The Classical Ideas Podcast

Latest Episodes:

EP 310: Indigenous Plant Medicines w/Dr. Natalie Avalos Aug 21, 2024

Show notes

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Visit Natalie Avalos: https://natalieavalos.wordpress.com

EP 309: Queer Activism in India w/Emma Thompson Aug 14, 2024

Show notes

Emma Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Islam subfield of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. They are also pursuing a graduate certificate from the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Their work focuses on Islam in South Asia along with Islam, Gender, and Sexuality. Their research draws on anthropological fieldwork and social media archives to examine how queer activists in Northern India navigate religion and secularism, especially situated within the context of rising Hindu nationalism. In addition to the dissertation project, Emma's interests include secularism studies, religious racialization and identity, queer and trans studies in religion, and religious nationalisms.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

EP 308: Afro-Futurism, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Joy as Resistance with Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack Aug 07, 2024

Show notes

Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities , and former Director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion in 2013 from Vanderbilt University. His research explores the intersections between Black religion, popular culture, the arts, and activism. His work has been published in Black Theology: An International Journal, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Black Scholar, and the recent volume, Moved By the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives. His most recent research focuses on the relationships between religion and discourses of afro-pessimism, afro-futurism, "Black optimism," and notions of "Black joy" as resistance.

Moved By the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793647771/Moved-by-the-Spirit-Religion-and-the-Movement-for-Black-Lives

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https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

EP 307: Coptic Orthodox Christianity with Phoebe Farag Mikhail Jul 23, 2024

Show notes

Phoebe Farag Mikhail is a Coptic Orthodox Christian and the author of Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church (Paraclete Press). She holds an M.A. in International Education and is a lifelong learner of theology, currently taking courses at Pope Shenouda III Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary in New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Plough, Christianity Today, and other publications.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023

Visit Phoebe Farag MIkhail: https://beingincommunity.com/

EP 306: Black Women's Maternal/ Reproductive Health w/Dr. Ashlyn Strozier Jul 16, 2024

Show notes

Dr. Strozier is a lecturer at Georgia State University. She is continuing her research in the areas of religion, gender, sexuality, and health focusing the disproportionality of black women's maternal mortality, and women's reproductive decisions, using digital platforms. Her pedagogical focus is anti-racist and decolonial teaching strategies, while shifting humanities curriculum to focus on professional skill development within the gaze of critical skills. Dr. Strozier is dedicated to research and teaching as forms of activism.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-fall-2023

Visit Dr. Ashlyn Strozier: https://www.instagram.com/gapeach82/

EP 305: Swāmīnī Vāto in the Swaminarayan Sampraday w/Dr. Bhakti Mamtora Jul 09, 2024

Show notes

Bhakti Mamtora (Ph.D., Religion, University of Florida) is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. Broadly, her research interests include print culture, book history, migration, and transnational religion. Her current book project employs archival, textual, and ethnographic methods to examine the genesis and reception of the Swāmīnī Vāto in the Swaminarayan Sampraday during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published journal articles in Fieldwork in Religion and Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, and entries in Hinduism in Five Minutes and Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024

EP 304: The Racism of People Who Love You w/Dr. Samira Mehta Jul 02, 2024

Show notes

Samira Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at CU Boulder. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the US. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (UNC, 2018) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023) was called "the epitome of a book meeting a moment" by Oprah's "Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2023." Mehta's current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics in the mid-twentieth century. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Luce Foundation funded project, Jews of Color: Histories and Futures.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-fall-2023

Read Dr. Samira Mehta: https://www.beacon.org/cw_contributorinfo.aspx?ContribID=12658&Name=Samira+K.+Mehta

EP 303: The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family w/Dr. Sophie Bjork-James Jun 25, 2024

Show notes

Sophie Bjork-James (Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, City University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR's All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4's Today, and in the New York Times. Her work has received support the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Visit Sophie Bjork-James online: https://sophiebjorkjames.com/

Visit Sacred Writes online: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024

EP 302: Mestizo Poetics of Belonging: Deuteronomy's Construction of Israelite Ethnicity w/Dr. Chauncey Handy Jun 18, 2024

Show notes

Chauncey Handy is Assistant Professor of Religion at Reed College. As a Chicano scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Chauncey's work focuses on the intersection of race/racialization, theories of ethnicity, Latinx theorization of identity, and the reception history of the Hebrew Bible (for example his Bible, Race, and Empire course at Reed). He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Reed College. He is working on turning his dissertation, Mestizo Poetics of Belonging: Deuteronomy's Construction of Israelite Ethnicity, into a published book. In this project, he considers the nature of ethnicity as presented in the text of Deuteronomy through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa's articulation of mestizaje (racial-ethnic intermixture). His argument emphasizes the value of socially located approaches to Hebrew Bible and seeks to theorize engagement with religious categories of belonging that advocate for a just society.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-fall-2023

EP 301: Chinese Nature Poetry and Ultrarunning w/Dr. Vic Thasiah Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

Vic Thasiah is a professor of religion and a lead faculty member in the environmental studies program at California Lutheran University. He is also the founder and co-president of the nonprofit environmental organization Runners for Public Lands. His research focuses on Chinese nature poetry, Native American perspectives on land and running, and environmental philosophy and activism. He is currently working on a book titled Ground Truth: The Natural World, Outdoor Recreation, and Environmental Activism.

Read Drag Sun, Tiger Moon: https://www.irunfar.com/dragon-sun-tiger-moon-fastpacking-the-backbone-trail

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-fall-2023

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