The Classical Ideas Podcast

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EP 290: Science Fiction and Dune w/Dr. Patrick J. D'Silva Mar 20, 2024

Show notes

Patrick J. D'Silva (Ph.D., Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a faculty member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. His current research projects include analyzing the intersection of race, religion, and cultural appropriation in contemporary science fiction, as well as the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have engaged with yoga. His previous research examines the circulation of esoteric breathing practices between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia during the early-modern period. He is the co-author (with Carl Ernst) of the forthcoming Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan. He lives in Boulder, CO with his family.

Visit Patrick D'Silva online: https://www.patrickjdsilva.com/

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

EP 289: The Cake Baker and the Coach w/Dr. Charles McCrary Mar 13, 2024

Show notes

Charles McCrary (Ph.D., Religion, Florida State University) is an assistant professor of religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He researches and teaches broadly on American religion, especially topics related to politics, race, secularism, and science. His first book, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines the history of "sincerely held religious belief" and how that became a standard for legal understandings of religion in religious freedom cases. He is currently in the early stages of a project about a "crank," in which he explores how religious, scientific, and political fringes are defined as such. McCrary has written in scholarly journals as well as popular outlets such as The Revealer, Religion & Politics, and The New Republic.

Read The Making of a Crass Religious Freedom Celebrity: https://newrepublic.com/article/175783/praying-coach-book-religious-freedom

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

EP 288: Multiracial Cosmotheandrism w/Dr. Aizaiah Yong Mar 06, 2024

Show notes

Rev. Aizaiah G. Yong (Ph.D., Practical Theology, Claremont School of Theology) serves as Assistant Professor of Spirituality at the Claremont School of Theology in Southern California, USA. He is an ordained Pentecostal Christian minister within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a recognized facilitator in the Compassion Practice and an Internal Family Systems Practitioner. Growing up in a multiracial and immigrant family, he is committed to sustaining transformational and collective efforts that address ongoing realities of social oppression with presence, passion, and peace.

Multiracial Cosmotheandrism: https://orbisbooks.com/products/working-title-multiracial-cosmotheandrism-a-practical-theology-of-multiraciality-inspired-by-the-life-philosophy-and-mysticism-of-raimon-panikkar-tentative

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

Spirited Renewal: https://www.spiritedrenewal.org/

EP 287: Moon of the Turning Leaves w/Waubgeshig Rice Feb 17, 2024

Show notes

In this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by Evan Whitesky ventures into unknown and dangerous territory to find a new home for their close-knit Northern Ontario Indigenous community more than a decade after a world-ending blackout.

For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.

Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the "land where the birch trees grow by the big water" in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature.

But it isn't just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence.

EP 286: Political Organizing and Teaching about Theology w/Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart Feb 15, 2024

Show notes

Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a Black queer preacher, teacher, public administrator, and justice advocate. She is an adjunct professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and the Government Fellow for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. In 2021, Rev. Naomi founded Salt | Yeast | Light, an organization that develops spaces of spiritual education, disruption, reflection, transformation, and public action.

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

Visit Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart:

https://twitter.com/oholyshift

https://www.instagram.com/oholyshift/

https://linktr.ee/heartleaps?fbclid=IwAR0KBxltXNIzvz1JYA_CmaXLj425I-Rn2YZqcjBSu3Ay50yFH5om-fqtrB8

EP 285: Jewish Cemeteries at the US Border w/Dr. Maxwell Greenberg Feb 08, 2024

Show notes

Maxwell Greenberg (he/they) | (Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies at Goucher College) is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator who researches and teaches about race, religion, gender, and place. He earned his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from UCLA (2021), before serving as the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (2021-23). He works at the intersection of Jewish, Religious and Indigenous Studies, and is particularly interested in how Judaism and Jewish memory function as unstable tools of statecraft in the US. Greenberg is passionate about building community with a network of scholars, artists and organizers who engage with religion as a connective tool for coalition building with movements to end racism and transmisogyny.

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

EP 284: Teaching, Curriculum, & Standards w/Dr. Elizabeth Jemison Feb 01, 2024

Show notes

Elizabeth Jemison is Associate Professor of Religion at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American religion. She is the author of Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, published by UNC Press in 2020. Her next book project, tentatively titled, Christian Motherhood: Race and Southern Churchwomen's Organizing during Segregation, examines how women's religious groups across racial lines mobilized to defend Christian motherhood with conflicting results. She has written for Patheos and Religion & Politics. At Clemson, Jemison received the Provost's Outstanding Junior Teacher Award in 2022 and the College of AAH Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2020. She was a Young Scholar in American Religion in the 2015-2017 cohort.

Follow Elizabeth Jemison online: https://twitter.com/eljemison

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

EP 283: Racial Science of Protestant Missions w/Dr. Matthew J. Smith Jan 25, 2024

Show notes

Matthew J. Smith (he/him/his) holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Northwestern University and is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Alma College in mid-central Michigan. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of race, religion, and U.S. empire whose research and teaching also center on gender/sexuality, science & technology, and the environmental humanities. His first book project explores the biopolitics of conversion in U.S. Protestant Missions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, interrogating the missionary discourse of plasticity as a central grammar in the modern scientific production of race. Smith also serves as the Director of the Religious Studies Program at Alma College, teaching a wide range of course offerings on the study of religion as it is lived in people's everyday lives.

Follow Dr. Matthew J. Smith https://twitter.com/smithmj303?lang=en

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

EP 282: Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England and Modern Traditional Catholics w/Dr. Lauren Horn Griffin Jan 18, 2024

Show notes

Lauren Horn Griffin (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara) is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. Her first book, Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England (Brill 2023), showed how confessional debates played a critical role in the development of national identities. Her current project investigates contemporary negotiations of national, religious, and racial identities in Catholic communities online. Adding Catholicism to current conversations about what many are calling white Christian nationalism in the U.S., she shows that while Catholics have long imagined the nation in terms of religious identity, many currently mobilize ideas of Catholic tradition to construct images of a munti-national white Western Civilization.

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

EP 281: Desegregation and Church Mission Statements w/Dr. Darius Benton Jan 11, 2024

Show notes

Darius M. Benton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, teaching courses in Organizational Communication and Religious Communication. He also serves as the inaugural program director for the MA in Strategic Communication degree. Dr. Benton earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Organizational Leadership from Regent University, his Master of Divinity degree with a certificate in Religious Education from Emory University, and Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication from Norfolk State University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar and professional educator with varied experiences from Pre-K through collegiate levels, an ordained minister, executive leader, and social scientist. Dr. Benton's research and publications focus on organizational culture; specifically examining issues of race and gender, religious leadership, and youth serving organizations.

Visit Darius Benton online: https://www.dmbenton.com

This episode is made possible with support from Sacred Writes.

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

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