On Religion

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

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

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'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'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 podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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