The Classical Ideas Podcast

Latest Episodes:

EP 221: The Two Faces of Religious Freedom w/Dr. Jolyon Thomas Oct 24, 2021

Show notes

Jolyon Baraka Thomas (he/him/his) is assistant professor and interim graduate chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. He is currently finishing a book on religion and public schooling in Japan and the United States, and his articles on religion and capitalism have appeared in Material Religion and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He also regularly writes for public-facing venues such as Killing the Buddha, Marginalia, The Revealer, Sacred Matters, and Tricycle.

Follow Dr. Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jolyonbt

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/2021-cohorts

EP 220: Comedy and Islam w/Dr. Samah Choudhury Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

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

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

Follow Dr. Samah Choudhury: https://twitter.com/SamahChoudhury

EP 219: The Young Lords w/ Dr. Jorge J. Rodriguez V Oct 12, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JJRodV

Visit online: https://www.jjrodriguezv.com/

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/2021-cohorts

EP 218: Weddings, Marriage, and Divorce in Islam w/Dr. Kecia Ali Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

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

Download "Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the 21st Century" for free at:

https://www.keciaali.com

Visit Dr. Kecia Ali on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kecia_ali

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

EP 217: Religion, Science, and the Brain w/Dr. Andrew Ali Aghapour Sep 30, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Dr. Aghapour on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewAghapour

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/2021-cohorts

EP 216: The Unraveling of Nepal's Hindu Monarchy w/Dr. Anne Mocko Sep 24, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Dr. Anne Mocko on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theMockOwl

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/2021-cohorts

EP 215: Transnational Online Shinto and Educational YouTube w/Kaitlyn Ugoretz Sep 18, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Kaitlyn Ugoretz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KaitlynUgoretz

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/2021-cohorts

EP 214: Social Media and Hinduism w/Dr. Dheepa Sundaram Sep 12, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Dr. Dheepa Sundaram on Twitter: https://twitter.com/themodsisyphus

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

EP 213: Ecological Ethics in the Jewish Community Farming Movement w/Dr. Adrienne Krone Sep 06, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Adrienne Krone on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdrienneKrone

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

EP 212: Heaven Narratives w/Dr. Brook Wilensky-Lanford Aug 31, 2021

Show notes

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

Follow Dr. Wilensky-Lanford on Twitter: https://twitter.com/modmyth

Visit Sacred Writes online: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

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