Why Study Religion? with Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

And don’t miss the opportunity to hear Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh’s talk, “Conjuring Death: Black Women and Retribution in the Era of Slavery” at the CSR conference, “The End of Life and What Comes Next: Perspectives from Healthcare, History, Anthropology, and Religion,” March 31-April 1. For more details and registration, check out our conference website: go.osu.edu/dyingwellconference.

Transcript:

So why should we or do we study religion? Well, religion is in an incredibly dynamic category.

It’s one of the only categories I think where you have people from so many different disciplines who can come together in a department and study this phenomenon together. And one of the things I like to always remind my students of is that while religion itself was not always an academic category—we can’t just use “religion” as a universal term to identify phenomena across spaces and time because there’s always been different ways that people would understand their relationship to the cosmos—we can break it down into these different components that are equally dynamic: things like power and ritual and ethics, all these elements of our human interaction and human strivings that constitute this very broad category that we call “religion.”

And so, religion is just a really wonderful way to think about convictions and interiority, to think about what powers people, what drives them, what helps them to survive under extraordinary circumstances, what keeps them motivated, what do they transmit to their children, what kinds of ideals are important to people, groups of people, to individuals, to families across spaces and time. These are all the kinds of questions that people in religious studies address through various means. So, I think religion as a category, as a field of study, is incredibly exciting because you can approach it from so many different cultures through so many different linguistic traditions and still find meaning together, still finds points of coherence and ways that we can converse across sometimes these incredible cultural or chronological or ethical divides. There are many ways we can use religious studies and the skills you learn within religious studies, the ways of relating and communicating with people through very difficult, sometimes deeply-seated understandings and beliefs that can translate into many other spaces.

And I think most importantly, religion is the study of what makes us human. What is it about us that separates us as entities on this planet? What is it that coheres us? These are some of the questions I think that, when we think about the fundamental category, what religion is fundamentally about, we’re asking questions about humanity across space and time. So, in that way, I think it’s such a flexible and versatile area of study. It’s something that, whether you want to be an attorney or a physician, you can do successfully because we are together addressing questions that I think impact our society on multiple levels

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Have questions about our upcoming conference? Interested in sharing with us what brought you to the academic study of religion? Send us an email at religion@osu.edu!

Why Study Religion? with Dr. James Padilioni, Jr.

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. James Padilioni, Jr., Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

And don’t miss the opportunity to hear Dr. Padilioni’s talk, “‘When the Consciousness we Know as Life Ceases’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Hoodoo Multiverse” at the CSR conference, “The End of Life and What Comes Next: Perspectives from Healthcare, History, Anthropology, and Religion,” March 31-April 1. For more details and registration, check out our conference website: go.osu.edu/dyingwellconference.

Transcript: The best way I can answer the question “Why Study Religion?” is just by telling you why I study religion. So, for me the study of religion comes down to a question about meaning but also meaningfulness, moreso than just meaning—meaningfulness being the whole potential that we discover for meaning, and meaningfulness abounds.

So, what is meaningfulness? When I think of that in three different dimensions, there is the cosmic sense of meaningfulness, thinking of cosmogony, or creation stories, origin stories, myths, all of those questions—cosmology—these cosmic sensibilities of meaning and meaningfulness and pattern, structure. And also mystery, which is a running corollary to meaningfulness in religion for me. It’s also about cultivating this sense of wonder and mystery around the inability for meaning to present itself all of the time to us.

But another sense of meaningfulness that I find in the study of religion is in social meanings and social meaningfulness, the patterns that we discover and then create and recreate in kinship and in other forms of social relations: friendships and communities we belong to and the feelings of belonging or feelings of ostracization or outsider. All of that can be part of the study of religion and understanding how shared sensibilities, “the group mind,” comes together and understands itself and creates itself and doesn’t always understand itself, doesn’t always seek to create itself as a community Again all of those understandings can be part of the study of religion.

And then the last dimension of meaningfulness that I find in the study of religion pertains to the interior self and the interior meaningfulness of our life, of our sense of self, who we are as persons, who we are as human beings, but also and more importantly who we are in our human becoming. I think all of that is accessible to students, especially when they are studying religion in college because there are so many questions that you’re going to have as a young person anyway that will be boiling up and pushing and resonating against some of those same questions of the interior meaningfulness, the patterns that we create in our everyday life, the everyday rituals and habits and friendships and other relationships and chosen kinship networks that we associate with.

We can study both or all from the cosmic to the social down through the interior person and out again in the religious studies classroom. So, I think that the study of religion really offers students a whole cosmos worth of wonder.

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Have questions about our upcoming conference? Interested in sharing with us what brought you to the academic study of religion? Send us an email at religion@osu.edu!

“Dying Well” Conference March 31-April 1

As we hit the midway point of the spring semester, we’d like to remind you of all the exciting events we have for Spring 2022, especially our conference coming up soon on March 31-April 1, “The End of Life and What Comes Next: Perspectives from Healthcare, History, Anthropology, and Religion.” We have an exciting line-up of speakers and performances across disciplines and media. Check out the video at the link below for more information and head over to our website for schedule, details, and registration. Plus, stay tuned for some of our speakers to appear as guests on our Why Study Religion? series on the blog!

Dying Well Spring Events with Interim Director Hannibal Hamlin

Questions? Send an email at religion@osu.edu.

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Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Hannibal Hamlin, the Director of the Center for Studies in Religion, and I’d like to announce the amazing group of events we’ve got planned for next term, Spring 2022. This is the last term of our two-year project, “Living Well, Dying Well,” sponsored by a generous grant from the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. This year is “dying well.” Last year, we focused on various aspects of health and life and living. This year, we’re focusing on the second part of the equation: dying well, death. And we have a variety of one-off events focusing on different aspects of death and dying in different cultures.

We also have a terrific conference planned March 31 and April 1 called “The End of Life and What Comes Next: Perspectives from Healthcare, History, Anthropology, and Religion,” where we’re bringing together a brilliant group of scholars who all address aspects of the big question, but again from their particular perspective. Our keynote lecture will be by Thomas Laqueur, the eminent historian, and our final event, a reading and talk by Thomas Lynch, will feature some of his poetry. He is, in addition to being a celebrated poet and a popular bestselling author, he is a former undertaker, and so his perspective on death and dying and what comes next will be particularly interesting.

In between, we have a variety of different events featuring topics related to East Asian and Asian funeral, death, and burial practices; we have a panel focusing on contemporary issues, ethical issues related to the healthcare industry and end of life; and we have another session that brings together some fascinating scholars who are going to be addressing a wide range of topics, including burial practices and the migration crisis in Europe, African American women and religious practices involving death and the afterlife, and in fact, Hoodoo conceptions of the afterlife. This will be a very exciting couple of days. There’ll be something for everybody, and I’m sure we’re all going to discover much more than we knew coming in with. I hope you will come to at least a few of these events, and if you’re like me you’ll want to attend them all.

Grad Chat with Savannah and Elise

After finishing their formal thoughts for their “Why Study Religion?” videos, Savannah and Elise kept chatting while the camera kept rolling. They talked more about why studying religion is important to them personally and what has motivated them to pursue doctoral work in their respective areas of interest. See what they had to say in the informal, podcast-style recording below!

Transcript

Savannah: Which is so weird because, I mean, every book, every book covers religion in some aspect.

Elise: Exactly, like you can’t get away from it, especially if you’re studying English literature.

Savannah: The Anglican Church is steeped in everything.

Elise: Exactly, and it is in the idiom of our language, inextricably linked. Whether a person is writing a text that they are conscious of being religious or not, it is in the way we speak

Elise: I don’t know…cause I think there’s a lot of beauty in a lot of religions, but there’s also a lot of harm

Savannah: I think it’s any social group, any society, there’s parts that are really beautiful or were intended to be very beautiful and unfortunately, end up causing more harm than good. And you know, figuring out how to navigate that by finding these questions that are so high stakes to people and really trying to tackle them head on, that’s something that we’ve been talking about in one of my grad seminars. It’s that knowing what’s important to us and what questions we want answers to and why and how our disciplines shape our thinking about those questions and how we answer them are so critical. In as much as I love being a theory head and being up in the clouds, what is that doing for the world, is my question.  And if you can’t take that and apply it in your life and in your work then-

Elise: Like, what are you doing?

Savannah: Right, it’s just an exercise in how many mental back flips can I do? You know? And while that is fun in a certain context, I don’t know that I’m leaving the world a better place for my kin, you know?

Elise: Yeah and I just don’t know if that’s enough to fuel a difficult career, you know?

Savannah: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, I agree with you. You have to believe in what you do because passion will only get you so far. I remember actually going to a conference once. It was at Syracuse University, and the woman who was the head of the Religious Studies Department there, Gail Hamner, gave this talk, and she was like, “You know, you think your passion is going to be enough to drive you through the PhD, but you’re wrong. It’s not going to be enough. You’re going to be so sick of what you study by the end that you really need to have some other reason. It can’t just be that you love it. It needs to be important to you for something else.” And I think that because these questions about religion have so fundamentally shaped the decisions the state can make about my body as a woman and things like that, these questions have high stakes for me.

Elise: Yeah, absolutely

Savannah: And so while it’s nice to read philosophy and just kind of speculate about the nature of reality, if I can’t take those speculations and use them to create a world that is safer for bodies like mine, what’s the point?

Elise: Absolutely, I love that. And I feel like that sometimes when I’m thinking, like, “Oh Renaissancce literature, why?” But then I think about the ways that words have been used, leveraged from that time, specific choices that translators made or commentators made and how I’ve seen them impact my life. Talking about how when I was working in church, like how women can’t preach or whatever and how that is a toxic choice that has been made, that is removed from its context. So, I think that establishing the context can at least help us have conversations about how things don’t have to be the way that we’ve taken them to be.

Savannah: Right, it’s never inevitable.

Elise: Exactly.

Savannah: That’s what I love about theories that are grounded in language as the generator of a reality. Because when you realize that’s the case and it’s not embedded fundamentally into, like matter that can’t be changed.

Elise: Exactly

Savannah: You know, when we remove the idea of fundamental realities and universal truths, we realize that nothing is inevitable and that actually we do have the power to make change.

Elise: Absolutely.

Savannah: Figuring out how to do that—the academy just offers one pathway for us to be able to explore those ideas, I think.

Elise: Yes, that was beautifully put.

Savannah: Thank you.