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The Religious Studies Project

May the Fourth Be With You episode / season 1

To honor May the Fourth, International Star Wars Day, please enjoy this compilation of classic Religious Studies Project interviews about Star Wars!

episodes

Harm, AI, and Religion | Discourse! June 2023

Mediatizing “Evangelicalism”: Authenticity, Identity, and Power

What’s Sincerity Got to Do With American Secularism?

What’s Happening Down Under? | Discourse! May 2023

Charting the Playful & Proper Study of Religion

Supreme Court to Coulter: Negotiating Religion in the Public Sphere | Discourse! April 2023

Keep Hope Alive: Preparing for White Christian Nationalism

Religion under Attack? | Discourse! March 2023

The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: Religion without God

Spitting on the Sacred: Politics and Redefining Profanation

Religious Literacy and Its Discontents | Discourse! February 2023

Navigating the Discursive Study of Religion

Where was God?: Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust

Critical Approaches to Studying Religion in Film

Oversimplified Binaries | Discourse! January 2023

Interrogating the Interrogators: Managing Muslims in Germany

Realities (Altered & Virtual) | Discourse! November 2022

Queens of the World | Discourse! October 2022

Secular Spaces? | Discourse! September 2022

Shifting the Focus of Graduate Education in the Study of Religion

Reflections on REF 2021

Presentism and Politics | Discourse! August 2022 (with video)

Unruly Women: Neocolonialism, Race, and Discrimination

Authorities and the Past | Discourse! June 2022 (with video)

Authorities and the Past | Discourse! June 2022

Abortion, Climate Change Protests, & Ukraine Invasion | Discourse! May 2022 (with video)

Cults and NRMs: An RSP Remix, Part I

Curanderismo Roundtable

Semana Santa, Diversifying the Seder, Prayer in High School Football, and… Derry Girls? | Discourse! April 2022

Sunday in the Park with Theory

Obeah and Experiments with Power

How “Woke” Is Your Textbook?: Introducing Religious Studies in the 2020s

Ukraine Invasion, Philippine Elections, and Misinformation | Discourse! March 2022 (with video)

Religious Legal Activism: Abortion Rhetoric Among British Evangelicals

The Wilderness of Mirrors: Nationalism, Religion, and Secret Intelligence

The Devil is in the Details! | Discourse! February 2022 (with video)

How Critical Race Theory became a Moral Panic | Discourse! June 2021 (with video)

The Insider/Outsider Problem: An RSP Remix

Spiritual Abuse Roundtable

When Religion Doesn’t Behave | Discourse! January 2022 (with video)

The Critical Humanist Study of Islam

When Religion Doesn’t Behave | Discourse! January 2022

Questioning the Silver Bullet: Critical Approaches for the Study of Ayahuasca

The Strange Charm of Gnosticism

Genealogy of the Jewish Notion

Narrative and Reflexivity in the Study of Religion: A Roundtable Discussion (with video)

The Unverifiable Truth-Claim! | Mid-Year Special 2016 (with video)

MasterBrain! | Mid-Year Special 2014

Fourteen to One! | Mid-Year Special 2015

Scrape My Barrel! | Mid-Year Special 2017 (with video)

Only Sixty Seconds! | Mid-Year Special 2019

Religious Freedom, Exemption, and Festivals in Australia | Discourse! November 2021 (with video)

The World Religions Paradigm: An RSP Remix

Discourse #10 |Sept 2019

Religious Symbols, Secularism, and Culture Wars

When Christians Meet Each Other: The Saint Thomas Christians of Southwest India in the Early Modern Period

Discourse Analysis & Ideology Critique in the Study of Religion

Religion, Bodies, and the State | Discourse! October 2021

Focus on Fieldwork: An RSP Remix

Mapping the Digital Study of Religion

Deconstructing ‘Religion’ in Contemporary Japan

#ClassificationMatters | Discourse! September 2021 (with video)

History Repeated: Religious Conspiracy Theories Then and Now

Law, Religious Racism, and Religions of the African Diaspora

Freak Out!: How Critical Race Theory became a Moral Panic | Discourse! June 2021 (with video)

Sovereignty and Spiritual Warfare

On the Tantricization of Jain Ascetic Rituals

South American Austral Religions in an Ethnohistorical Comparative Perspective

South American church-state relations

Evangelical Yoga: Cultural Appropriation and Translation in American Religions

Minority Religions in the Secret Police Archives

Religion, Science and Evolutionary Theory

Studying Tantra from Within and Without

Politics of this world: Protestant, evangelical, and Pentecostal movements in Peru

Sexual Ethics and Islam

Religion, Spirituality, and Addiction Recovery

Comedy, Comedians, and Church: The Interplay between Religion and Humor

What do we mean by Indigenous Religion(s)?

Islamic Millennialism

Religious Freedom in America: Theoretical Considerations

Reinventing Graduate Education in the Study of Religion

Yoga in Museums

AI and Religion: An Initial Conversation

Black Religious Movements and Religio-Racial Identities during the Great Migration

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology

Religion and the Psy-Disciplines

Six Scholars Discuss the Dissertation to First Book Process

Study of Religion in Peru

Muslim NGOs and civil society in Indonesia

Angel Spirituality

Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes

Beyond ‘Faith-Based Organizations’: Religion and NGOs in comparative perspective

Witchcraft in Rural Slovenia

Millennialism and Violence?

Misplaced Faith?: A theory of supernatural belief as misattribution

Christian evangelical organisations in global anti-trafficking networks

Religion, Gender, and Gender Violence

Christmas Special 2017 – Scrape My Barrel!

Changing Your Story: Assessing Ex-Member Narratives

Children in New Religious Movements

Hyper-Real Religion, Digital Capitalism, and the Pygmalion Effect

Jesuits, Mormons, and American Religion in the World

Drawn to the Gods – Religion, Comedy and Animated Television Programs

Muslims, NGOs, and the future of democratic space in Myanmar

Autism, Religion, and Imagination

Hindu Traditions in Contemporary British Communities

The Legacy of Edward Tylor – Roundtable

‘Modelling Religion’ and the Integration of the Sciences and the Humanities in the Bio-cultural Study of Religion

Stereotyping Religion: Critical Approaches to Pervasive Cliches

Why do we believe? Evolution, Primates, and the Human Niche

What is the point of of academic conferences?: A roundtable discussion

The Gods of Indian Country

Ecospirituality, Gender and Nature

A Dark Goddess: An inter-religious language for feminine spirituality

Preserving identity and empowering women. How do Canadian Muslim schools affect their students?

Religion, Education, and Politics in Australia and NZ

Representations of Religious Studies in Popular Culture

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

The Hugging Guru: Amma and Transnationalism

A Global Study on Government Restrictions and Social Hostilities Related to Religion

New Directions in the Study of Scientology

RE Commission report: A Way Forward?

Magic and Modernity

Myth, Solidarity, and Post-Liberalism

From Static Categories to a River of Theories: “The Myth of Disenchantment”

From Non-Religion to Unbelief? A developing field…

Drone Metal Mysticism

Against Invention: A richer history for ‘Hinduism’

Worldviews and Ways of Life

Negotiating Gender in Contemporary Occultism

“Soka Gakkai, Kōmeitō and the religious voices of Japan’s political arena

Situating Religion within Justice

African American Spiritual Churches

‘Good’ Grief? Rituals of World Repairing

Religious change in Japanese Shinto

God and Mathematics

Muslim Superheroes

What We Can Learn from our Founding Fathers

The Political Relevance of the Sociology of Religion

The Lie at the Heart of America

Myth-making, Environmentalism, and Non-Religion

Thanks for Listening! Celebrating 10 Years of the RSP

Politics and Conspirituality | Discourse! January 2021

The Therwil Affair: Handshakes in Swiss Schools

The BASR and the Impact of Religious Studies

Manifestos and the Academic Study of Religion

The New Satanic Panic and the Return of Blasphemy | Discourse! April 2021

Sacred Trees: Belief, Mythology, and Practice

Power and Diversity in 4th Century Martyr Shrines

On Human Remains | Discourse! May 2021 (with video)

Comparing Methods in Christian Origins

The U.S. Military Chaplaincy and Twentieth-Century Society

Masculinity and the Body Languages of Catholicism

On the Tantracization of Jain Ascetic Rituals

Islam, Politics, and Identity: The (Im)possibility of Sudan’s Islamic State

Human Rights in Australia | Discourse! March 2021

Conspiracy Theories, Public Rhetoric, and Power

Understanding Evangelical Opposition to Climate Action

“Religion and Pluralities of Knowledge”: A Roundtable Discussion

Religion and Memory

Sex Scandals and Minoritized Religions

Religious Climate Activism | Discourse! February 2021

Following the Objects: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria

Ritual, Religion, and the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Culture

Race and the Aliites

Beyond Ecological Essentialism: Critical and Constructive Muslim Environmentalisms

Studying “Non-Ordinary Realities”: A Roundtable Discussion

Studying Vernacular Religion in the US

Witchcraft and Demonic Possession in Early Modern England

Os serés matáves: Pentecostalism in the Prisons of Rio

Religion and Literature

Science and Religion in Europe: A Historical Perspective

Geographies of Religion and the Secular in Ireland

The Emerging Church

Prayer, Pretense, and Personification: How God becomes real

Spiritualism and Shamanism

The Postsecular

Visual Culture and the Study of Religion

Narrative and Reflexivity in the Study of Religion: A Roundtable Discussion (Video and Audio!)

Baby Boomers, Quest Culture, and Spiritual Seeking

Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

The Subtle Body

Demons, possessions, and exorcisms: Sean McCloud on “Spiritual Warfare”

Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life – An interview with Tatjana Schnell

“Would You Still Call Yourself an Asianist?”

THATCamp Roundtable on Digital Religious Studies

“Unruly Angels”: An Interview with Ingvild Gilhus

Religion, Spirituality and Health

Habermas, Religion and the Post-Secular

The Holberg Prize 2014 Episode With Michael Cook, “Bigger Things Do Rest On Smaller Things.”

Roundtable on Religious Studies and Academic Credibility beyond ‘World Religions’

Authors meet Critics: “New Age Spirituality”

Book Reviews, May, 2014 – Graham Harvey, Morgan Luck, and James Cox

The Uses of “Indigenous Religion”

Before “Religion”: a History of a Modern Concept

Christmas Special 2014 – MasterBrain!

The Burning Saints, Fire-Walking Rituals of the Anastenaria

The Psychology of Prayer: An interview with Kevin Ladd

Global Categories; Local Contexts

Christian Reconstruction

Encounters Between Buddhism and the West

African Christianity in the West

Religion and Film

‘Religious’ and ‘Spiritual’ Struggles: Now in ‘Nonreligious’ and ‘Nonspiritual’ flavors!

Lived Religion: Part 2

Religion, gender and corporeality

Lived Religion: Part 1

21st Century Irish Paganism

The Supernatural and the New Comparativism

The Invention of the Secular Academy

Religion and Planetary Ethics

Discursive Approaches and the Crises of Religious Studies

Is Religion Special? A Critical Look at Religion, Wellbeing and Prosociality

Religious Demography in the US

Of Demons, Saints and Heaven: Andean religious beliefs in Peru

Gender, queer theory and religion

Race and Religion: Intertwined Social Constructions

Minority Religions and the Law

Indian Rationalism, and a Relational Approach to Nonreligion

Religion and Authority in Asia

Pilgrimage in Japan and Beyond: Part 1

Social Constructionism

Pilgrimage in Japan and Beyond: Part 2

The Fate of Earthly Things

The Brethren in Scotland

Is Britain still a Christian country?

Comics and the Superhero Afterlife

Gurdjieff and the Study of Contemporary Religion

Understanding the Secular

Sri Lankan Buddhism and Colonialism

The Invention of Religion in Japan

The Critical Study of Religion

“Practice What You Preach”: CREDs and CRUDs

God’s Mind, Your Mind, and Theory of Mind

Self-immolation as a religious act: The contested martyrdom of Roger Allen LaPorte, Catholic Worker

Religion as an Evolutionary Organism

Categorising “Religion”: From Case Studies to Methodology

Embodied religious practices, child psychology and cognitive neuroscience

A Critical Introduction to the History, Beliefs, and Practices of Wiccans

An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion

Historical, Popular, and Scholarly Constructions of Yoga

Teaching and Learning in Contemporary Religious Studies

Global(ized) religion and the study of religious tensions

Communism and Catholicism: Religion and Religious Studies in Lithuania

Christmas Special 2015 – Fourteen to One!

Researching Radicalisation

ISKCON In Britain

Is Secularism a World Religion?

Religion and Feminism

Religion, Youth, and Intergenerationality

Evangelicalism and Civic Space

Death, Music, and Ritual: Contemporary Requiems in the Commemoration of Death and Violence

Sociology of Religion – and Religious Studies?

Researching Religious Diversity

ISKCON And When New Religions Aren’t So New Anymore

Religious Studies as a Discipline

Religion and American Law

New Horizons in the Sociology of Religion: Beyond Secularization?

Getting to Know the North American Association for the Study of Religion

See you in the next life? Cognitive foundations of reincarnation beliefs

Nature alive: Amazonian religion in Peru

Method and Theory in the Cognitive Sciences of Religion

The “Axial Age”: Problematising Religious History in a Post-Colonial Setting

Video Games and Religious Studies

DEATH, Religion, and Terror Management Theory

Permutations of Secularism

Popular Culture, Dr. Who, and Religion

Music, Marketing and Megachurches

From the Ku Klux Klan to Zombies

UFOs, Conspiracy Theories… and Religion?

Identity and Capitalism

BDSM as Religious Practice

Conversion and Deconversion as Concepts in the Sociology of Religion

Popular Culture Studies and Bruce Springsteen: Escaping and Embracing Religion

Descriptions of Religion as Explanations of Religion

Discourse, Australia Edition

Demystifying the Study of Religion

Philology and the Comparative Study of Myths

Natural Selection In the Evolution of Religion

Critical Approaches to Pre-Islamic Arabia and Early Islam

Christmas Special 2016 – The Unverifiable Truth-Claim!

Discourse #8 (June 2019)

Nonreligion, Religion, and Public Health

Discourse #6, March Edition: With Joel Ritala, Jarno Sandberg, Anton Stranden, and Martta Tenhu

Spatial Contestations and Conversions

When Archive Meets A.I. – Computational Humanities Research on a Danish Secular Saint

EASR 2019 Publishing Panel

When Islam Is Not a Religion

Reflections on “Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith”

BASR 2019: The State of the Discipline

Lady Death and the Pluralization of Latin American Religion

Doctors and Stigmatics in the 19th and 20th centuries

Challenges and Responsibilities for the Public Scholar of Religion

How Religious Freedom Makes Religion

The secularization of discourse in contemporary Latin American neoconservatism

Atheism, New Religious Movements, and Cultural Tension

Straight White American Jesus, the podcast

Buddhism in the critical classroom

Discussing Pious Fashion and Muslim Dress Beyond the Headscarf

Science Fiction, Video Games, and Religion

Discourse #11 | Oct 2019

LDS Garments and Agency

Unbelief as a Nuanced Phenomenon: The Sociality of Nonreligion across Europe

Religion, Food Waste, and Food Consumption

Religion and Multiculturalism in Canada and Beyond

What is Mindfulness? A Critical Religious Studies Approach

The Study of Religion and National Identity in Estonia

Discourse #12 | December 2019

America’s Dark Theologian Stephen King: A Religious Imagination Explored

Young People and Religion in a Global Perspective

Slenderman and online mythology

Special 2019: Only Sixty Seconds!

Secular Jewish Millennials in Israel/Palestine

Religion as a Tactic of Governance

Applied Religious Studies at Georgia State University

Discourse! March 2020 with Theo Wildcroft, Dan Gorman, & Vivian Asimos

Melodies of Change: Music and Progressive Judaism

The Public Square and the Heart of Culture War

Narrating Belief: Vernacular Religion in India

Separating Religion and Government…But What Is Religion?: A Look at the US Supreme Court

Christian Beauty Pageants: Beauty is in the eye of the creator

America’s Changing Religious Landscape

Near Death Experiences

Artificial Intelligence and Religion

The Problem with ‘Religion’ (and related categories)

Decolonizing the Study of Religion

Discourse! June 2020

Discourse! May 2020 with David G. Robertson, Suzanne Owen, and Craig Martin

The Science of Prayer: Genealogies and Biopolitics

The Fetish Revisited: Objects, Hierarchies, and BDSM

Politics, Kabbalah, and Beyond: Jewish Studies and the Study of Religion

Discourse! #13 | January 2020

Navigating stasis and mobility: The journey of anointing oil

Discourse! February 2020 with Sierra Lawson and Sidney Castillo

Global Flows, Local Contexts: Pentecostalism in Australia

Decolonizing Religious Studies and Its Layers of Complicity

Roots as Scripture and Scripture as Roots

Religious Literacy is Social Justice

Locked In, Locked Down, and Vaccinated? On Agency and Autonomy | Discourse! November 2020

Developing a Critical Study of Non-Religion

The Roots of QAnon | Discourse! August 2020

The Sacrality of the Secular and Philosophy of Religion

Race, Religious Freedom & Empire in Post-War Japan

Empty Signs in an Automatic Signalling System

Exploring African Shamanism and White Sangomas in South Africa

Presidentialism, or “Who’s Your Daddy?” | Discourse! October 2020

Media and the Study of Religion

Discourse! April 2020 with Christopher Cotter, Chris Silver and Savannah Finver

Challenging the Normative Stance of Aniconism in the Study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Who Are the Power Worshippers?

Founding American Religion, the Journal

The Weakest Link! | Mid-Year Special 2020 (with video)

Rhizomes, Assemblages, and Religious Change

Kitchens and Constructions of Religious Subjectivity in Black Atlantic Traditions

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Buddhist Ritual

Holocaust Museums as Sacred-Secular Space

Religious Festivals during COVID-19 | Discourse! September 2020

Boxing and Religious Identity

Ancient Christian Origins: A Heterogeneous History

What does religious literacy mean in your context?

Climate Change(s): New Approaches to Environmental and Agricultural Ethics

Surviving Sexual Abuse: The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

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