Sogenji Zen Monastery in Okayama, Japan. He teaches meditation classes and works with individual clients doing private embodiment process coaching sessions, Sourcepoint Therapy, Structural Integration, and Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy at his home on Whidbey Island in Langley, Washington.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religion and Photography in 19th-Century America

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Rachel Lindsey is Assistant Professor in Saint Louis University’s Department of Theological Studies. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Religion from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University. She is the author of Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth Century America from University of North Carolina Press. We discussed Communion of Shadows and her fantastic projects, Lived Religion in the Digital Age and Arch City Religion. You can find Dr. Lindsey’s projects at archcityreligion.org and religioninplace.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Teaching Religious Studies in College

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Chris Jones holds a Bachelor of Arts from Oklahoma Baptist University, a Master of Theology from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the sole religious studies professor at Washburn University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Myth of Divine Chosenness

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Michael Coogan is lecturer on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and the director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum. He is the author of God and Sex, The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, and numerous textbooks on the Old Testament. He joined me on the phone to talk about his brand new book, God’s Favorites: Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness, out from Beacon Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Nicole Kirk is a historian of American religious history, associate professor, and the Frank and Alice Schulman Chair of Unitarian Universalist History at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, Illinois. She joined the faculty at Meadville Lombard in 2012 after earning her Ph.D. in American Religious History at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the author of Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Santa Muerte

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Saint John's Illuminated Bible

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Jonathan Homrighausen is an Episcopal writer and scholar on Scripture, art, and interreligious dialogue. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Duke University, after earning his MA in Biblical Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.

His latest book, Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John’s Bible (out from Liturgical Press in 2018), explores the call to social ethics in The Saint John’s Bible. It was a true pleasure to speak with Jonathan about his book and his interest in the Saint John’s Bible. I think you will find him a wealth of knowledge in the intricate design and construction of this marvelous Bible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Epistle of James

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Alicia Batten received her BA in Humanistic Studies from McGill University, and completed an MA and PhD in Theology, with a focus on the New Testament, at the University of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses upon the origins and development of early Christianity, with particular emphasis upon the ancient Mediterranean cultural context (s), including material culture. She also thinks it important to study the shifting manner in which biblical texts are interpreted over the centuries, and is currently writing a commentary examining the text reception and impact of the Letter of James. Beyond her academic interests, Alicia enjoys gardening, art, and reading works of fiction and poetry.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Nibiiro Art, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhism

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rima Fujita was born in Tokyo and now resides in Southern California. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with her B.F.A. and has exhibited her work internationally to much acclaim. As a descendant of the Last Samurai her creative aesthetics is strongly influenced by the philosophy of Bushido and Buddhism.

Known for her distinctive style with vivid colors on black surface, Rima’s works are extracted from her dreams and meditation process. They are ethereal and evoke a timeless sense of longing and peace, and yet if examined deeply her images trigger a powerful ripple of infinite emotions. She is inspired by “Nibiiro,” an expression of a very dark grey color from the Heian period in Japan (AD 794 to1185). If you mixed all colors that exist in Nirvana, the Buddhist land of Perfect Bliss, it would become “Nibiiro.”

Rima’s life passion lays in her philanthropic work. In 2001 she established “Books for Children,” an organization that produces children’s books and donates them to children in needs around the world. She has created 4 children’s books and has donated more than 12,000 books to the Tibetan children in exile. All profits go to support the Tibetan children’s education. H.H. The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Betty Williams, the Nobel Peace Laureates personally gave her special recognition in 2006 at the International Peace Summit in Japan. His Holiness The Dalai Lama calls her, “An artist who creates beautiful art.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Inter-Religious Diplomacy and Jain Plurality

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Barbato researches the mechanisms and strategies of interreligious communication with a focus on high-level actors and cultural diplomacy, such as the Pope. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany and is in partnership with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in the UK. She is currently developing a project on Hindu-Christian dialogue. She’s also a scholar of Jainism and is the author of Jain Approaches to Plurality: Identity as Dialogue, published by Brill in 2017.

We discuss current events, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Jainism, and her book.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dean Sluyter, "The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics" (New World Library, 2022)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Dean Sluyter about his book The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics (New World Library, 2022).

Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye.

Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma -- authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening -- and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Icelandic Paganism

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson is the elected Allsherjargoði (high priest) of the Icelandic pagan group, Ásatrúarfélagið, or Ásatrú Association. He is also a musician and composer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Blogging Religion

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Giulia Evolvi is the author of Blogging My Religion: Secular, Muslim, and Catholic Media Spaces in Europe, out now from Routledge. Evolvi is a Research Associate at the Centrum für Religionswissenshaftliche Studien (CERES) in Germany and she manages the Religion and Materiality Focus Group for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg project.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Internment of Japanese Buddhists in World War Two

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Duncan Ryuken Williams was born in Tokyo, Japan to a Japanese mother and British father. After growing up in Japan and England until age 17, he moved to the U.S. to attend college (Reed College) and graduate school (Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in Religion). Williams is currently a Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages & Cultures and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Previously, he held the Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at University of California at Berkeley and served as the Director of Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies for four years. He has also been ordained since 1993 as a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition and served as the Buddhist chaplain at Harvard University from 1994-96.

Williams' latest book is American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Gurdjieff

Tue, 24 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Roger Lipsey is a biographer, art historian, translator, and, for many decades, a participant in the Gurdjieff teaching. Among his recent books is Hammarskjöld: A Life, which has been hailed as the definitive biography of Dag Hammarskjöld. His latest book, Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy, is out now from Shambhala Publications.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Tao Te Ching

Mon, 23 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sean Michael Wilson is an award-winning Scottish graphic novel/comic book writer. He has written more than 30 books, published by a variety of US, UK and Japanese publishers and translated into 12 languages. His books are of two broad types: 'western' style graphic novels, including original story ideas and various books on social issues; and a unique line of manga style books on Japanese themes, unmatched by any other English language comic book writer.

His latest book is an adaptation of the Tao Te Ching in collaboration with Cary Kwok and William Scott Wilson.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 23 May 2022 04:00:00 -0000

In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.

What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Gyotaku

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dwight Hwang is a California-based Gyotaku artist. His notable artistic achievements include a 2018 solo showcase by Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Japan Foundation, as well as providing cover art for the book Simply Fly Fishing by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard.

Guest discussant Michael Vanhartingsveldt is a contributing columnist at Buddhistdoor Global. He works at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. He did his masters in East Asian Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and he also works as a lecturer for the Japan Foundation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Teaching Religion in High School

Thu, 19 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

George Coe is a religious studies, current events, and world history teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. He runs a popular blog with teaching resources here.

This conversation talks about constitutionality of teaching about religion; how to arrange a semester of teaching high school religious studies, a wide-range of resources that he and I have used to with success in our own classrooms, and a deep dive investigation of a typical religious studies class in a typical United States high school. This is a snapshot of a hardworking teacher doing great work for teenagers in the United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Hiking as Pilgrimage

Wed, 18 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Christopher Ives teaches in the area of Asian Religions at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. In his scholarship, he focuses on modern Zen ethics. In 2009 he published Imperial-Way Zen, a book on Buddhist social ethics in light of Zen nationalism. Currently he is engaged in research on Zen approaches to nature and Buddhist environmental ethics. He is the author of Zen on the Trail: Hiking as Pilgrimage, out now from Wisdom Publications.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Covering Religion as a Journalist

Tue, 17 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sam Kestenbaum is an independent religion journalist. He writes for The New York Times and is a contributing editor and former staff writer for The Forward.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Women of Color in American Islam

Mon, 16 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam.

She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Religious Freedom Center and the First Amendment

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Charles C. Haynes is vice president of the Freedom Forum Institute / Religious Freedom Center and a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center.

Haynes is best known for his work on First Amendment issues in public schools. Over the past two decades, he has been the principal organizer and drafter of consensus guidelines on religious liberty in schools, endorsed by a broad range of religious and educational organizations. In January 2000, three of the guides were distributed by the U.S. Department of Education to every public school in the nation. These are “A Parent’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools,” “A Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools,” and “Public Schools & Religious Communities.”

Haynes is the author or co-author of six books, including First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America, and Religion in American Public Life: Living with Our Deepest Differences. His column, Inside the First Amendment, appears in newspapers nationwide.

He is a founding board member of the Character Education Partnership, and serves on the steering committee of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools and the American Bar Association Advisory Commission on Public Education. He chairs the Committee on Religious Liberty, founded by the National Council of Churches.

Widely quoted in news magazines and major newspapers, Haynes is also a frequent guest on television and radio. He has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and on ABC’s “Evening News.” In 2008, he received the Virginia First Freedom Award from the Council for America’s First Freedom.

Haynes holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and a doctorate from Emory University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dana W. Logan, "Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (U Chicago Press, 2022), Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America's Revolution.

Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Addiction and Spirituality

Thu, 12 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Chris Grosso is a youth mental health group facilitator with Newport Academy, public speaker, writer, and author of Indie Spiritualist (Beyond Words/Simon & Schuster, 2014), Everything Mind (Sounds True, 2105) and Dead Set On Living (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, 2018). He writes for Revolver Magazine, ORIGIN Magazine, and Huffington Post, and has spoken and performed at Wanderlust Festival, Celebrate Your Life, Yoga Journal Conference, Sedona World Wisdom Days, Kripalu, Sun Valley Wellness Festival, and more.

Chris is passionate about his work with people who are in the process of healing or struggling with addictions of all kinds. He speaks and leads groups in detoxes, yoga studios, rehabs, youth centers, hospitals, conferences, and festivals worldwide. He is a member of the advisory board for Drugs over Dinner, hosts The Indie Spiritualist Podcast on Ram Dass’s esteemed Be Here Now Network and is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Buddhism for Children

Wed, 11 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Andrea Miller is the deputy editor of Lion's Roar magazine (formerly the Shambhala Sun), a publication force within Buddhism that so many of you will already know, and the author of two picture books: The Day the Buddha Woke Up. She's also the editor of three anthologies, most recently All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance. I spoke with Andrea on the heels of her trip to India to attend the International Buddhist Conclave, which afforded her the chance to attend sacred Buddhist sites.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Teaching Religion on YouTube

Tue, 10 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Andrew M. Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Boston University and founder of the educational YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast. Andrew has produced over 50 video lectures on a variety of religious studies topics, used by educators worldwide. You can follow him on twitter @andrewmarkhenry.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Impermanence, Embodiment, and Conscious Intention

Mon, 09 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Rinzai Zen Life in Japan

Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Interfaith Activism, Sikhism, and Hinduism

Thu, 05 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Tahil Sharma grew up in an interfaith family and practices Sikhism and Hinduism. He is a Program Manager for Faith Outreach at Brave New Films and an Interfaith Minister in Residence at the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Christianity and American Political Culture

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Matthew Bowman received his PhD. in history from Georgetown University. He is associate professor of history at Henderson State University, where he teaches courses in American history since the Civil War, race, and American religion.

He is the author of Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, out now from Harvard University Press, and several other books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Witchcraft and The Holy Wild

Tue, 03 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Danielle Dulsky is the author of The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman, out now from New World Library.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mary Magdalene in the Reformation

Mon, 02 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Margaret Arnold is the Associate Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Her new book, The Magdalene in the Reformation, is out now from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mindfulness and Happiness

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Mark Van Buren is a Mindful Living Trainer, yoga/meditation instructor, personal trainer, and musician, that has been promoting health and wellness for over a decade. He has run dozens of workshops and retreats all over the tri-state area, and has been asked to speak at numerous colleges including Columbia, Montclair State, and Bergen Community. A handful of yoga studios have already opened their doors to his message, allowing him to give talks and run guided meditations and retreats.

He has worked extensively with children and adults with autism and other special needs, and even released two solo albums, based on his inward journey through meditation, under the band name “Seeking the Seeker.”

Van Buren holds a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies from Montclair State University and two Associate Degrees from Bergen Community College in exercise science and music. He is currently the owner and head instructor of Live Free Yoga Studio in River Edge, NJ, and in recent years a bestselling author.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sikhism

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This episode introduces Sikhism, including an overview of the basic beliefs, practices, important people, and specific goals of the Sikh religion, practiced by around 25 million people worldwide, with its spiritual home in Amritsar in Northwestern India in the state of Punjab.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Religious Literacy in American Education

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Benjamin P. Marcus is the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, where he examines the intersection of education, religious literacy, and identity formation in the United States. He is a contributing author in the Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Education, where he writes about the importance of religious literacy education.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Relational Mindfulness

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Deborah Eden Tull, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, public speaker, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She trained for seven years as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery in Northern California, and she has been traveling to, living in, or teaching about conscious, sustainable communities internationally for the last 25 years. She currently resides in the mountains western North Carolina and offers retreats, workshops, and consultations nationally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Evangelical Christian Nationalism in the Cold War

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The topic of this episode focuses on Dr. Daniel Hummel's piece, “The Limits of Evangelical Christian Nationalism during the Cold War,” which appears in the new book North American Churches and the Cold War, out now on Eerdsman Publishing.

Dr. Daniel Hummel is a scholar, writer, researcher, and teacher of religion, politics, and foreign policy in the United States and the modern Middle East. Dr. Hummel is a specialist in the concept of Christian Zionism and has a forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press entitled, A Covenant of the Mind: Evangelicals, Israel, and the Construction of a Special Relationship. Dr. Hummel is also a contributor to the Washington Post in middle east current events.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

C. Pierce Salguero, "Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical" (Beacon Press, 2022)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Are you curious about Buddhism but find yourself met with scholarly texts or high-minded moralizing every time you try to pick up a book about it? Well, if so, relax. This is no ordinary introduction to Buddhism; there are none of the saccharine platitudes and dense pontification that you may have come to expect. Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (Beacon Press, 2022) is a readable introduction for complete newcomers that provides an objective, streamlined overview of the tradition--from unpacking the Four Noble Truths to understanding what "nirvana" actually means. For those who have already dipped their toes into the tradition through the practice of mindfulness or meditation, this guide will help you create a more well-rounded and informed experience by delving into the history of the Buddhist traditions that shape a mindful practice.

Buddhist scholar Dr. Pierce Salguero analyzes the ideas and philosophy of the complex tradition through the eyes of both a critic and an admirer. He shares anecdotes from his time at a Thai monastery, stories from the years he spent living throughout Asia, and other personal experiences that have shaped his study of Buddhism. Through this guide, readers will have the opportunity to develop an approach to practice that is not quite Buddhist but Buddhish.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Rock'n'Roll, aka "The Devil's Music"

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Randall J. Stephens is an Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. He previously taught at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne) and Eastern Nazarene College (Quincy, Massachusetts). He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture. He is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with physicist Karl Giberson (Harvard University Press, 2011); and editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History (University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

His latest book is The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018). Stephens has written for the Atlantic, Salon, the Wilson Quarterly, Christian Century, the Independent, History Today, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and the New York Times. He has been interviewed for news and culture programs on the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, KBYU-FM 89.1, Austrian Youth Radio, and NPR. Stephens is one of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sanctuary and San Francisco Zen Center

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an author, Zen priest, teacher, divine seer, artist, and Drum medicine woman. Her work has been featured in Essence Magazine, CNN, CBS NEWS, KPFA Radio, Buddhadharma, and Lion’s Roar. She holds a M.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Transformative Learning from California Institute of Integral Studies. She spoke to me from Green Gulch Farm, a Zen practice center within the San Francisco Zen Center. She is the author of “Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging,” out now from Wisdom Publications. You can find her online at Zenju.org, where she has three episodes published of her own podcast, Teachings of the Hollow Bones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On High School Religious Studies

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

John Camardella teaches religion and social studies at Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois. This conversation touches on the organization, implementation, and day-to-day operations inside a high school course focused on world religions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Shinto

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Eric Lancaster is an instructor of Japanese at the University of Missouri and an instructor of religious studies at Columbia College. He is a member of Bunraku Bay Puppet Theatre troupe, whose film, "Kaiju Bunraku," was screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Corey Landon Wozniak, "The Buddha at the Bellagio: (Teaching) Religion in Sin City" (Revealer, 2022)

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Corey Landon Wozniak about his Revealer article (2022) "The Buddha at the Bellagio: (Teaching) Religion in Sin City." As Wozniak points out, Las Vegas (for all that it's sin city) is full of religion, all kinds of it. He talks about how religion is done in America's Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sita's Ramayana

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Samhita Arni is the author of the NYT Bestselling graphic novel, Sita's Ramayana, (collaboration with Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar) available from Tara Books. She is also the author of The Mahabharata-A Child's View and The Missing Queen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sanctuary Churches and the Role of Christianity

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sarah Klaassen is the pastor of Rock Bridge Christian Church in Columbia, Missouri. In September 2017, her church congregation voted to become a sanctuary church and seeks to protect those at risk of deportation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Why Socrates Died

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Robin Waterfield is the author of numerous books about ancient Athens including Xenophon's Retreat, Why Socrates Died, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens, and more. He has also translated the works of Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, and more from ancient Greek.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Belief in God: Good, Bad, or Irrelevant?

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This episode is a discussion with Dr. Preston Jones about the book Is Belief in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant: A Professor and a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism, and Christianity. Jones is the editor and co-author of the volume with Dr. Greg Graffin, singer for Bad Religion. The book was released in 2006.

Dr. Preston Jones is a professor at John Brown University in Arkansas. His research focuses on the American Empire in the period 1898-1917 and the personal experience of combat. He has published 8 books, more than 200 articles, and he has interviewed more than 100 combat veterans.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On St. Francis of Assisi, Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and the Crusades

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Paul Moses, former Newsday city editor and senior religion writer, is a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He was the lead writer on a Newsday team that won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of The Saint the Sultan (2009, Doubleday) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York's Irish and Italians (2015, NYU Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Middle Eastern Archaeology and the Historical Jesus

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Carrie Duncan is an Assistant Professor of ancient Mediterranean religions at the University of Missouri. She is a senior staff member on the following projects in Jordan: the Ayn Gharandal Archaeological Project, the Petra North Ridge Project, and the Madaba Plains’ excavation. She teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, the Jesus of history, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Spirituality, Climate Change, and Parenting

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Mary DeMocker is cofounder and creative director of 350.org’s Eugene, Oregon, chapter. She has written about conscious parenting and climate activism for the Sun, EcoWatch, Mothering.com, Spirituality & Health, Oregon Quarterly, and the Oregonian.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Punk Rock and Religious Identity

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Francis Stewart completed her doctoral thesis on punk rock as a surrogate for religion, with a particular emphasis on Straight Edge punk, in 2011 at the University of Stirling.

Within the thesis, Stewart examined the notions of community, authenticity, integrity, DIY, and salvation. She also engaged with the connections between music and the expression of emotions, particularly those emotions which are deemed socially 'undesirable' or 'negative'. She also engaged with the question of what do we mean by the terms 'religious', 'spiritual' and 'faith'.

Her book, Punk Rock is My Religion: Straight Edge Punk and 'Religious' Identity, is out now from Routledge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Taoist Practice

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Pablo Mendoza is Assistant to the President for Social Equity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri and was previously the Director of the Mizzou Multicultural Center. He has taught Cheng Man-Ch'ing (Zhang Manqing) Yang-style Tai Chi Ch'uan (Taijiquan). This form is based on martial applied defensive moves that are synchronized to breathing patterns that assist with relaxation and meditation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Stephenson, "New Rome: The Empire in the East" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive.

In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically-minded interpretation of antiquity's end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular "barbarian" invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not.

Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire's transformation into Byzantium.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Zen in America, Shunryu Suzuki, and the San Francisco Zen Center

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Michael Downing teaches creative writing at Tufts University. This conversation features a deep dive into Michael’s nonfiction book Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a "dramatic and insightful" narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as "a highly readable book, important for the healing it invites in giving voice to the thoughts and feelings of Zen Center members who have remained silent until now."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A veteran journalist, essayist, and award-winning education writer, Linda K. Wertheimer is the author of Faith Ed: Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance. The book focuses on public schools’ ups and downs as they teach about world religions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Ashram Life, the Bhagavad Gita, and Teaching Yoga

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Raghunath tours the world, leading yoga workshops, yoga teacher trainings, kirtans, and the practical applications of yogic philosophy. He annually takes a group on pilgrimage through holy places of India and sometimes fronts the bands Youth of Today and Shelter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Leaving Hasidism

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shulem Deen is a writer, journalist, and author of the award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return. He is a regular contributor to the Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Death Penalty

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Griffin Hardy is the Communications Director for Ministry Against the Death Penalty, founded by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Israel, Palestine, and Christian Zionism

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Daniel Hummel is a scholar, writer, researcher, and teacher of religion, politics, and foreign policy in the United States and the modern Middle East. He is currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Hummel is also a specialist in the concept of Christian Zionism and has a forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press entitled, A Covenant of the Mind: Evangelicals, Israel, and the Construction of a Special Relationship. Dr. Hummel’s unique take on the Israel-Palestine situation is tinted with his own expertise in Christian Zionism, and we discuss that issue in a lot of depth in this conversation as well. Dr. Hummel is also a contributor to the Washington Post in middle east current events.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Rinzai Way and Korinji Monastery

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Meido Roshi is the abbot of Korinji monastery in Wisconsin. In 2008 Meido Roshi received inka shomei ("mind seal"), designating him an 86th-generation Zen dharma heir and a 48th-generation holder of the lineage descended from Rinzai Gigen. Meido Roshi's book The Rinzai Zen Way: A Guide to Practice is out from Shambhala Publications in March 2018. The focus of our conversation is this book and I highly recommend picking up a copy. It’s incredibly accessible to anyone, even if you’ve never read a book about Zen in your life.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Japanese Buddhist Art

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Michael Vanhartingsveldt is a contributing columnist at Buddhistdoor Global. He works full-time at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. He did his masters in East Asian Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and he also works as a lecturer for the Japan Foundation. Michael collaborates on "Carving the Divine TV" with filmmaker Yujiro Seki.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On "Naked Monk," Diligence, and Buddhist Practice

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Hugo Bernard is the author of Naked Monk. His first work of Buddhist fiction was a short story written in high school. He is working on several novels, in different genres, using fiction as a tool to better grasp Buddhist teachings. With these stories, his goal is not to ‘teach’ but to ‘explore’ how the Dhamma resonates in challenging scenarios. He hopes to accomplish this while telling stories that are a pleasure to read.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Medieval Christianity and Monastic Worlds

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Rabia Gregory’s primary research interest is the history of Christianity in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She approaches the study of religion through book history, material culture, and theories of gender. Her book, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform, published by Ashgate, uses previously unpublished cultural artifacts to revise long-standing assumptions about religion, gender, and popular culture. In the book, she demonstrates that by the fourteenth century, worldly, sexually active brides of Christ, both male and female, were no longer aberrations and provide a history of the dispersion of theology about the bride of Christ in the period between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and explains how this metaphor, initially devised for a religious elite, became integral to the laity’s pursuit of salvation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Zen Odyssey of Ruth and Sokei-an Sasaki

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Janica Towne Anderson (author of Zen Odyssey) is a master falconer and has been a student and teacher of esoteric traditions for fifty years. She has worked as a research assistant in the psychology department at Harvard University and served as an instructor at Esalen Institute. She founded Big Sur Tapes, which preserved and published audio archives from teachers such as Ram Dass, Buckminster Fuller, and Alduous Huxley.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Punk, Meditation, and Yoga

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Miguel Chen is the bass player for long-running Fat Wreck Chords punk rock band Teenage Bottlerocket. He is the author of I Wanna Be Well (Wisdom Publications). He is a meditation practitioner, an RYT-500 yoga instructor, and the owner of Blossom Yoga Studio in Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming. In addition to appearing in countless Teenage Bottlerocket press pieces, Miguel has been featured by Lion’s Roar, PunkNews, Full Contact Enlightenment, LionsRoar.com, Modern Vinyl, and more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Writing and the Monk Life

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk whose essays have appeared in The Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and the New York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing series. His book Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize. His most recent book, Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex (Although Not necessarily in that Order) is out now from Shambhala Publishing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Jesuits and Zen

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Kennedy, S.J. is one of several practicing Catholic men and women who are recognized by the Buddhist community as zen teachers. He is the author of Zen and Christianity: Zen Gifts to Christians and Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Busshi Sculpting, Filmmaking, and "Carving the Divine"

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Born and raised in Japan, Yujiro Seki discovered his passion for filmmaking when he was in high school. Yujiro earned a BA Degree in Film from the University of California, Berkeley. His forthcoming documentary film, "Carving the Divine," offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Busshi – practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the beating heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Chan Buddhism

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Guo Gu (Dr. Jimmy Yu) is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center and is also the guiding teacher for the Western Dharma Teachers Training course at the Chan Meditation Center in New York and the Dharma Drum Lineage. He is one of the late Master Sheng Yen’s (1930–2009) senior and closest disciples, and assisted him in leading intensive retreats throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is also a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Florida State University, Tallahassee. In the 1980's, he played bass in Judge and Death Before Dishonor in the New York Hardcore scene.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Spirituality and Horses

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The author of The Five Roles of the Master Herder and the bestseller The Tao of Equus, Linda Kohanov speaks and teaches internationally. She established Eponaquest Worldwide to explore the healing potential of working with horses and offer programs on everything from emotional and social intelligence, leadership, stress reduction, and parenting to consensus building and mindfulness. Her main website is eponaquest.com. More information about The Five Roles of a Master Herder is available at masterherder.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Queer and Feminist Religious Studies

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Melissa M. Wilcox received her doctorate in Religious Studies from U.C. Santa Barbara in 2000. Her transdisciplinary research program focuses on gender studies and queer studies in religion, with particular emphasis on the U.S. and Europe in the context of transnational queer and religious politics. Her books include Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community (Indiana University Press, 2003); Sexuality and the World’s Religions (co-edited with David W. Machacek; ABC-CLIO, 2003); Queer Women and Religious Individualism (Indiana University Press, 2009); and Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives (Routledge, 2013). Her 2009 book received the annual book award from the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. Her newest book, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody, is forthcoming in 2018 from the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press, and she is currently working on two textbooks focused on sexuality and queer studies in religion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Korean Zen Buddhism

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Anita Feng (Zen Master Jeong Ji) serves as the guiding teacher at Blue Heron Zen Community in Seattle, Washington. She has practiced Zen in the lineage of Zen Master Seung Sahn since 1976. In the late ’70s she lived and studied intensively with Zen Master Seung Sahn at the Providence Zen Center. She received Inka from Zen Master Ji Bong 2008 and received final transmission as a Zen Master in 2015.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Resurgence of Taoism and Christianity in China

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Ian Johnson is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times; his work has also appeared in The New Yorker and National Geographic. He is an advising editor for the Journal of Asian Studies and teaches courses on religion in Beijing. He is the author of The Souls of China, Wild Grass, A Mosque in Munich, and The Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. He is based in Beijing and spoke to me from Berlin, Germany.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Mormonism, Race, and Politics

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Max Perry Mueller received his PhD from Harvard University. He is a historian of American religion and an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Race and the Making of the Mormon People, published by the University of North Carolina Press in September 2017.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Accidental Buddhism and the Writer's Life

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dinty W. Moore is author of The Accidental Buddhist and The Mindful Writer. He is a professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, the editor of Brevity Magazine, and lives in Athens, Ohio.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Leaving an Apocalyptic Splinter Group

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Brandon X used to be a member of a church called the “Church of God Preparing for the kingdom of God." The group holds an apocalyptic view of end times prophecy and the end of the world as we know it. Brandon left in 2013.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Soto Zen

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Brad Warner is the author of several books on Zen. A Soto Zen priest, he is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese-monster-movie marketer, and popular blogger based in Los Angeles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kaya Oakes, "The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World" (Broadleaf Books, 2021)

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For every woman, from the young to those in midlife and beyond, who has ever been told, You can't and thought, Oh, I definitely will!--this book is for you.

Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile and feminine and self-reliant, not barren or butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality.

Women who don't fit in, whether during life transitions or because of changes in their body, mind, or gender identity, are carving out new ways of being in and remaking the world. But this is nothing new: they have been doing so for thousands of years, often at the margins of the same religious traditions and cultures that created these limited ways of being for women in the first place.

In The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World (Broadleaf Books, 2021), Kaya Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it. Change, after all, Oakes writes, always comes from the margins.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Unitarian Universalism

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Rev. Molly Housh Gordon started her tenure as the third settled minister of the Columbia, Missouri Unitarian Universalist congregation 2012. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Religion from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark. and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Indigenous American Religion

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dennis Kelley is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He received his Master’s and Doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with emphases in American Indian Religious Traditions, Religion in American Culture, and Myth and Ritual Theory. His most recent book is Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves, and is currently working on a book tentatively titled Having Had a Spiritual (Re)Awakening: Religion and Alcohol Addiction Recovery in Indian Country.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Rinzai Zen Buddhism

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Seido Ray Ronci is a Rinzai Zen monk and the director of the Hokoku-An Zendo meditation center in Columbia, Missouri. He is the author of the poetry collection The Skeleton of the Crow, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry, and This Rented Body (2006). He contributed to the Zen poetry collection America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, published in 2004. His work has also appeared in Tricycle, Narrative, and Rattle. Seido Ronci is an associate professor at the University of Missouri, where he teaches critical theory and literature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices