The Classical Ideas Podcast

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

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/

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.

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

Darnise C. Martin, PhD is a Professor, Author and Life Transformation Coach with 15 years of training and experiences in helping people create Whole Life Abundance. Dr. Darnise has a life- long passion for helping people tap into their spiritual connections for authentic transformation in the areas of Relationships, Spirituality, Life Purpose and Career, Self-Worth, and Well-Being. Dr. Darnise is a scholar, professor, published author and speaker, with a doctorate in Religious Studies. Dr. Darnise was also featured on Tavis Smiley’s radio program on National Public Radio (NPR), and has appeared on KJLH radio in Los Angeles. She has consulted on feature length documentaries such as Dark Girls and Light Girls for the Oprah Winfrey Network. She continues to speak throughout the community offering empowerment and relationship workshops. Dr. Darnise is the author of Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (New York University Press, 2005), coeditor of Women and New and Africana Religions, and the personal development book, 40 Something: 10 Radical Lessons for Women on How To Live and Love Without Losing Themselves. Visit Dr. Darnise at www.drdarnise.com

This episode made possible with support from Sacred Writes. 

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

Prea Persaud is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida and a Visiting Instructor in the Religion Department at Swarthmore College, PA. Her research focuses on Hinduism in the Caribbean and the intersection between race and religion. In her dissertation, “God Must be a Trini: The Transformation of Hinduism into a Caribbean Religion,” she uses Hinduism in Trinidad to challenge studies on diasporic Hinduism that center India as the homeland, scholarship on the Caribbean that ignores the influence of Asian migration, and the rigidness of categories within the study of religion.  She is on the steering committees for the North American Hindu Unit and the Religion in South Asia Unit at the American Academy of Religion and a member of the Intersectional Critical Hindu Studies Group. Her recently publications include several chapters in the edited volume Hinduism in the 5 Minutes edited by Steven Ramey, and “Creolization, Caribbeanness, and Other Categories in the Study of Caribbean Hinduism” in American Examples: New Conversations about Religion edited by Michael Altman. 

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

Eugenia Rainey studies religion as negotiated process. She explores this process at the intersection of Lucumí, an Afro-Cuban religion, (also referred to as La Regla de Ochá or Santería) and medicine. Her work focuses on how the cultural competency paradigm that emerged out of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society influenced the adaptation of Lucumí practice outside of Cuba and racial identity formation in south Florida. Rainey's identity as Cape Verdean and multiracial inform her scholarship on processes of racialization in the United States and Latin America. With her thorough grounding in religious practice, her work highlights devotees' experiences and perceptions of the medical encounter. Through this research she seeks to better understand how the healthcare infrastructure impacts lived religion and how Lucumí in the US accommodates the healthcare needs of devotees as well as the healthcare infrastructure. Her research is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Reed Foundation, as well as Tulane University and Dartmouth College.

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

Yolanda M. Santiago Correa was born and raised in the archipelago of Puerto Rico as the only child of Miguel and Yolanda. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from la Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Religion & Culture at Southern Methodist University. Her academic work and interests focus on Puerto Rico, Afro-Latinidad, music, and the relationship between racial and religious identity and imagination. Yolanda is a creator and co-host of Majestad Prieta: A Podcast on Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, y la Diáspora and is a team member of the AfroLatiné Theology Project.

Jennifer T. Kaalund (Ph.D., New Testament and Early Christianity, Drew University) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her research focuses on Christian Scriptures, contextual Biblical hermeneutics, and African American history, culture, and religion. She is the author of Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place, and Identity (Bloomsbury T&T Clark Press, 2018). She currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

Follow Dr. Jennifer Kaalund: https://twitter.com/jkaalund

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

Soumia Bardhan is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. Operating at the transdisciplinary intersection of intercultural communication, global communication, and Islamic studies, she explores the complex ways diverse communication practices associated with Islam/Muslims shape MENA (Middle East and North Africa) culture and politics, challenge Islamophobia, facilitate the deliberative capacities of Muslim minority groups, and influence U.S. foreign policy. Her first monograph, on the digital rhetoric of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is under contract with the University of Alabama Press. This book nuances how we understand the rhetoric of Islamism and challenges U.S./Euro-centric narratives of the relationship between (and future of) religion and politics in the MENA region. Soumia was awarded the University of Notre Dame’s Global Religion and Research Initiative grant to develop an interdisciplinary course titled “Religion and Communication in the Middle East.” She teaches intercultural/critical intercultural communication; transnational rhetoric; religion, culture, and communication; gender, politics, and Islam; and directs Global Study courses focusing on Islam and intercultural dialogue in Spain, France, Morocco, and India.

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

Oluwatomisin "Tomi" Oredein is currently an Assistant Professor in Black Religious Traditions and Constructive Theology and Ethics and the Director of Black Church Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX. Anchored in her American African identity, her scholastic and creative work engages theopoetics, womanist theology and ethics, postcolonial and decolonial thought, and Black theology from an African diasporic perspective. Tomi is most intrigued by how cultural, social, and religious liminalities can be sites of generative theological and ethical exploration. She has written academic, creative, and ecumenical pieces that foreground questions of care, modes of recognition, and cultural perception from her American African lens. She is the author of the forthcoming book with the University of Notre Dame Press (May 2023), The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice. Her future works include a solo-authored book on a theological ethics of care entitled Making a Human: A Theological Ethic of Care and co-editing a book on theopoetics exclusively featuring racially and ethnically minoritized scholars, entitled In Color: Embodied Approaches in Theopoetics.

Buy The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye here: The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye

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

Marcus Evans is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in the department of Philosophy & Religion at Western Kentucky University. Marcus is currently interested in religion and spirituality in Afro-Asian encounters and arts (e.g., music, films, novels, graphic designs, performances, etc.). His dissertation explores Afro-Asian style and spirituality in the hip-hop productions of RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan. He has recently contributed an article titled “Buddhism and Afro-Asian Masculinities in RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists” to a forthcoming volume titled Buddhist Masculinities, edited by Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew (Columbia University Press).

This episode sponsored by Sacred Writes. 

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

Playlist discussed in this episode:

1. “Bring Da Ruckus” (1993) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhRNgqPlyk
2. “Reunited” (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40a5UNO5T44 (music-video)
3. “Second Coming” (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V33vEEL4Peo
4. “One Blood Under W” (2000) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmmtW5cD6HI
5. “Chi-Kung” (2003) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjr3k882waE (music-video)
6.  “Life Changes” (2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnLxyCHGB1M
7. “Ruckus in B-Minor” (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-XwMytbaIE
8. “Fate of the World” (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cKvJUka_VM (music-video)

Dr. Popy Begum is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. She received her B.A. in International Criminal Justice and a Certificate in Dispute Resolution from John Jay College of Criminal Justice; and her MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University. Her dissertation study of Hindu and Muslim sex workers in New Delhi combines ethnographic field observations of the red-light district and 102 in-depth interviews via respondent-driven sampling.

Sara Moslener is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the United States. She has been studying evangelical purity culture for over 15 years and has numerous publications, including the book Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford University Press: 2015).  Sara’s work has been featured in The Revealer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Sojourners Magazine, Jezebel, Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, Religion News Service, and The Baffler. She has appeared on numerous podcasts and is a regular contributor to the podcast Straight White American Jesus.