Podcasts about Talal Asad

Show notes and Transcript For years Dr Steve Turley has been bringing an optimistic and upbeat analysis of current events.  His Turley Talks are some of the most popular social commentaries in the Conservative sphere.   He joins Hearts of Oak to ask if we are seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization and a new Conservative age?  We look at the political shockwaves happening across Europe with the rise of populist conservative political parties in many countries.  And we end off looking at the rise of the parallel economy as a bulwark against the increasing woke economic wave that is sweeping through many large corporations. Steve Turley (PhD, Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and author who is widely considered one of the most exciting voices in today's growing patriot movement. Dr. Steve's popular YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers and daily showcases his expertise in the rise of nationalism, populism, and traditionalism throughout the world. His videos, podcasts and writings on civilization, society, culture, education, and the arts are widely renowned. Connect with Dr Steve and join the movement of Courageous Patriots... WEBSITE:         https://turleytalks.com/ TWITTER:         https://twitter.com/DrTurleyTalks YOUTUBE:        https://www.youtube.com/@DrSteveTurleyTV PODCASTS:      https://podcasts.apple.com/am/podcast/turley-talks/id1520478046 Interview recorded 17.7.23 Audio Podcast version available on Podbean and all major podcast directories...  ⁣https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ Transcript available on our Substack... https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Dr Steve Turley. You'll have seen his Turley Talks, and I've loved watching these over the last few years, bringing an optimistic and hopeful message, looking at world events, looking at the political side, and often quite at odds with a more dour, conservative message, which we sometimes see in the media. But we look at, are we seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization? A new conservative age is rising. And we look at the political winds, the political conservative winds blowing across Europe and how they're changing also in the US. Why is that? We look at a search for spiritual meaning in the midst of the moral vacuum decay collapse of society when there is no right and wrong. People are searching for meaning and often people are looking to faith and to Christianity for that. And then we finish off on parallel economies. This is a pushback on the woke corporation, the woke agenda, the progressive wave that is coming through commerce and we are seeing a new set of companies that don't want to force that upon our throats and want to cater for a more traditional conservative market.  Dr Steve Turley, it is wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time. (Dr Steve Turley) It's my honour, Peter. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you. Oh, thank you. And you can find @DrTurleyTalks on Twitter, @SteveTurleyTV, obviously on YouTube. All the links are in the description, but turleytalks.com and the many podcasts at Turley Talks, but all the links are there in the description. And Dr. Steve Turley is internationally recognized, best-selling author. I didn't actually realize one of the books, touching on C.S. Lewis. Anyone who writes anything on C.S. Lewis is wonderful to have on. So from my home town back in Belfast.  Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's right. But you're a scholar, speaker, obviously, Turley Talks. I think you've been putting stuff up since, what, 2016, 2017, something like that?  That's right. Yeah, we started on November 1st, 2016, just seven days leading up to November 8th, which was what I like to call Brexit Part Two, which was the election of Donald Trump. And so I started there. I made one video per day analysing the current political situation. I made the argument, the extended argument, that Trump was going to win against all odds, as it were. And of course, I spent the next few weeks gloating and we just kept going. Yeah, give us a little bit of your background. Probably 80%, well, 75% of our viewers are UK, 15% US, and then the rest all over. So, Dr. Steve, could you just take a moment and introduce yourself to our UK audience who may not be as familiar with you as others? Yeah, well, I'm Dr. Steve Turley. Technically, I'm an internationally recognized scholar, speaker and author, that's part of the elevator pitch. But I've spent most of my life either in the world of music, my first degree was in classical guitar, or in theology. My other degrees are in theological studies, the last one being a PhD from Durham University in the UK. Which we were just talking about. And as a result, I was in academia for a number of years, both at the university level as well as classical schools. Classical schools are going through a bit of a renaissance here in the States and as well as in Europe where we're going back to the great books tradition, Latin, Greek, the importance of theology as the queen of the sciences and so on. So I spent about 20 years, 18 years in that world and then a friend of mine suggested I start doing some YouTube videos to analyse the political and cultural scene going on back in 2016. It was obviously very exciting. Brexit had just passed in June, which I mean, I didn't think it stood a chance and I was, of course, hoping for it, but when I saw it actually happening, that's when I I realized a lot of the scholarship that I had encountered at Durham University, which we can develop a bit, called post-secular studies. That's when I started to see some of the ramifications of those studies actually in real time. So my friend suggested I do something akin to that kind of analysis for people with the upcoming Trump-Clinton election, which I did. And the channel turned out to be a hit, as it were, over time. And so I ended up leaving academia and going into broadcasting full-time. And I've since written 20 books on various subjects, and we now have over a million subscribers to the YouTube channel. And really in the end, my daily analysis is one of looking at current events in light of, of what I would call very real conservative trends. And so my analysis tends to be very optimistic for the conservative, which is fair, which cuts against the grain and rightly so, fully noted. We've lived for the last 300 years in what's called the modern world and the modern world's inherently leftist, liberal, anti-traditionalists, you know, it's... Keep science and religion worlds apart, they have nothing to do with each other, and on and on and on. So rightly so, we've been rightly frustrated, but that modern age is coming to an end and a new world is rising. And so what I try to do is provide hope for courageous patriots with daily optimistic broadcasting of news and events. Can I start with your tagline on your YouTube, it's the secular world is at its brink and a new conservative age is rising. Tell us about, because bad news sells better than good news, which you mentioned in the conservative circles. Tell us why you use that, I guess that tagline, that message. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I have you guys over on the other side of the pond to blame for that, I would say a little bit of it when I was doing my doctoral studies at Durham University. It was while I was there that I came across a field of study that's broadly known as post-secular studies, and it's a huge field of study. I mean, it deals with, philosophy and law and fashion and media and politics, you name it, and involves all kinds of scholars like Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist, he's really the one who kind of coined the phrase decades ago, Peter Berger's another one, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, they're all united in their assessment that what's known as the secularization thesis is for all practical purposes dead in the social sciences. So secularization thesis is this notion, it was very popular in the early 20th century. It's this notion that the more educated and technological society becomes, the less religious it will be. So sociologists like Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, they all saw secularity and progressivism and so forth, as just basically baked into the cake of this progressive, evolutionary movement of history. And what these post-secular scholars were arguing is that thesis, for all practical purposes, is dead. And they made the argument that very few contemporary sociologists will take the secularization thesis seriously today. And that's because, as it turns out, religion is more prevalent in our world today. It's actually, well, I should say it's just as prevalent in our world today as it's always been. And in fact as Rodney Stark at Baylor University would put it, we're actually going through the single greatest religious renewal the world has ever seen. But the key here is that what all of these different scholars are noticing in their own way, in their own bent, and their own degree of, you know, strength or certitude, is that this return of religion that's going on all over the world, because of this extraordinary religious renewal, the world's political order is changing. So these aren't just personal private sentiments that people are just having new religious experiences of. No, this is changing the balance of power. This is something that's enacting a kind of paradigm shift we haven't seen probably in 300 years. In other words, we're increasingly shifting away from the world order that began in Europe with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that was founded on the fundamental tenets of scientific rationalism as a one-size-fits-all vision of reality for everyone, that became universalized through colonization and industrialization and globalization and westernization. And what we're seeing here now is more and more populations rejecting that modern world, and embracing what's commonly called a more post-modern or post-secular world. That's ultimately working itself out with populations going back, going back to nation, culture, custom, tradition, most particularly religious traditions, to quite literally, ironically, pre-modern beliefs and practices, while at the same time maintaining modern technology. So this is something akin to what Guillaume Fay argued, or what he called archaeo-futurism. Some have called it techno-primitivism, but it's the notion that the antithesis between science and religion and church and state, you know, technology and tradition, that's at the heart of the modern age, that antithesis has collapsed. And now the two are joining forces, like we're seeing with the rise of neo-Orthodox Russia or neo-Confucian China, Shinto Japan, Hindu nationalist India with the BJP party there, the neo-Ottoman vision of Erdogan in Turkey. Of course, we saw it in 1979 with the rise of theocratic Iran. Now we've got theocratic Afghanistan, now we've got neo-traditionalism absolutely on fire all throughout the African continent and on and on and on and on. And I think it's taken Western powers by surprise. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with the Dolts in D.C. or the bullies in Brussels or the demons of Davos, my comic book names for them. But Western elites just don't really know what to do with this new, far more traditionalist, conservative world. Or that's how I use the term conservatives, ultimately is a traditionalist. That's what, that's what unites a Texas conservative with a with a Hindu conservative in, you know, in India. Because they don't know what to do with this world order because it doesn't respond to the political and economic manipulative pressures that the West has learned to rely on over the last several decades and sort of closed the loop here to make things even worse for them. The same dynamics are manifesting themselves in the West. But obviously from a different vantage point, because we were really the centre, the epicentre of this industrialism, of this globalism, of this enlightenment, sort of ideology that has morphed into a very bizarre wokeness. But we're seeing comparable nationalist, populist, traditionalist trends on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Brexit and Trump earthquakes happening literally within days of each other, what, 90 days or so, just a few months of each other, more than that. But Trump actually campaign back in 2016. There was a time in the mid-summer when he said, call me Mr. Brexit. I mean, he was a huge supporter of Brexit, a huge supporter of dismantling the liberal world order and the globalist institutions that make up that order. So while there's all kinds of hiccups and and there's all kinds of oppressions and all kinds of roadblocks and frustrations and setbacks. There's really nothing the Dolts in DC or the Bullies in Brussels can do to stop this tectonic shift that's happening underneath their feet. No political paralysis in the palace of Westminster, can stop it because again it's a foundational paradigm shift from secular to post-secular, from modern to post-modern, and so secular modernist sentiments and structures are indeed withering away.  You talk about kind of religion, spirituality, and certainly it's strange because we have this search for meaning in an age of chaos where there is no order, no right and wrong, no truth, and people are looking at spirituality. Certainly I have seen it here in the UK, people once again opening their Bibles, trying to understand what it is all about. So you have that rise of inquisitiveness, of curiosity, and at the same time, certainly from a Christian point of view, you've got a very weak church that seems to have bought into that lie, the progressive lie. What are your thoughts on that, and how does that work out in the U.S.? Oh yeah, in terms of the mainline churches, we're seeing very much the same thing. I mean, what happened, of course, is in the modern experiment, the church got privatized. I mean, even in the UK in many respects, even though you have a national church there. And we get to see it and we're actually enamoured by it whenever there's a coronation or a royal wedding or a funeral, a monarchical funeral, whatever.  You can have the Church of England any day, Steve. Please take it.  I went to school with some of the clergy in Durham and I was shocked by some of the interaction I had with them. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And again, we're facing it here to the extent that the Episcopal Church manifests our wing of the Anglican Church or the United Methodist Church. Mainline denominations have basically gone the way of modernity, and it's because they got privatized. And we have to just remember that, you know, if you just compare the way, like we were just talking about the beauties of Durham, medieval cities, where the church was in the urban planning of the medieval city, of course, it was right at the very centre. I mean, you've got a map of the Christian image, a Christian cosmos in every medieval city here in the states the New England commonwealth drew from similar frames of reference, the church steeple, the highest building in the commonwealth there with it with a town green and Edenic green in its front and like you look at modern urban planning today, where's the church? if it's even there it's been it's been pushed into the place of consumerism you know, it's right next to pizzerias and dry cleaners and it's and what's happened as a result is the truth has been privatized because public life and private life operate by very different dynamics. Public deals with the obligatory, whereas private is more optional, right? Public is objective, private is subjective, public applies to all, private applies to only some. So when you privatize the church, what you do is you basically wither, you hollow out its truth and its moral claims because truth is public, it's not private. Truth is objective, it's not subjective. Truth applies to all by definition, not to only some. And so when you're pushed into the social equivalent of a Weight Watchers program or the YMCA or like a pizzeria or whatever. If you're pushed into that equivalent, you can know more proclaimed truth than they can. That's what got hollowed out of the gospel. So the gospel no longer weighs on us, like it would have, say, just in the 18th century. So the clergy, I mean, they're more interested in all these gimmicks and church marketing programs and the like. I'm broad brushing, but you know where I'm coming from. In the states, we do, since church and state are so separated here, in one sense, right, the church can be actually pretty vibrant here at local levels. And so many leftists think we live in a default theocracy in all the red states, or even more specifically, sort of the red counties where the church exercises, very conservative church exercises, so much inordinate influence and the like, but there are very, very heavy barriers placed on that, where it's not allowed to rise to more national levels. They do everything they can to quell that. But it does seem to be, for all kinds of reasons, particularly demographic reasons, it does seem to be rising in a way that they just can't clamp down on anymore. And Christian faith still seems to be something that's seemed positive, certainly in, generally in politics. I mean, when you look at the front bench of, in parliament, of any MP, the last thing they would ever want to say is they'd go to a church or they may be a Christian. That's just not on the radar. In the US, it still seems that that is part of, kind of, the identity, and even Joe Biden claims he's a Christian, and I'll let him take that up with God personally, but how does that, because you still seem to have that as a central tenant, as an anchor, certainly in the political sphere. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's still very, very strong here. It's right. I mean, I guess we would be more akin to the Irish side of the UK, where religion is just a stronger part in the United States. Yeah, it's no coincidence that secularization thesis was actually formulated in Europe because that's what they were seeing. They were seeing these radical secularizing forces as liberalism, and the liberal project began to take over in Europe. And yeah, it just, it took over here in the States to a certain extent, particularly among our elite, but that never really made it into the heartland. We, for whatever reason, we just were able to keep, I guess maybe it's just the frontier sort of culture that we have here, but in our rural and in ex-urban areas, Christianity's just been able to flourish. I think largely also because of the demographic revolution that's happening today, where liberalism more or less destroyed the family, they stopped having kids. And so with all these alternative lifestyles or just with very secularized conceptions of the family, woke liberals, while busying themselves trying to take over every cultural institution in the nation and being very successful in doing so. They forgot to procreate. So for whatever reason they omitted replacing themselves from the cultural takeover plan. So we have a number of studies, Ed Dutton actually has an excellent studies, he's in the UK, Durham fellow as well, on the extraordinary fertility differences between atheists and religionists and liberals and conservatives. And in all kinds of demographic studies all over the world, but particularly in North America and Europe, we're seeing a very clear and direct relationship between, for lack of better term, you know, how right-wing you are, particularly how religiously conservative you are, and how many children you have. And the demographic discrepancy is extraordinary, and that seems with the United States and with its concentrated population, that's having some pretty profound effects. So yeah, it'd be very hard to win an election here nationally and be hostile, overtly hostile to faith in your expressions. Like you said, I think Joe Biden's incredibly hostile to faith. Just ask any Christian baker, for example. But he will never admit to that. He'll always try to say, oh, I'm a good churchgoing, Catholic and blah, blah, blah. Obama did the same thing. Yeah. Clinton, you know, scenes of him singing in his church choir. You just, there's no way around it. You have to, you have to do this. If anything, Trump, Trump may have been probably the least overtly Christian fellow we had, but I mean, his pod, they were, it was so woven into his policies that it just, it didn't matter. No, absolutely. Can I ask you, obviously the message you bring, a hopeful message, and I've seen you on numerous, I think I saw you on Seb Gorka the other day. The only person kind of I come across with that, kind of more positive outlook possibly is Steve Bannon. But yours, I mean, do you, are you told, come on Steve, it's really, look, we've got this against, we've got that against, just come on, it's and you're living in a fairy world. How do you kind of cope with that pushback that just fit into the this is a fight and it's a dark fight and we may win in the end? How do you kind of cope against that? The choice to tune that positivity down? Yeah, yeah. They I've been accused of pushing copious copium on. Oh, no, absolutely. And again, well, the irony to it all is when I first came across post-secular scholarship, I didn't believe it. I thought it was applicable to the Middle East, Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe I noticed Russia being in the orthodox tradition. I noticed Russia was doing quite well. But outside of that, I mean, I came across this during the Obama era, right after the Obama era started in 2009. And I just, I didn't buy it. I thought the West was shot. The West was done. So I share, ironically, I have shared in that kind of pessimism. But the more I studied, the more I was confronted with the data and the more I'm seeing the political outworking's happening that data just is is playing itself out it's just getting confirmed and I think too one of the ways of thinking about the current climate we're in particularly spiritual climate analytically helpful way of seeing it it is through the prism of post secularism sort of a counter reading of it, we have to recognize how frustrated and disconcerted our secular left is. Remember, secular progressivism lived by the notion that religion was on its way out. Conservatism was on its way out. Traditionalism was on its way out. It was an evolutionary throwback that had no relevance to us today. And so you have the likes of like a Sam Harris who's repeatedly and openly expressed his utter dismay as to the stubbornness of particularly American Christianity but also Islam, not just its persistence but its actual growth and flourishing. And so to these people who've admittedly captured all the cultural levers of power, to these people, we're not supposed to be around, Peter. So a lot of the persecution that we're facing here, political, cultural, economic, the de-banking, the latest trend of de-banking that Nigel Farage has had to deal with, these persecutions are happening precisely because we're not supposed to be here. We're not supposed to persist. So I see a lot of the the obstacles and the frustrations that we face as an ironic confirmation. That the jokes on them. We're winning. We're not going away. They can clamp down as hard as they want on us. We've got all the demographic back winds behind us blowing in our direction. One of the fascinating statistics is that in just three decades, they predict there will be one liberal woman here in the United States for every so-called, for every four far-right women. And it's just because when all is said and done, right-wingers are having families and in many ways, bigger than ever, because you take in consideration child mortality rates having imploded. So we're having more kids than ever, and we have the data on whether or not those kids retain that conservatism into adulthood. And the answer is yes, because the more conservative, the more you tend to rely on parallel structures, like Bible colleges or home-schooling or what have you. And the United States and Britain are number one and number two in terms of home-schooling populations. Populations. Interestingly enough, Russia is number three, which is also fascinating. But so what we're seeing is we're seeing 70%, 80% retention rates among young people. We've studied particularly with the Amish, the Amish population. And the Amish retention rates have actually been going up over the last 30 years. Eric Kaufman, who's a Canadian expat at University of London, has done a lot of writing on this. And back in the 70s and 80s, if I recall, they had about a 70% retention level. About 30% of their kids would go through Rundspringe, this kind of, you get to flirt a little bit with the outside world. About 30% of them said, no, I like this. I'm going to stay in the outside world. And they basically become Mennonite, so they stay close to their families, but they have more freedom with modern technology and so forth. Those numbers have hit upwards of 80% or 90% retention of late. So the more woke and crazy our society gets, ironically, the more traditionals hang on to their kids. So there's just no way around it. They're disappearing. We're growing. And there's nothing they can do to stop that. And so as long as those dynamics are in place, Kauffman says by 2030, the United States culture war should tip dramatically in favour of the right permanently, or at least for the foreseeable future. We're estimated to have upwards of 300 million Mormons in our country just by the end of the century, 300 million Amish by the end of next century. So we're basically evangelicals, Mormons, Amish. I know there's a joke in there somewhere. I haven't quite figured it out yet. It can't be walking into a bar, Mormons don't drink, but three guys walked into a bar. But Europe is the same thing. Now it's slower because you don't have the density of the population and the Bible Belt per se, but you look at what Viktor Orban's doing in Hungary. Can I ask, because you've written and one of the things that I've enjoyed about, what you put out is that you cover what's happening in Europe and I wouldn't want to criticize the wonderful U.S. commentators and maybe not looking at Europe. We certainly in Europe look to the U.S. for kind of...  Terrible. No, you could criticize, they completely ignore you and it makes me upset, because at least Eastern Europe particularly they're ahead of us. You know, we're all honouring Viktor Orban but we were talking about Viktor Orban six years ago before anybody knew his name around here. So yes, no, go ahead, beat them up all you want, Peter. He's an absolute rock, but it's not, I mean, two of the, uh, two podcasts you put out recently, France's right-wing party surge and first persons riots. In other words, WEF, Dutch government collapses, and that's going to be phenomenal to watch that with the new farming party. But all across, I mean, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Italy, uh, Austria, Germany, it's, it's happening all over and how, I guess, as an American commentator, do you view what's happening? Because I think a lot of us maybe in Europe had thought, you know, we're post-Christian in Europe and conservatism is very much out of fashion and this liberal way of this, the EU just knitting everyone together, throwing off the nation-state and suddenly you've got a push back on nearly every single country across Europe. How do you see that from the States? Absolutely, yeah. I think again, well, getting my doctorate in the UK helped, no question, to kind of broaden my horizons to what was going on in the world. But also, when I encountered the post-secular studies, a lot of it was on Europe and the trends that were happening, particularly starting in Eastern Europe, going into Central Europe, talking a lot about Hungary and Poland. We were just seeing the rise of the Law and Justice Party Poland back around that time. And I really thought, and again, you have to remember this was during our Obama era. I really saw the so-called far right. They're not far right. They're just, you know, the apostles of common sense, I think you would call it, but I was noticing that we were already seeing the 300% surge in so-called far right parties, these nationalist populist parties. And I really thought, wow, something's going to happen in Europe before we know it. And then again, this is before Brexit sentiments came in. The Cornell sociologist Mabel Berezin has written about what she calls post-security politics. And it's very interesting because she argues that the nation state historically promised to provide three things, secure borders, a stable economy, and a space for the celebration and perpetuation of a population's customs, traditions, and religion. And what Berezin argued is that, of course, over the last three, four decades, we've seen all those securities just erode as a result of globalization, so border security eroding as a result of mass unfettered immigration, economic security eroding through what's called a global division of labour, where manufacturing and industrial factory jobs are shipped out to third world nations, while capital and finance are relocated in urban centres, leaving rural populations highly disenfranchised. So that's where you got the Yellow Vest uprising in France, where there were no jobs, where rural folk were living. They had to commute to the big cities to work. But they couldn't work there because the gentrification of those cities through finance had jacked up the real estate prices. So there was no work where they lived, and they couldn't live where there was work. And then they're commuting an hour and a half each way. And then Macron slaps a fuel tax on them to pay for some green initiative. And that just blew up into the Yellow Vest uprising. So we saw that kind of post-security politics there. And then the cultural security has eroded through progressive political correctness, redefining our traditions as racist and bigoted and all kinds of phobic. At the same time, we're seeing this mass influx of migrants coming in with a different culture, different language and so forth. So it goes right back to the border security. So it's a closed loop, as it were, a self-enforcing loop. And so post-security politics was manifesting itself very clearly in the rise of bootleg parties. That's a neat phrase. again, I think goes back to Eric Kaufman, where the centre-right, centre-left were in their political paralysis. They refused to deal with any of those issues, any border security, any economic security, any cultural security. And so you ended up seeing the rise of these so-called, we call them third parties here in the parliamentary system, and they started to win. Nigel being one of the most extraordinary examples of that. I mean, back in 2019, one in three Brits voted for a party for the European Parliament elections before Brexit was finally instituted. And even then, you know, we know we got the issues, but they voted for the Brexit party and it was only what, six weeks old, five or six weeks old. The Tories collapsed. It was absolutely astonishing and the Tories only had their best election ever months later with Nigel basically bowing out and giving his blessing that if you want Brexit, put Boris back in. So you're seeing these, if you've got border security, economic, I'm sorry, yeah, border security, economic security, and cultural security as the new main issues of European populations, then you inevitably see nationalism, populism, and traditionalism emerging as the political forces that are changing politics in the continent. Now again, bullies in Brussels are doing everything they can to stop it. You'll hear them talk that way, as you well know, where you just hear them say, well, we have instruments that we can use to force compliance and things like that. But increasingly, it's just not working. Finland, you mentioned, the Sweden Democrats, the rise of the AFD in Germany. They're doing everything they can to try to prevent the AFD from running in their next national election because it looks like right at this point they're going to come in second only to, formally, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. So the Vox party in Spain, keep an eye on that next week. They have their, socialist government collapsed and they're going to probably boot out Sanchez and they're going to probably get into a coalition government with the Podemos party, the centre-right party, so you have something very much like what we're having in Finland, in Sweden, in Greece where the left just collapsed, and on and on and on. I think France is next. I think National Rally is poised to win a very impressive national election. And then if they begin to coalition with the centre-right Republicans and a couple of the others, Eric Zemmour's party and so forth. Now suddenly France is going to be a, the France that was supposed to be the globalist space par excellence for Europe's new emperor, Emmanuel Macron, now they're going to have a government more on par with Viktor Orban. It's incredible. It is and we could have the AFD arrive second in Germany, could have a freedom party first in Austria next year and Le Pen leading France. I mean that would just be the most beautiful scenario...  And it's happening, that's the thing, what we try to do, every day on my channel and what you're doing is we're tapping into the trends that are moving, in this direction. So a lot of people are late to the party. A lot of people are like, what's going on in Europe? This is amazing stuff. Well, it's Nigel Farage first came on the scene in the 1990s. This is stuff that's been happening. I mean, remember the European union sanctioned Austria when the when the freedom party first got a certain amount of the vote. And if I recall, that was back in the 1990s as well, well before the 2008 global financial crisis. These are seeds that have been germinating for a while, and they've already been sown, and now we're just going to witness how big the harvest is. Another part of the jigsaw, and we'll finish up on this area, but is the economic side. And one of your phrases from your website is, now is the time to build a parallel economy, to live out our God-given freedoms and leave a legacy of faith, family and freedom for our children and grandchildren. And that idea of a parallel economy intrigues me, especially when you see corporations bound to wokeness and being severely damaged because of it, happily. Tell us more about that parallel economy because we've talked about kind of the spiritual and the political side but, you also need to have a juggernaut, an economic juggernaut, taking that on and people need an alternative and this is what a lot of the conversation has been about a parallel economy. Absolutely, and again it's a term or it's a concept that's also European as well. I mean just in terms of the way it was formalized and written about, I'm thinking in particular of Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and the Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s. They wrote a lot about what they called a parallel polis, and they actually pointed to churches and the concept of the churches in Jerusalem as this notion of being able to create an alternative society where citizens can live out truth in the midst of a society dominated by lies, like in the Soviet period, and the more we live out truth, the more we reveal those lies to be what they actually are, fabrications and the like. So, obviously, Václav Havel was a brilliant fellow, ended up becoming president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. And the Berlin Wall fell within just a decade or so of those writings. So we're taking a lot of inspiration from that as we live in a kind of, well, what scholars actually call a refeudalization. I've heard the term refeudalization for the United States, and I've heard the term neo-medievalism when applied to Europe because of the EU functioning very similarly to, say, the Holy Roman Emperor or something, or the Roman Catholic Church, working in that way, having sort of ultimate control over districts and emerging sovereign nations and the like. But refeudalization refers, it's a very helpful model to see what's going on today, because it refers to ways in which the structure of society is increasingly reflecting the, this kind of caste system. So for example, today, like say in the medieval period, you have an astonishing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very, very few. So five years ago, 400 billionaires owned half the world's assets. Today, that number's dropped to a hundred. Now, thank God one of them is on our side. Elon Musk is, and that, and he's just, he's been one of the biggest boosts to this parallel economy that's trying to provide a different kind of space from this neo-feudalism or refeudalization. But it's not just the billionaires and the bureaucrats that are that are teaming up. There's also a new kind of radicalized fundamentalism involving all things woke, the environment, gender and race. And again, that's where bureaucrats and billionaires, you can really see them teaming up where you have corporations now enforcing ESG and DEI. And this is where the demons and Davos come in. They're enforcing stuff that none of us would ever vote for, right, from our politicians, but because bureaucrats and billionaires are hooking up here with this bizarre kind of ideological fundamentalism. Where there's no room for dissent whatsoever, dissenters are heretics, but instead of a clerical class, now it's a clerisy class, a class of pseudo-intellectuals from the universities, the professional class, the credential class that are imposing an ideological inquisition on the whole of the population. But again, the good news is what we're seeing is something akin to a Protestant revolt that we saw coming out of that feudalized period, and the Protestant revolt in many ways was a populist revolt where the people had the right to the scriptures and so on and so forth and to pray and to have a direct relationship to God, And so what we're seeing, I think, is we're seeing a new kind of Protestant revolt in the form of a parallel economy where more and more people are with money and investment opportunities and seeing extraordinary business opportunities are starting to pump lots and lots of money into an economy that is the only requirement of being a part of it is you must disown all things woke. Anything woke is not allowed. Anything else, you're come on in. You're going to love it. So we're seeing the Sound of Freedom movie. It's number one at the box office. It's about to hit a hundred million dollars in revenue. This is all as the Disney's new Indiana Jones has just bombed and as a matter of fact, Disney. I just came across a stat the other day, Disney has lost nearly 1 billion dollars in its last eight releases. Nobody's going to see it anymore, So they're going to alternative movies. Um, they're going to alternative stores. They're boycotting, well, I would say they're going to alternative beer, but I don't think bud light is beer quite frankly. I'm partial to British beer myself, but you see Bud Light's sales on the tank, Target, you know, they had their pride section for children in their clothing store. Target is a department store here in the States. They're falling apart because of a boy, actually Boycott Target was a song and it hit number one on iTunes. It's just amazing stuff going on. And it's happening at the same time, even within the Democratic Party. There are constituencies like Muslims who are pushing back against the LGBT agenda. So in Hamtramck, Michigan, which is a Detroit district, it votes 70% Democrat, but they have the first all Muslim city council there. They were the first city council to vote unanimously to officially ban the rainbow LGBT pride flag from flying on any and all city public property. And these were all Democrats. And Democrats and the woke just don't know what to do with this, because they're seeing all of their cultural products basically going bankrupt. And now they're even seeing what was up until now very loyal voting constituents rebelling against them as well. It does really look like it's starting to implode. And this parallel economy may indeed be the mainstream economy within the next five to 10 years. Dr. Steve Turley, I appreciate you coming on and sharing that optimism and upbeat message, which I think is often missing in commentary. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Peter. It's been my honour.

Susan Hayward, associate director of the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, leads the conversation on religious literacy in international affairs.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the final session of the Fall 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic if you would like to share it with your classmates or colleagues. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We're delighted to have Susan Hayward with us to discuss religious literacy in international affairs. Reverend Hayward is the associate director for the Religious Literacy and Professions Initiative at Harvard Divinity School. From 2007 to 2021, she worked for the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), with focus on Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Columbia, and Iraq. And most recently serving as senior advisor for Religion and Inclusive Societies, and as a fellow in Religion and Public Life. During her tenure at USIP, Reverend Hayward also coordinated an initiative exploring the intersection of women, religion, conflict, and peacebuilding, partnership with the Berkley Center at Georgetown University and the World Faith Development Dialogue. And she coedited a book on the topic entitled Women, Religion and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen. Reverend Hayward has also taught at Georgetown and George Washington Universities and serves as a regular guest lecturer and trainer at the Foreign Service Institute. And she's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. So, Susan, thank you very much for being with us today. Can you begin by explaining why religious literacy is so important for understanding international affairs? HAYWARD: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Irina. And thanks to the Council on Foreign Relations for inviting me to be a part of this webinar. And I really appreciate you and the invitation, and I appreciate all of you who have joined us today, taking time out of what I know is a busy time of year, as we hurdle towards final exams and cramming everything into these last weeks of the semester. So it's great to be with all of you. I am going to be—in answering that broad question that Irina offered, I'm going to be drawing on my work. As Irina said, I worked at the—I work now at Harvard Divinity School's Religion and Public Life Program. And what we seek to do here is to do here is to advance the public understanding of religion in service of a just world at peace. And we do that, in part, by working with professionals in governments and foreign policy, and in the humanitarian sector, as well as working with our students who are seeking to go into vocations in those professional spheres. And then my fourteen years with the Religion and Inclusive Societies Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace. So I'll say a little bit more about both of those as we go along, and those experiences, but I'm also happy to answer any questions about either of those programs when we turn to the Q&A. And I should say that I'm going to be focusing as well—given that a lot of you all who are joining us today are educators yourselves or are students—I'm going to be focusing in particular on how we teach religious literacy within international affairs. So I wanted to begin with the definition of religious literacy, because this is a term that is increasingly employed as part of a rallying cry that's based on a particular diagnosis. And the diagnosis is that there has been insufficient deep consideration of the multiple and complex dimensions of religion and culture that impact international affairs at all levels across the world. And that the result of that lack of a complex understanding of religion in this arena has been the—the hamstringing of the ability of the international system to operate in ways that are effective in bringing justice, peace, democracy, human rights, and development. So I'm going to circle back to that diagnosis in a bit. But first I want to jump to the prescription that's offered, which is to enhance religious literacy using various resources, trainings, courses, and ways that are relevant for foreign policymakers and those working across the international system, as well as those students who are in the schools of international affairs, or other schools and planning to go into this space, into this profession. So the definition that we use here at Harvard Divinity School—and this is one that has been adopted by the American Academy of Religion, which is the scholarly guild for religious studies—defines it in this way: Religious literacy is the—entails the ability to discern and analyze the fundamental intersections of religion and social, political, and cultural life through multiple lenses. So specifically, one who is religious literate will possess a basic understanding of different religious traditions, including sort of fundamental beliefs and practices and contemporary manifestation of different religious traditions, as well as how they arose out of and continue to be shaped by particular social, historical, and cultural contexts. And the ability to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social, and cultural expressions across time and space. So this gets broken down in two different ways—three, according to me. But that definition focuses on two in particular. One is often referred to as the confessional approach or the substantive approach. So that's looking at understanding different religious traditions and their manifestations in different places. That's understanding something fundamental about the difference between Theravada Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism, for example. Or how Islam is practiced, and dominantly practiced in Nigeria, versus in North America, for example. The second approach is the religious studies approach. Which is sometimes also called the functional approach. So that's the ability to be able to analyze the ways in which religions in complex ways are really intersecting with social, and political, and economic life, even if not explicitly so. But in implicit, embedded ways shaping different kinds of economic systems, social systems, and political systems, and being able to analyze and see that, and so ask particular questions and consider different kinds of policy solutions—diagnoses and solutions that can take that into account. And then finally, I add the religious engagement approach. That particularly comes out of my work when I was at USIP and working with foreign policymakers in the State Department and elsewhere. To some extent, overseas as well, those in the diplomatic sector. Which I understand is determining whether, when, and how to engage with specifically defined religious institutions, actors, and interests, including on issues related, for example, with religious freedom, in ways that are inclusive, just, strategic, and, importantly for the U.S. context, legal. So abiding by the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Now, all three types of religious literacy defined here depend on three principles or ideas. So the first is that they understand religions as lived, as constituted by humans who are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting their religious traditions. This means that as a result they are internally diverse, sometimes very internally contradictory. They'll have different religious interpretations with respect to particular human rights issues, particular social issues, issues related to gender, and so on and so forth. That they change over time. That that sort of complex interpretive process that is going on within religious traditions also leads to kind of larger normative changes within religious traditions over history in different temporal contexts. And that they're culturally embedded. So as the question I was asking earlier, how is Islam, as it's understood and practiced in Nigeria, different from how it's understood and practiced in North America, for example. There are ways in which the particular religious interpretations and practices of a tradition are always going to be entangled with specific cultural contexts in ways that are near impossible to disentangle at times. And that means that they just manifest differently in different places. And this—these ideas of religion as lived pushes against an understanding of religions as being static or being monolithic. So that then leads us to ensure that there's never—that it's always going to be a problem to make sweeping claims about entire religious traditions because you'll always find somebody or some community within those religious traditions that don't believe or practice according to the claim that you just made about it. And that applies to situations of violent conflict and with respect to human rights, on global issues like climate and migration. This idea, the internal diversity in particular, is what is at play when you hear the phrase “Ambivalence of the Sacred” that was coined by Scott Appleby in his—in this very influential book by the same name. I'll throw in here a quote from Scott Appleby from that book, this idea that religions are always going to show up in ambivalent or contradictory ways across different places, but also sometimes in the very same contexts. So I think we can see that, for example, in the U.S. right now, and that there's no one, let's say, religious position with respect to reproductive rights, for example. There's a great deal of internal plurality and ambivalence that exists across religious traditions and interpretations within the Christian tradition and beyond about that specific issue. Moreover then, what religion is, what is considered religious, what is recognized as religious and what isn't, and how it manifests in different contexts depends on just a complex array of intersecting factors. I'm going to come back to—that's kind of meaty phrase just to throw out there, so I'm going to come back to that in a minute. So the second principle or idea of religious literacy that I want to highlight here is the idea of right-sizing religion. This is a phrase that Peter Mandaville used quite a bit when he was in the State Department's Religion and Global Affairs Office under the Obama administration and has written about. So I'll turn you to that article of his to understand more about it. But the central idea is that we don't want to over nor underemphasize religion's role in any given context. So just by way of a quick example, in looking at the Rohingya crisis or the ethnic cleansing of Rakhine State in Myanmar, one could not say it was all about religion, that it was about Buddhist nationalists who are anti-Muslim wanting to destroy a particular religious community. Nor could you say it had nothing to do with religion, because there were these religious dimensions that were at play in driving the violence towards the Rohingya and the larger communities' acceptance of that violence against the Rohingya community. But if you were to overemphasize the religious roles, the religious dimensions of that crisis, then your policy solutions—you might look at religious freedom tools and resources to be able to address the situation. And that would address the situation in part, but obviously there were other economic and political factors that were at play in leading to the Rohingya crisis. And including certain economic interests with oil pipelines that were being constructed across lands that the Rohingya were living on in Rakhine state, or the political conflict that was taking place between the military and the National League of Democracy, and so on. So addressing the crisis holistically and sustainably requires that we right-size the role that religion is playing in that particular crisis. And that goes across the board, in looking at conflicts and looking at the role of religion in climate, and addressing climate collapse, and so on and so forth. We need to always neither under nor overestimate the role that religion is playing in driving some of these issues and as a solution in addressing some of these issues. OK. So with that definition and principles of religious literacy in mind, I want to go back to the diagnosis that I gave at the—that I mentioned at the top, for which religious literacy is offered as a solution. The diagnosis, if you remember, was that there's been insufficient consideration given to the multiple and complex dimensions of religion and culture that impact international affairs. So I'm going to demonstrate what it means to apply the religious studies approach to religious literacy, or the functional approach to religious literacy, to help us understand why that might be. And remember, the religious studies approach is seeking to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social, and cultural expressions and understandings across time and place. So this approach, in trying to answer that question and consider that diagnosis, it would invite us to look historically at the development of the modern international legal and political systems in a particular time and place in Western Europe, during the European Enlightenment. As many of you may well know, this came about in the aftermath of the so-called confessional or religious wars. Those were largely understood to have pitted Protestants against Catholics, though it's more complicated in reality. But broadly, that's the story. And the modern state, on which the international system was built, sought to create a separation between religious and state authority. For the first time in European history, this separation between religious and state authority that became more rigid and enforced over time, in the belief that this was necessary in order to ensure peace and prosperity moving forward, to bring an end to these wars, and to ensure that the state would be better able to deal with the reality of increasing religious pluralism within Europe. So this was essentially the idea of secular political structures that was born in that time and place. And these secular political structures were considered to be areligious or neutral towards religion over time, again. In the process of legitimating this sort of revolutionary new model of the secular modern state, and in the process of creating this demarcated distinction that had not previously existed—at least, not a neat distinction of the secular or the political authority and the religious—the religious authority—there was an assertion as part of that ideologically legitimate and support that. There was an assertion of the secular as rational, ordered, and associated with all of the good stuff of modernity. Meanwhile, the religious was defined in counter-distinction as a threat to the secular. It was irrational, backwards, a threat to the emerging order. A not-subtle presumption in all of this is that the new modern state and the international system would serve as a bulwark against archaic, dangerous, religious, and other traditionally cultural, in particular, worldviews and practices in—it would be a bulwark against that, and a support for this neutral and considered universal international law and system—secular system. Now, I realize I'm making some, like, huge, broad historical sweeps here, given the short amount of time I have. But within that story I just told, there is a lot more complexity that one can dig into. But part of what I seek to do in offering religious literacy in international relations theory and practice to students, and to practitioners in this realm, is to help those operating in the system think through how that historically and contextually derived conception of religion and the co-constitutive conception of secularism continues to operate within and shape how we interpret and respond to global events within the system. And this occurs—I see this happening in two dominant ways. One is, first, in thinking about religion as a distinct sphere of life that can be disentangled entirely from the political, when in reality religion is deeply entangled with the political, and vice versa. And scholars like Talal Asad and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd have done really great work to show how even our understanding of the secular and secular norms and so on is shaped by Protestant Christian commitments and understandings. And saying within that, our understanding of what religion is—like, a focus on belief, for example, which has been codified in a lot of religious freedom law, as part of the international system—again, tends to emphasize Protestant Christian understandings of what religion is and how it functions. So that's the first reason for doing that. And then second, in understanding religion to be a threat to modernity, and sometimes seeing and responding to it as such rather than taking into account its complexity, its ambivalence, the ways in which it has been a powerful force for good, and bad, and everything in between, and in ways that sometimes let the secular off the hook for ways that it has driven forms of violence, colonialism, gender injustice, global inequalities, the climate crisis, and so on. So those are the consequences of when we don't have that religious literacy, of those potential pitfalls. And, on that second point, of the ways in which religion continues to be defined in ways that can overemphasize its negative aspect at time within the international system, I commend the work of William Cavanaugh in particular and his book, The Myth of Religious Violence to dig into that a little bit more. So what we're seeking to do, in bringing that kind of religious literacy to even thinking about the international system and its norms and how it operates, is to raise the consciousness of what Donna Haraway calls the situatedness of the international system, the embedded agendas and assumptions that inevitably operate within it. And it invites students to be skeptical of any claims to the systems neutrality about religion, how it's defined, and how it's responded to. So I recognize that that approach is very deconstructionist work. It's informed by, post-colonial critical theory, which reflects where religious studies has been for the last couple decades. But importantly, it doesn't, nor shouldn't ideally, lead students to what is sometimes referred to as analysis paralysis, when there's sort of groundedness within hypercritical approaches, only looking at the complexity to a degree that it's hard to understand how to move forward then to respond constructively to these concerns. Rather, the purpose is to ensure that they're more conscious of these underlying embedded norms or assumptions so that they can better operate within the system in just ways, not reproducing forms of Eurocentrism, Christo-centrism, or forms of cultural harm. So the hope is that it helps students to be able to better critique the ways in in which religion and secularism is being—are being discussed, analyzed, or engaged within international affairs, and then be able to enter into those kinds of analysis, policymaking, program development, and so on, in ways that can help disrupt problematic assumptions and ensure that the work of religious literacy or religious engagement is just. So I'm just going to offer one example of how this kind of critical thinking and critical—the way of thinking complexly about religion in this space can be fruitful. And it speaks back to one of the things Irina noted about my biography, the work I had done looking at women and religion and peacebuilding. So while I was at USIP, in that program, we spent several years looking specifically and critically at forms of theory and practice, and this subfield that had emerged of religious peacebuilding. And we were looking at it through the lens of gender justice, asking how religion was being defined in the theory or engaged in the peacebuilding practice and policy in ways that unintentionally reinforced gender injustice. And what we found is that there were assumptions operating about certain authorities—often those at the top of institutions, which tended to be older, well-educated men—representing entire traditions. Assumptions made about their social and political power as well. When in reality, we knew that those of different genders, and ages, and socioeconomic locations were doing their own work of peacebuilding within these religious landscapes, and had different experiences of violence, and so different prescriptions for how to build peace. So we began to ask questions, like whose peace is being built in this field of religious peacebuilding that was emerging? And the work that USIP had been doing in this space of religious peacebuilding? Whose stories were being left out in the dominant analyses or narratives in the media about religious dimensions of certain conflicts, and what are the consequences of that? So these kinds of questions are grounded in the recognition of, again, the internal diversity, the change over time of religious traditions. And they help ensure that analysis and policy actions aren't unintentionally reproducing forms of harm or structural violence. I'm almost done. So please do bring your questions so that we can engage in a discussion with each other. But I wanted to end by offering a couple examples of resources that I think might be helpful to both enhancing your own religious literacy but also as potential pedagogical tools in this work. So first is Religious Peacebuilding Action Guides that were produced by the U.S. Institute of Peace, in partnership with Salam Institute for Peace and Justice, and the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers. There's four guides. They're all available for free online. Once I close down my PowerPoint, I'm going to throw the links for all of these things I'm mentioning into the chat box so you can all see it. But one of the things—I'm just going to dive in a little bit to the analysis guide, because one of the things that I think is useful in helping, again, to help us think a little bit more complexly about religion, is that it takes you through this process of thinking about the different dimensions of religion as defined here—ideas, community, institutions, symbols and practices, and spirituality. So it's already moving beyond just an idea of religious institutions, for example. And it takes you through doing a conflict assessment, and asking the questions related to religion with respect to the drivers of the conflict and the geographic location and peacebuilding initiatives, to help you craft a peacebuilding—a religious peacebuilding initiative. I have used this framework as a means to help students think through the ambivalence of religion as it manifests in different places. So I have an example there of a question that I have sometimes used that has been fruitful in thinking about how these five different dimensions of religion have manifested in American history in ways that either have advanced forms of racialized violence and injustice or that have served as drivers of peace and justice. And there's lots of examples across all of those dimensions of the ways in which religion has shown up in ambivalent ways in that respect. There's also—USIP's team has produced a lot of amazing things. So I'll put some links to some of their other resources in there too, which includes they're doing religious landscape mappings of conflict-affected states. They have an online course on religious engagement in peacebuilding that's free to take. Another resource is from here, at Harvard Divinity School in the Religion in Public Life Program. And we provide a series of case studies that is for educators. It's primarily created educators in secondary schools and in community colleges, but I think could easily be adapted and used in other kinds of four-year universities or other kinds of professional settings, where you're doing trainings or workshops, or even just holding discussions on religious literacy. So there's a series of kind of short, concise, but dense, case studies that are looking at different religions as they intersect with a host of issues, including peace, climate, human rights, gender issues. And it says something about that case study here—the example that I have here is the conflict in Myanmar, pre-coup, the conflicts that were occurring between religious communities, and particularly between Buddhist communities and Muslim communities. And then there's a set of discussion questions there that really help to unearth some of those lessons about internal diversity and about the ways in which religious intersects with state policies and other kinds of power interests and agendas—political power interests and agendas. And then also, at our program, Religion and Public Life, we have a number of courses that are available online, one that's more on the substantive religious literacy side, looking at different religious traditions through their scriptures. Another course, it's on religion, conflict and peace, all of which are free and I'm going to throw them into the chat box in a moment. And we also have ongoing workshops for educators on religious literacy, a whole network with that. So you're welcome to join that network if you'd like. And then finally, we have a one-year master's of religion and public life program for people in professions—quote/unquote, “secular” professions—who want to come and think about—they're encountering religion in various ways in their work in public health, or in their work in journalism. And so they want to come here for a year and to think deeply about that, and bring something back into their profession. And then the final thing, and then I'm going to be done, and this one is short, is the Transatlantic Policy for Religion and Diplomacy, which brings together point people from—who work on religion across different foreign ministries in North America and Europe. And their website, religionanddiplomacy.org, has a lot of really great resources that—reports on various thematic issues, but also looking at religion in situ in a number of different geographic locations. They have these strategic notes, that's what I have the image of here, that talk about, at a particular time, what are some of the big stories related to religion and international affairs overseas. And they list a number of other religious literacy resources on their website as well. So I commend all of that to. And with that, let me stop share, throw some links into the chat box, and hear responses and questions from folks. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you for that. That was terrific. And we are going to send out—as a follow-up, we'll send out a link to this webinar, maybe a link to your presentation, as well as the resources that you drop into the chat. So if you don't get it here, you will have another bite at the apple, so to speak. (Gives queuing instructions.) So I'm going to go first to the written question from Meredith Coon, who's an undergraduate student at Lewis University: What would be a solution for India to have many different religions live in peace with each other, especially since most religions share a lot of the same core values of how people should live? And how can society prevent the weaponization of religion, while still allowing broad religious freedom? HAYWARD: All right. Thank you for the question, Meredith. And one thing just to note, by way of housekeeping, I'm not sure I can actually share the links with all of the participants. So we'll make sure that you get all of those links in that follow-up note, as Irina said. So, Meredith, I think a couple things. One, I just want to note that one of the assumptions within your question itself is that folks of different religious persuasions are constantly at conflict with one another. And of course, there is a reality of there is increasing religious tensions around the world, communal tensions of many different sorts, ethnic, and religious, and racial, and so on, across the world. And the threat to democracy and increasing authoritarianism has sometimes exacerbated those kinds of tensions. But there's also a lot of examples presently and historically of religiously incredibly diverse communities living in ways that are harmonious, that are just, and so on. So I think it is important—there's a lot of work that supports forms of interfaith dialogue and intra-faith dialogue. And I think that that work is—will always be important, to be able to recognize shared values and shared commitments, and in order to acknowledge and develop respect and appreciation for differences as well on different topics—again, both within religious traditions and across them. But I think that dialogue alone, frankly, is not enough. Because so often these tensions and these conflicts are rooted in structural violence and discrimination and concerns, economic issues, and political issues, and so on. And so I think part of that work, it's not just about building relationships kind of on a horizontal level, but also about ensuring that state policies and practice, economic policies and practices, and so on, are not operating in ways that disadvantage some groups over others, on a religious side, on a gender side, on a racial side, and so on. So it's about ensuring as well inclusive societies and a sense as well of inclusive political systems and inclusive economic systems. And doing that work in kind of integrated ways is going to be critical for ensuring that we're able to address some of these rising forms of violations of religious freedom. Thanks again for the question. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Clemente Abrokwaa. Clemente, do you want to ask your question? Associate teaching professor of African studies at Pennsylvania State University? I'm going to give you a moment, so we can hear some voices. Q: OK. Thank you very much. Yeah, my question is I'm wondering how peacebuilding, in terms of religious literacy, how would you look at—or, how does it look at those that are termed fundamentalists? How their actions and beliefs, especially their beliefs, those of us—there are those outside who perceive them as being destructive. So then to that person, is their beliefs are good. So they fight for, just like anyone will fight for, what, a freedom fighter or something, or a religious fighter in this case. So I'm just wondering how does religious literacy perceive that in terms of peacebuilding? HAYWARD: Right. Thank you for the question, Professor Abrokwaa. I really appreciate it. So a couple things. One, first of all, with respect to—just going back, again, to the ambivalence of the sacred—recognizing that that exists. That there are particular religious ideas, commitments, groups, practices that are used in order to fuel and legitimate forms of violence. And I use violence in a capacious understanding of it, that includes both direct forms of violence but also structural and cultural forms of violence, to use the framework of Johan Galtung. And so that needs to be addressed as part of the work to build peace, is recognizing religious and nonreligious practices and ideas that are driving those forms of violence. But when it comes to religious literacy to understand that, a couple ways in which the principles apply. One is, first, not assuming that their—that that is the only or exclusive religious interpretation. And I think sometimes well-meaning folks end up reifying this idea that that is the exclusive religious interpretation or understanding when they're—when they're offering sometimes purely nonreligious responses to it. And what I mean by this, for example, let's look at Iran right now. I read some analyses where it's saying that, the Iranian authorities and the Ayatollahs who comprise the Supreme Council and so on, that they—that they define what Islamic law is. And there's not a qualification of that. And in the meantime, the protesters are sort of defined as, like, secular, or they're not—the idea that they could be driven by certain—their own Islamic interpretations that are just as authoritative to them, and motivating them, and shaping them is critical. So being able to recognize the internal plurality and not unintentionally reify that particular interpretation of a religious tradition as exclusive or authoritative. Rather, it's one interpretation of a religious tradition with particular consequences that are harmful for peace. And there are multiple other interpretations of that religious tradition that are operating within that context. And then a second way that the religious literacy would apply would also look at the ways in which sometimes the diagnoses of extremist groups that are operating within a religious frame doesn't right-size the role of religion in that. It sometimes overemphasizes the religious commitments, and drives, and so on. And so, again, we need to right-size. There are religious motivations. And we need to take those seriously. And we need to develop solutions for addressing that. And there are economic interests. And there are political interests. So there's a whole host of factors that are motivating and inspiring and legitimating those groups. And being able to take into account that more holistic picture and ensure that your responses to it are going to be holistic. And then one final thing I want to say that's not with respect to religious literacy as much—or, maybe it is—but it's more just about my experience of work at USIP, is that—and it kind of goes back to the question that Meredith asked before you about religious harmony between multireligious relations and harmony, is that I sometimes finds that engaging with groups that are defining themselves and motivating themselves with a primary grounding in religion, that they're not going to participate generally in interfaith initiatives, and so on, right? And so that's where some of that intra-faith work can be particularly important. I saw this, for example, in Myanmar, when their—when previously the movement that was known as Ma Ba Tha, which was defined by some as a Buddhist nationalist anti-Muslim kind of Buddhist supremacist group. The folks who were most successful in being able to engage in a values-grounded conversation with members of the organization were other Buddhist monks, who were able to speak within the language of meaning and to draw attention to, like, different understandings of religious teachings or religious principles with respect to responding to minority groups, and so on. So I think that's in particular, with addressing those groups, that's where that intra-religious work or intra-communal work can be really critical, in addition to some of that cross-communal work. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So we've seen, obviously, the war in Ukraine and how Christian Orthodoxy is being—or, Greek Orthodoxy in Ukraine, and the division. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it's playing out with Russian identity? HAYWARD: Yeah, absolutely. There's been some really good analysis and work out there of the religious dimensions of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. So again, the sort of dominant story that you see, which reflects a reality, is that there are ways in which political and religious actors and interests are aligning on the Russian side in order to advance particular narratives and that legitimate the invasion of Ukraine that—that are about sort of fighting back against an understanding of the West as being counter to traditional and religious values. Those are some of the religious understandings. And then that concern gets linked then to the establishment of an independent or autocephalous Orthodox Church within the Ukraine context. And you see—in particular, what's pointed to often is the relationship between Patriarch Kirill in the Russian Orthodox Church, and Putin, and the ways in which they've sort of reinforced each other's narrative and offered support to it. And there's really great analysis out there and stories that have been done about that. And that needs to be taken into account in responding to the situation and, I would say, that some of the religious literacy principles would then ask us to think about other ways in which religion is showing up within that, that go beyond the institution too. So a lot of the news stories that I've seen, for example, have focused exclusively on—sometimes—exclusively on the clerics within the Orthodox Church and their positions, either in support of or in opposition to the war. But in reality, on the ground there's a lot more complexity that's taken place, and a lot more of the ways in which different individuals and communities on both the Russia and the Ukraine side are responding to the violence, to the displacements, and so on. It paints a more complex and, I think, fascinating story, frankly. And sort of illuminates ways forward in support of peacebuilding. For example, there's ways in which different kinds of ritual practices within Orthodoxy have served as a source of support and constancy to folks who are living in this situation of insecurity and displacement, in ways that have been helpful. There are, of course, other religious traditions that exist within both Ukraine and Russia that are operating and responding in different ways. Like, the Jewish community in Ukraine and the Catholic—the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. So looking at those complexities both within Orthodoxy, but there's many different ways that Orthodox Christians are responding in both countries. There's not one story of Orthodox Christianity and the invasion of Ukraine. But also looking at some of the religious diversity within it. And that helps to ensure, like I said, one, that we're developing solutions that are also recognizing the ways in which religion at a very ground level is serving as a source of support, humanitarian relief, social, psychological support to people on the ground, as well as the ways in which it's sort of manifesting ambivalently and complexly in ways that are driving some of the violence as well. And it also helps to push back against any sort of a narrative that this is about a Russian religion—on the Russian side—this is about a religious war against a secular, non-religious West or Ukraine, right? That that goes back to what I was talking about with the historical sort of contingencies that are baked into this system a little bit. And in defining it in that way, Russia's religious and its motivations are religious, Ukraine's not religious, that's both not true—(laughs)—because there's many religious folks within the Ukraine and within the West generally, but also feeds—it feeds the very narrative that Putin and Kirill are giving of a secular West that is anti-religion, that is in opposition to Russian traditional values. FASKIANOS: It seems like there needs to be some training of journalists too to have religious literacy, in the same way that we're talking about media literacy. HAYWARD: Yeah. FASKIANOS: Probably should be introduced as well. (Laughs.) HAYWARD: Yeah, Irina, it's funny, we did—one of my students actually did a kind of mapping and analysis of stories about the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the religious dimensions of it. And she noted that there was—for example, it was—almost always it was male clerics who were being quoted. So there was very little that was coming from other gendered perspectives and experiences on the ground, lay folks and so on. And again, for that—for that very reason it's sort of—because we know so many policymakers and international analysis are depending on these kinds of media stories, I worry that it creates a blinder to potential opportunities for different kinds of ways of addressing needs and partners for addressing needs on the ground. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I'm going to go next to Liam Wall, an undergraduate student at Loyola Marymount University: With so much diversity within religions itself, how can we avoid the analysis paralysis you mentioned and take in as many unique perspectives as possible, without letting that stand in the way of progress? How does one know that they have enough religious literacy and can now become an effective practitioner? HAYWARD: Well, OK, the bad news is that you will never have enough religious literacy. (Laughs.) This is a process, not an end. There are scholars here at Harvard who have been studying one particular sect of a particular religious tradition for their entire adult lives, and they would still say that they are students of those traditions, because they're so complex. Because so many of these traditions are composed of a billion people or just—just 500 million people. But that means that there's going to be an incredible diversity to explore. And so that's the bad news. But the good news is, one, like, first take the burden off of your shoulders of having to be an expert on any one particular religious tradition, in order to be able to help to develop and enhance your own religious literacy, and those of others, and to operate in ways that reflect the principles of religious literacy, is the good news. As well as there are many different kinds of resources that you can turn to in order to understand, for example if you're going to be working in a particular geographic location, scholarship, people you can speak to in order to begin to understand at least some of the specific manifestations and practices, and some of the disputes and diversity that exists within that particular country or geographic location across religious traditions. But, secondly, I would say, it's almost more important than—like, the substance is important. But what's just as important, if not more important, is understanding what kinds of questions to be asking, and to be curious about these religious questions and their intersection with the political and social. So we sometimes say that religious literacy is about developing habits of mind in how we think about these religious questions, and what kinds of questions we ask about religion. So it's about developing that kind of a reflex to be able to kind of see what's underneath some of the analysis that you're seeing that might be relevant to religion or that might be advancing particularly problematic understandings of religion, or reinforcing binaries like the secular and the religious and so on. And that's just as—just as important. So the extent to which you're continuing to, like, hone those—that way of thinking, and those habits of mind, that will set you up well for then going into this space and being able to ask those particular questions with respect to whatever issues you're focusing on, or whatever geographic location you're looking at. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to go next to Mohamed Bilal, a postgraduate student at the Postgraduate Institute of Management in Sri Lanka. HAYWARD: Yay! FASKIANOS: Yes. How does sectarianism influence our literacy? In turn, if we are influenced by sectarianism, then would we be illiterate of the religion but literate of the sect? Thus, wouldn't such a religious literacy perpetuate sectarianism? HAYWARD: Thank you for the question, Mohamed. It's—I miss Sri Lanka. I have not been there in too long, and I look forward to going back at some point. So I would say sectarianism, in the sense of—so, there's both religious sects, right? There's the existence of different kinds of religious traditions, interpretive bodies, jurisprudential bodies in the case of Islam. And then broader, different schools or denominations. The term that's used depends on the different religious tradition. And that reflects internal diversity. Sectarianism, with the -ism on the end of it, gets back to the same kinds of questions that I think Professor Clemente was asking with respect to fundamentalism. That's about being sort of entrenched in an idea that your particular religious understanding and practice is the normative, authentic, and pure practice, and that all others are false in some ways. That is a devotional claim or—what I mean by a devotional claim, is that is a knowledge claim that is rooted within a particular religious commitment and understanding. And so religious literacy in this case would—again, it's the principles of internal diversity, recognizing that different sects and different bodies of thought and practice are going to exist within religious traditions, but then also ensuring that any claim to be normative or to be orthodox by any of these different interpretive bodies is always a claim that is rooted within that religious tradition that we sometimes say is authentic. It's authentic to those communities and what they believe. But it's not exclusive. It's not the only claim that exists within that religious tradition more broadly. And the concern is about—sects are fine. Different denominations, different interpretative bodies are fine and a good and sort of natural thing, given the breadth and the depth of these religious traditions. The problem is that -ism part of it, when it becomes a source of competition or even potentially violence between groups. And so that's what needs to be interrogated and understood. FASKIANOS: So another question from John Francis, who's the senior associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah: If you were training new diplomats in other countries to be stationed in the United States, where a wide range of religious traditions thrive, how would you prepare them for dealing with such religious variation? HAYWARD: The same way I would—and thank you, again, for the question. The same way that I would with any other diplomats going to any other—the same way I do with foreign service officers at the Foreign Service Institute, who are going to work overseas. I would—I would invite them to think about their own assumptions and their own worldviews and their own understandings of what religion is, based on their own contexts that they grew up in. So how that shapes how they understand what religion is, in the ways I was speaking to before. So for example, in Protestant Christianity, we tend to emphasize belief as the sort of core principle of religious traditions. But other religious traditions might emphasize different forms of practice or community as sort of the central or principal factor. So recognizing your own situatedness and the ways in which you understand and respond to different religious traditions. I would invite those who are coming to work here to read up on the historical developments and reality of different religious communities and nonreligious communities in the U.S. and encourage them to look not just at some of the—what we call the world religions, or the major religions, but also at indigenous traditions and different practices within different immigrant communities. And I would have them look at the historical relationship between the state and different religious communities as well, including the Mormon tradition there in Utah, and how the experience of, for example, the Mormon community has shaped its own relationship with the state, with other religious communities on a whole host of issues as well. And then I would encourage—just as I was saying earlier—no diplomat going to the U.S. is going to become an expert on the religious context in the U.S., because it's incredibly complex, just like anywhere else in the world. But to be able to have sort of a basic understanding to be able to then continue to ask the kinds of questions that are going to help to understand how any political action is taken or response to any policy issues kind of inevitably bumps up against particular religious or cultural commitments and values. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take the next question from Will Carpenter, director of private equity principal investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, and also taking a course at the Harvard Extension School. HAYWARD: Hey! FASKIANOS: I'm going to ask the second part of Will's question. How will the current polarized domestic debate regarding U.S. history, which is often colored by the extremes—as a force for good only versus tainted by a foundation of injustice—impact America's capacity to lead internationally? HAYWARD: Hmm, a lot. (Laughter.) Thank you for the question. I mean, I think the fact of polarization in the U.S. and the increasing difficulty that we're facing in being able to have really deep conversations and frank conversations about historical experiences and perceptions of different communities, not just religiously, not just racially even, but across different—urban-rural, across socioeconomic divides, across educational divides and, of course, across political divides, and so on. I think that—I think that absolutely hampers our ability to engage within the global stage effectively. One, just because of the image that it gives to the rest of the world. So how can we—how can we have an authentic moral voice when we ourselves are having such a hard time engaging with one other in ways that reflect those values and that are grounded within those values? But also because I think get concern—with respect to religion questions in particular—I get concern about the increasing polarization and partisanization of religion in foreign policy and issues of religious freedom, and so on. Which means that we're going to constantly have this sort of swinging back and forth then between Republican and Democratic administrations on how we understand and engage issues related to religion and foreign policy, different religious communities in particular, like Muslim communities worldwide, or on issues of religious freedom. So I think it's incredibly critical—always has been, but is particularly right now at this historical moment—for us to be in the U.S. doing this hard work of having these conversations, and hearing, and listening to one another, and centering and being open about our values and having these conversations on that level of values. To be able to politically here in the U.S., much less overseas, to be able to work in ways that are effective. Irina, you're muted. FASKIANOS: Thank you. (Laughs.) With that, we are at the end of our time. Thank you so much for this. This has been a really important hour of discussion. Again, we will send out the link to the webinar, as well as all the resources that you mentioned, Susan. Sorry we didn't have the chat open so that we could focus on what you were saying and all the questions and comments that came forward. So we appreciate it. And thank you so much, again, for your time, Susan Hayward. And I just want to remind everybody that this is the last webinar of the semester, but we will be announcing the Winter/Spring Academic Webinar lineup in our Academic bulletin. And if you're not already subscribed to that, you can email us at cfracademic@cfr.org. Just as a reminder, you can learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. Follow @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Good luck with your exams. (Laughs.) Grading, taking them, et cetera. Wishing you all a happy Thanksgiving. And we look forward to seeing you again next semester. So, again, thank you to Susan Hayward. HAYWARD: Thank you, everybody. Take care.

On today's Lunch with Norm, we are joined by President of Brand Together, Talal Asad! Learn about Amazon's new way to grow your DTC store.. Buy with Prime. Find out on today's episode What is Buy With Prime, what effects will it have on the future of eCommerce, and how to get early access. Talal is an experienced Growth Hacker and eCommerce Professional with a demonstrated track record of revenue growth and history of working across multiple industries. He provides focused, intensive eCommerce consulting to get your CPG products flying off the virtual shelf. Our guest specializes in Amazon, Shopify, eCommerce Strategy, and channel diversification. This episode is brought to you by Post Purchase Pro Post Purchase PRO specializes in helping Amazon sellers create more sales, ranking, and reviews through post purchase marketing. Finally your email marketing can be actively managed by professionals with over 30 years experience so you can focus on running your business. Increase repeat purchases, drive better organic search term ranking, get more reviews, and build a real asset. For more information visit https://www.postpurchasepro.com/lunch This episode is brought to you by Startup Club Startup Club is the largest club on Clubhouse supporting the Startup ecosystem. Startup Club offers an exciting sense of belonging to established and aspiring entrepreneurs, startup businesses, and companies wanting to Learn, Connect, and Grow. Join us for conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, subject matter experts, and more. For More information visit https://Startup.club In this episode, we are joined by Talal Asad, President of Brand Together. Today we learn about Amazon's new way to grow your DTC store.. Buy with Prime. Jeff has a passion for "tough suspensions" and a mission to help sellers get reinstated. Talal specializes in Amazon, Shopify, eCommerce Strategy, and channel diversification. This episode is brought to you by Startup Club, Post Purchase Pro, and HONU Worldwide.

With the release of the 2021 film Dune, a conversation about Dune's depiction of religion and it's connection to Islam has been re-ignited. For this episode, Vivian Asimos and Aled Thomas want to dig into the depictions of Islam in Dune, especially following scriptwriter John Spaihts comment about Islam in the current day versus when Frank Herbert wrote his book in the 1960s. We talk about Islamic history, and how Islam's history means that Islam also has a future. We discuss the notion of Jihad in Islam, as well as Talal Asad's conception of Islam as a “discursive tradition”.You can read Haris Durraini's close reading of the religion appendix in Dune here.Got any comments, thoughts, or topic suggestions? Get in touch with the show! Follow us on twitter @RPC_Pod or send us an email at: religionpopculturepod@gmail.comFollow Vivian on twitter and instagram @vivianasimos, or go to her website incidentalmythology.comFollow Aled on twitter @aledjllthomas

Find out more about Brand Together: https://www.brandtogether.io/Growth Hacking Strategies The description is definitely not enough to put into words what Talal has been doing so far and to present his expertise and his company's capabilities. Please check out the podcast to get a full overview. Follow us on this journey through time! Talal is an experienced Growth Hacker and eCommerce Professional with a demonstrated track record of revenue growth and history of working across multiple industries, most recently food & beverage CPG. Skilled in eCommerce, Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing, and Social Media. Strong marketing professional graduated from The Ohio State University - The Max M. Fisher College of Business. #digitalagency #socialmediastrategist #website #business #ecom #eccomerce #ecommercemarketing #ecommercebusiness #Amazon #Growth hacking #Agency Find out more about marginbusiness: INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/marginbusiness/FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/marginthecompanyWEBPAGE https://https://marginbusiness.com/

On this episode, we discuss the common Amazon seller support issues, the best tips for contacting seller support, and whether seller support is the best/only option with Amazon issues. On today's Lunch with Norm we have two special guests joining us. Marketing professional graduated from The Ohio State University, Talal is an experienced growth hacker and eCommerce professional skilled in Advertising, digital marketing, and social media. Vanessa is the founder of Online Sellers Solutions, a service that helps sellers solve their Amazon problems, born from the passion to solve problems and the excitement from the unsexy part of Amazon. Learn the best way to navigate the sometimes tricky Amazon Support. This episode is brought to you by Global Wired Advisors Global Wired Advisors is a leading Digital Investment Bank focused on optimizing the business sale process. Our approach combines decades of merger and acquisition experience with online and e-commerce expertise to increase the transactional value of your greatest asset. Maximizing the value of your company in a business sale is achieved through the full expression of its future potential. Choosing the right representation to provide this vision to the right buyer, means putting your future in focus. For More information visit https://globalwiredadvisors.com/ This episode is also brought to you by Sellerise. Take a deep dive into your business processes to make data-driven decisions and outperform the competition in an innovative way. Sellerise is a comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs with innovative tools like the PPC Dashboard, Smart Alerts, Review Requester, and Keyword Tracker. Everything you need to grow and scale your business is just one click away. Stand out from the crowd and conduct business whenever, wherever. Innovate your effort and work smarter, not harder. The difference is amazing. Sellerise is for professionals at every level of the business journey. Simply select the capabilities that best fit your needs. Visit https://www.sellerise.com This episode is brought to you by Zee Are you a private label seller looking to expand into larger markets internationally or need an experienced  import partner to keep growing? Zee makes selling your Amazon products abroad easy with excellent import knowledge, door-to-door solutions, customer service and scalability. Streamline your import process with Zee today to increase profit margins and continue to scale. Ready to expand your ecomm empire and take your Amazon FBA Business global? Visit https://zee.co to learn more! This episode is also brought to you by .CLUB Domains .CLUB is the most used new top-level domain name and the perfect web address for your membership or subscription-based startup or business. Why? Because your customers are your CLUB! Grow your business with a domain name that instantly means membership and subscriptions. There are a lot of great domain name choices today, but if your business is about building a community of members around a product or service, there's no better URL than YourName.club. With 1.3 million registrations worldwide, there are already thousands of e-commerce sites using .CLUB. - great subscription businesses like Soap.club, Firstleaf.club and Coffee.club. You too can join the .CLUB today. Visit https://www.get.club. On today's show we have Vanessa Hung and Talal Asad - 2 incredible Amazon experts. They will be talking about the most common reason sellers reach for seller support help, what changes sellers should make to their listing during this time of the year, and best tips for contacting seller support. Vanessa is the founder of Online Sellers Solutions, a service that helps sellers solve their amazon problems. Talal is an experienced growth hacker and eCommerce professional skilled in Advertising and Digital Marketing. This episode is brought to you by Global Wired Advisors, Sellerise, Zee & .CLUB Domains.

On this episode of What The Exit, I sit down with Talal Asad. Talal runs an e-commerce firm called Brand Together and we talk about risk mitigation at scale, how important is a DTC website and other sales channels in 2021 and Talal shares some strategy behind why you NEED a DTC site even if it's not making significant revenue towards the end of our conversation. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/emergant/message

The latest Account-wide storage announcement, was packaged as a "relief" for sellers has been fine for bigger sellers with limited launches, but will be devastating for brand new sellers and ones who are expecting large launches. If a brand new seller had 6 ASINs going into Amazon at the 200 unit limit, they will technically be in violation. As always, Amazon is going through some major changes, and the time they are taking to communicate and enforce those changes is so haphazard that it will likely put some sellers out of business. Talal Asad is owner/principal of the small eCommerce consultancy Brand Together. They work with CPG brands of varying sizes, with the aim of giving a collaborative approach to share ideas, business tips and scaling. He has been doing Amazon for over 5 years, first as a Digital and eCommerce lead for an energy drink brand that was in over 2400 stores in the United States. Prior to that he was running multimillion dollar DSP campaigns for Fortune 10 and Top 10 agencies.

In this second part of our conversation with Professor Salman Sayyid, we discussed, among many things, how secularism and the dichotomies that it produces, have been used as discursive and political formations in order to domesticate Muslims, and regulate the behavior of Muslims. Recommended Readings: 1. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, by, Talal Asad. 2. The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament, by, Wael Hallaq.

Our friend Mike returns to help us wade through some of the more controversial claims made about the new vaccines and try to come to grips about what the next few years will look like. While Don wishes he could get a shot and be done with it, Mike's take suggests we are getting closer to Tom's Thousand Year Quarantine. Mentioned: Medical Nihilism by Jacob Stegenga, Formations of the Secular by Talal Asad. Mike provided some notes for his more salacious claims: Potential COVID vax antibody dependent enhancement: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5 Simulated effects of time-limited COVID vax immunity: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/06/29/2020.06.28.20142141.full.pdf Meta analysis of repeat flu vax effects: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14760584.2017.1334554 Reduced antibody maturation in repeat flu vaccination: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11296-5.pdf?origin=ppub Ritalin doesnt work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063150/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=r360 Paxil kills kids: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report Intro music by auntie004. Outro by reiyashi.

Episode 5 In this episode we discuss the life, work, and impact of Talal Asad. Produced by: Daisy Bahena, Danya Schulman, Valerie Manfredi, Jeffrey Graham **This podcast is for educational purposes only**

We discuss the ongoing controversy about a mural in San Francisco's Washington High School. Does the mental health of students outweigh the artistic merit and pedagogical value of the mural, which is critical of America's history? More importantly, what kinds of assumptions and vocabularies are operative in this debate? We try to develop a more critical approach to the topic with assistance from Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood's essays on the Danish Cartoon Controversy, published in the 2009 volume "Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech."

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, which is why this new book will make a substantial contribution in the field: Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (Palgrave, 2015). In this interview with the editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, we learn about the communist project of secularism and its legacies today. Whereas Western models of state secularism were premised, in theory at least, on separations between religious and secular spheres and between church and state, communist regimes rejected separation and sought to directly rule over the religious realm. As the editors discuss in this interview, even after the waning of utopian revolutionary convictions, officials in contemporary communist und postcommunist states continue to intervene regularly in religious affairs. The essays of the book reveal surprising dynamics currently being generated in religious-secular interactions in today’s China, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and places in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, which is why this new book will make a substantial contribution in the field: Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (Palgrave, 2015). In this interview with the editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, we learn about the communist project of secularism and its legacies today. Whereas Western models of state secularism were premised, in theory at least, on separations between religious and secular spheres and between church and state, communist regimes rejected separation and sought to directly rule over the religious realm. As the editors discuss in this interview, even after the waning of utopian revolutionary convictions, officials in contemporary communist und postcommunist states continue to intervene regularly in religious affairs. The essays of the book reveal surprising dynamics currently being generated in religious-secular interactions in today’s China, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and places in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, which is why this new book will make a substantial contribution in the field: Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (Palgrave, 2015). In this interview with the editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, we learn about the communist project of secularism and its legacies today. Whereas Western models of state secularism were premised, in theory at least, on separations between religious and secular spheres and between church and state, communist regimes rejected separation and sought to directly rule over the religious realm. As the editors discuss in this interview, even after the waning of utopian revolutionary convictions, officials in contemporary communist und postcommunist states continue to intervene regularly in religious affairs. The essays of the book reveal surprising dynamics currently being generated in religious-secular interactions in today’s China, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and places in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, which is why this new book will make a substantial contribution in the field: Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (Palgrave, 2015). In this interview with the editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, we learn about the communist project of secularism and its legacies today. Whereas Western models of state secularism were premised, in theory at least, on separations between religious and secular spheres and between church and state, communist regimes rejected separation and sought to directly rule over the religious realm. As the editors discuss in this interview, even after the waning of utopian revolutionary convictions, officials in contemporary communist und postcommunist states continue to intervene regularly in religious affairs. The essays of the book reveal surprising dynamics currently being generated in religious-secular interactions in today’s China, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and places in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, which is why this new book will make a substantial contribution in the field: Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (Palgrave, 2015). In this interview with the editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, we learn about the communist project of secularism and its legacies today. Whereas Western models of state secularism were premised, in theory at least, on separations between religious and secular spheres and between church and state, communist regimes rejected separation and sought to directly rule over the religious realm. As the editors discuss in this interview, even after the waning of utopian revolutionary convictions, officials in contemporary communist und postcommunist states continue to intervene regularly in religious affairs. The essays of the book reveal surprising dynamics currently being generated in religious-secular interactions in today’s China, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and places in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talal Asad is a socio-cultural anthropologist, renowned for his contributions and research on the phenomenon of religion and secularism, and the religious revival in the Middle East. He discusses the attempts to define religion, the shifting place of "belief" in that endeavor, and some of its implications for politics. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 15122]

Talal Asad is a socio-cultural anthropologist, renowned for his contributions and research on the phenomenon of religion and secularism, and the religious revival in the Middle East. He discusses the attempts to define religion, the shifting place of "belief" in that endeavor, and some of its implications for politics. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 15122]

Talal Asad is a socio-cultural anthropologist, renowned for his contributions and research on the phenomenon of religion and secularism, and the religious revival in the Middle East. He discusses the attempts to define religion, the shifting place of "belief" in that endeavor, and some of its implications for politics. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 15122]

Talal Asad delivers the first lecture in the 2006-2007 Presidential and Endowed Lectures in the Humanities and Arts Series. His lecture is entitled "Thinking About Blasphemy and Secular Criticism." (October 9, 2007)r