Sacred & Profane

Here in the States, it's become an annual tradition for conservative commentators to bemoan the "war on Christmas." That's the idea that Christmas is being pushed out in favor of non-Christian holidays or more secular winter celebrations. But as our fellow Jue Liang tells us, in China, the government is actually cracking down on Christmas and many other holidays as the ruling party looks to the calendar as a way to promote Han Chinese identity.

The Confederate monuments around Charlottesville's county courthouse have all been removed, and a new kind of public memory is emerging in Charlottesville's Court Square. The streets around the courthouse were the site of hundreds of slave auctions over Charlottesville's history. The descendants of the people who were bought and sold in the square are at the center of a movement to bring their stories to the forefront — in essence, to create a new civil religion. Our colleague Jalane Schmidt and descendant Myra Anderson met in Court Square to discuss how the memory of the humans bought and sold in the square is changing both Court Square itself and how Charlottesville understands the past.

We're living in an era where robots are increasingly common in our factories and our homes. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that robots are also finding a place in religious spaces, too. Professor Holly Walters joins us to discuss how robots are finding a home in some Buddhist and Hindu temples. Some see temple robots as a simple continuation of religious technology like prayer wheels or church bells, but they also raise radical questions about what it means to be religious at all.

Each year, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, parades, and barbecues. Celebrating July Fourth is part of what some scholars identify as America's civil religion. And like any religion, civil religion is built in part upon foundational myths and symbols that Americans, regardless of their religious faith, believe in and rally behind. Those symbols include documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. There are many Americans who view those two documents as sacred texts, both in a figurative and literal sense. We're joined by our colleague, Lisa Woolfork, who teaches a version of the Declaration of Independence that tackles the tension between those documents as sacred texts, and the reality of the government they created.

The media often cover the Satanic Temple as an elaborate prank, pulled off by a group of dedicated trolls trying to rile conservative Christians. But despite those public perceptions, in 2019 the IRS recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax exempt religious organization. And even though many do not see them as a "real" religious movement, Satanists play an important role in American religious and political life, showing us how ideas about religion, pluralism, and the separation of church and state are changing in the U.S.

Renowned Biblical scholar Dr. Renita Weems joins us to discuss how the translation of one particular word can profoundly change the meaning of a well-loved book of the Hebrew Bible — and what translation choices can reveal about race and gender in the modern world, as well as the ancient one.

Today on the show, we dive into one the best-selling books in the early United States: a massive compendium of world religions. It's a work that's incomplete, and sometimes incorrect, but also one that shows how the first generation of Americans were exploring ideas about faith, tolerance, and religious pluralism. And almost as interesting as the book itself is its author, a woman who lived and died in greater Boston, but never stopped thinking of a much larger world.

We'll be returning with a third season soon. But we couldn't ignore the biggest story about religion in 2021 - the pro-Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol hoping to overturn a democratic election. Journalist and author Sarah Posner joins us and charts decades of racist, anti-government rhetoric and conspiracy theories from the religious right to explain how white evangelical Christians came to be a key part of the violent mob at the U.S. Capitol earlier this year.

There are hundreds of Confederate memorials across the U.S. With our colleague Jalane Schmidt, we explore an often overlooked part of their history: religion. Not only are these monuments often steeped in religious symbolism, white Christian communities also helped to build and maintain them. And we hear from a group of Christians here in Charlottesville wrestling with that legacy today.

On paper, France is an egalitarian society. The republican ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité are carved into public buildings across the country. And formal equality is carved into French laws in other ways, including a policy that makes it illegal to collect information on residents’ race, ethnicity, or religion.That “colorblindness” has made it difficult for people of color to prove to the state that systemic racism and police brutality exist in a supposedly equal country.In our ongoing series highlighting documentaries by students here at UVA, grad student Bremen Donovan follows a group of community activists and lawyers who are fighting to prove discrimination exists in court in order to make France’s official equality a reality.

Across the country, protestors are putting their bodies at risk from police violence and the COVID-19 pandemic, with the hope of creating radical change. We spoke with our colleague Larycia Hawkins about the power—and the price—of embodied solidarity.

Graduate student Kevin Stewart Rose brings us the story of a Christian community dedicated to creating a more environmentally sustainable future, but unable to extract itself from our unsustainable present. Part of "Field Notes," our ongoing series dedicated to highlighting documentary work from students at UVA.

Last season. we explored the impact of an ancient artifact with Biblical connections: the Cyrus cylinder. Cyrus's proclamation may be ancient, but it has a lot of resonance in modern discussions of religious freedom, immigration, and national identity. Perhaps then it shouldn't come as a surprise that Cyrus himself has become a political symbol, as well. We're looking at two very different leaders who have become closely associated with Cyrus: the last Shah of Iran, and President Donald Trump.

We're returning to our ongoing series Field Notes, featuring documentary pieces from students here at UVA. Jason Evans explores how black women—leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement since the beginning—are shaped by their faith, even as they question many aspects of the traditional black church.  

Santa Muerte. Holy Death. To outsiders, she's become a symbol of cartel driven violence in Mexico—a "narco-saint," worshiped only by traffickers, and venerated at crime scenes. To her followers, she's a protector with roots stretching back to the pre-Hispanic past. Dr. Jessie Marroquín joins us to explore the complex history of the saint, now one of the fastest growing religious movements in Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.

Months before COVID-19 closed borders across Europe, the EU was already facing serious divisions. Evan Sandsmark sent us this report last summer on the cracks showing in the foundations of modern Austria—especially religion, which continues to be a fault line in European politics. Plus, we check in with Evan about what Europe looks like under lockdown today.

In 1902, a young American headed to the Vatican to record a voice unlike any other. His subject was Alessandro Moreschi—the last known castrato. That is to say, a man castrated in childhood in order to preserve a high singing voice. Castrati's high, yet powerful, voices were in constant demand in both sacred and secular spaces across Europe for centuries. We talk to UVA's Bonnie Gordon about how the interpretation of a single biblical passage helped launch that demand, and how their otherworldly voices became a tool for conversion—and the center of a debate about the nature of human bodies and souls.

"He was a time-traveler and a translator. Or more precisely, the act of translating enabled Mira ji to time-travel." As we work to get our remote studio up and running, we're dipping into our archives to bring you some excellent short audio documentaries by students here at the University of Virginia—including this piece on the Urdu poet Mira ji, whose poetry refused to be confined by religion, gender, or time.

In 1905, a young Zen priest named Nyogen Senzaki arrived in San Francisco from Japan. He was convinced that America, with its long tradition of religious freedom, was fertile ground for the spread of Buddhism. And he slowly built a diverse new community of Buddhist practitioners in California. But everything changed when the U.S. entered World War II. Beginning in 1942, the United States government incarcerated roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent—including Senzaki—in remote camps across the American interior. Many were American citizens. They were held without charges, and without appeal. Duncan Ryūken Williams, scholar and author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War joins us to discuss how this mass incarceration shaped American Buddhism—and American conceptions of religious freedom.

In 1872, an act of Congress transformed newly acquired territory in the American west into Yellowstone National Park. The act declared that the land was "hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States...and set aside as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."And while it was our first national park, Yellowstone draws on much older thinking about sanctuaries. We often use the word sanctuary to talk about places like Yellowstone that have been protected from human development and industry. But it's a word with deep religious roots. Traditionally, a sanctuary is a place that is set apart from daily human life and reserved for the divine.Last winter, we traveled to Yellowstone to explore what happens when a religious idea like sanctuary is transformed into a secular and bureaucratic one. How has "setting aside" this land affected the people and animals who have historically lived within its borders? And can any man-made border keep out the effects of climate change?

Over 2,500 years ago, a victorious army marched through the open gates of the mighty city of Babylon. Soon after came a decree: that all the conquered peoples who had been brought to the city — the people who helped build its magnificent temples, gardens, and palaces — could return to their homelands, to worship their own gods as they saw fit.In the many years since it was written, the edict has been interpreted in many ways: as a sign from God; as the first declaration of human rights; as a savvy piece of political propaganda.How much do the intentions of the person who wrote it matter, over two millennia later?

When Americans think about Austria, it’s easy to fall back on quaint stereotypes — the home of Mozart and The Sound of Music, where people climb and ski the snow-capped alps and still wear lederhosen and dirndls. But Austria, like everywhere else, is much bigger and more complicated than its postcard version. Like many of its neighbors in the European Union, Austria is home to a large number of new refugees from across the Middle East. The new arrivals — and questions of whether they can blend in, and become Austrian — are a near constant topic of debate.How do these questions about who belongs in Austria actually shape someone’s life?Consider Hassan’s story.

West Virginia has been shaped by resource extraction for hundreds of years. First came timber, then coal. These days, it’s hydraulic fracking. And it’s often difficult to hold out when extraction companies come to your area. When a drilling company showed up on their doorstep, a group of Hare Krishna devotees had to make the choice about whether to allow fracking on their land.

2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, when close to a million people were killed in one hundred days.UVA’s Larycia Hawkins sits down with Christophe Mbonyingabo, who’s been working to repair the rifts caused by the violence in his home country for over twenty years. He worried that after the genocide, Rwandans would learn to tolerate each other, but not truly forgive or trust one another. And so, he set out to see if it was possible to rebuild that trust — if perpetrators could look survivors in the eye and acknowledge what they had done, and if survivors could find a way to forgive.

In the 3rd century BCE, Ashoka Maurya ruled an empire stretching from the Kandahar valley of Afghanistan across most of the Indian subcontinent. It was an incredibly diverse place. His subjects spoke dozens of languages. And their faiths and philosophies were almost as varied: they were Hindus, Buddhists, Stoics, Zoroastrians, and Jains.Eventually, Ashoka began an audacious project: a code of ethics that drew from traditions across the empire, designed to minimize the suffering of both humans and animals. It was a code he said anyone could follow, no matter their religious tradition or station in life.Hosts Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer sat down with UVA’s Sonam Kachru to discuss Ashoka and his edicts. Plus, we explore how an ancient text became a best-selling comic book — and how these edicts might be applied to our daily lives and current politics.