The Classical Ideas Podcast

Latest Episodes:

EP 211: Paid Family Leave and the Catholic Church w/Dr. Annie Selak Aug 25, 2021

Show notes

Annie Selak (she/her/hers) is a systematic theologian, specializing in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. from Boston College, and is also a proud graduate of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (M.Div) and Santa Clara University (BA, BS). Dr. Selak's dissertation, "Toward an Ecclesial Vision in the Shadow of Wounds," examined the wounds of racism and sexism in the Roman Catholic Church utilizing contemporary trauma theory and the ecclesiology of Karl Rahner. Her work has been featured in Modern Theology, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Washington Post, America, and Commonweal. Dr. Selak currently serves as Associate Director of the Women's Center at Georgetown University.

Follow Dr. Annie Selak on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aselak

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

Follow Sacred Writes: https://twitter.com/Sacred_Writes

Read "What the Church Owes Families," here: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-church-owes-families

EP 210: Muslim Women and French Anti-Separatism w/Sahar Ahmed Aug 19, 2021

Show notes

Sahar Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin. Her research examines and offers a reinterpretation of the right to freedom of religion under International Human Rights Law and Islamic jurisprudence. Sahar is from Lahore, Pakistan, where she worked as a Barrister for many years.

Follow Sahar Ahmed on Twitter: here.

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

EP 209: Muslim Philanthropy and Pillars Fund w/Kashif Shaikh Aug 02, 2021

Show notes

Kashif Shaikh is the Co-Founder and President of Pillars Fund. In 2010, Kashif and a small group of Muslim philanthropists founded Pillars to strategically organize wealth within their communities and support American Muslim civic institutions and leaders building a more just, equitable society. For the next five years, Kashif volunteered his time and resources to grow and lead Pillars. In 2016, he was asked to be Pillars' first full-time executive director and transitioned Pillars from a volunteer-run fund to a fully operational foundation. Under his leadership, Pillars has invested more than $6 million in Muslim community organizations and initiatives to build collective power and transform what is possible for Muslims in the United States.

At the heart of Kashif's career in philanthropy is a dedication to promoting racial equity and creating opportunities for Muslims and people of color to tell their stories through art. Prior to launching Pillars, Kashif was a program officer at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, where he helped manage a portfolio of more than $20 million and helped scale a variety of Chicago nonprofits working at the intersection of racial justice, poverty, and education. He also managed the Foundation's corporate partnerships and helped develop corporate social responsibility strategies for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Blackhawks, and Chicago Bulls. His career began at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, where he developed strategies to engage the organization's largest corporate partners.

Kashif's expert insight on Muslims in philanthropy has been cited in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and Chicago Sun Times, among others. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Peabody Awards, Chicago Humanities Festival, and Mortar, a nonprofit based in his home town of Cincinnati that helps entrepreneurs from historically marginalized communities access resources to start and run successful businesses. He has been named a Philanthropy Forward Fellow by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions and Neighborhood Funders Group, a New Profit Civic Lab Entrepreneur, and an Ambassadors for Health Equity Fellow. In 2017, Crain's Chicago Business named him to their 40 Under 40 list.

Kashif holds a BA from Ohio State University and MA from Northwestern University

EP 208: Medieval Queer Magic w/Kersti Francis Jul 23, 2021

Show notes

Kersti Francis is a writer, editor, and medievalist based in Tucson and Los Angeles. Francis' works at the intersections between religion, magic, gender, and sexuality is so interesting. I loved this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. She is on Twitter (@kerstifrancis), where she tweets about feminism, queerness, history, and much more.

EP 207: A conversation w/ Dr. Felipe Hinojosa and Dr. Arlene Sánchez-Walsh Jul 02, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Arlene Sánchez-Walsh: https://twitter.com/AmichelSW Guest host Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh, Ph.D., is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2003). She has authored more than a dozen articles and book chapters on the subject of Latino/a Pentecostalism, and has served as a media expert for outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and On Being with Krista Tippett, and served as an expert on Latino/a religious history for the PBS series God in America. Sánchez-Walsh's current writing projects include a textbook on Pentecostalism in America, and a monograph on Latinos/as and the prosperity gospel. Her current research is on the rise of nonbelief among Latinos/as.

Dr. Felipe Hinojosa: https://twitter.com/fhinojosa71

Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, Felipe Hinojosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2009 and joined the faculty at Texas A&M that same year. His research areas include Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, and Social Movements. In addition to serving as Director of the Carlos H. Cantu Hispanic Education & Opportunity Endowment, Prof. Hinojosa serves as editor for the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, and online moderated forum Latinx Talk. His work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Western Historical Quarterly, American Catholic Studies, Mennonite Quarterly Review, and in edited collections on Latina/o Studies. Dr. Hinojosa's first book, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) was awarded the 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award for the best book in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. His new book, Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2021) is set in four major cities (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston) where in 1969 and 1970 Latino radical activists clashed with religious leaders as they occupied churches to protest urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

EP 206: How God Becomes Real w/Dr. Tanya Luhrman and Dr. Brian Carwana Jun 23, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Tanya Luhrmann is the author of "How God Becomes Real" and is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and also an anthropologist of religion.

Dr. Brian Carwana Brian has a PhD in religion, a business degree, and worked as a strategy consultant. He is the Executive Director of Encounter World Religions where he has been teaching people about ethno-religious communities and facilitating actual "encounters" for 20 years.

Purchase "How God Becomes Real" here.

Visit Dr. Tanya Luhmann online https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com/

Visit Dr. Brian Carwana online https://religionsgeek.com/

EP 205: Texts After Terror w/Dr. Rhiannon Graybill Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of religious studies at Rhodes College and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her latest book, Text After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible, is a study of sexual violence and rape in the Hebrew Bible and is out now from Oxford University Press.

Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible from Oxford University Press

EP204: Roman Catholic Womanpriests w/Dr. Jill Peterfeso Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

Download "Womanpriest" for free as an eBook from Fordham Press here: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823288298/womanpriest/

Jill M. Peterfeso is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Guilford College. She is a cultural historian of American religion whose published scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality, resistance to authority, and social justice, specifically in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.

While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests' actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

EP 203: Early Christian Magic w/Dr. Shaily Patel Apr 22, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Shaily Patel is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Virginia Tech. She is an expert on ancient magic, early Christian literature, and ideological criticisms of the New Testament. She is currently writing a book about the ways in which early Christian writings featuring Simon Peter are caught between two simultaneous but opposing cultural trends: the allure of "magic" in the Roman imagination and the categorial vilifying of magicians among ancient writers. In her wider work, she is concerned with the problem of representation in historical accounts, especially the representation of groups and ideas that challenge established "orthodoxy."

Follow Dr. Shaily Patel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vox_magica

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

EP 202: Himalayan Histories w/Swati Chawla Apr 14, 2021

Show notes

Swati Chawla is assistant professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Her doctoral research is focused on migration, citizenship-making, and contemporary Buddhisms in the Himalayan regions of postcolonial South Asia. Her masters and M.Phil. work focused on the Tibetan Buddhist female monastic tradition in exile. She hosts the Twitter channel #himalayanhistories.

Follow Swati Chawla on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChawlaSwati

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Classical Ideas Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected