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Why Study Religion? with Dr. Chadwick Allen

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. Chadwick Allen, Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

And don’t miss the upcoming opportunity to hear Dr. Allen’s talk (4/14), “Wombed Hollows, Sacred Trees: Burial Mounds and Processual Indigenous Subjectivity,” and go on a curated tour of the Newark Earthworks (4/16) with him and Dr. John Low, director of the center. These events are co-sponsored with the American Indian Studies Program in the Center for Ethnic Studies at OSU. More information can be found on the event webpage. We hope to have you join us!

Transcript:

I’m a professor of English, and my work looks at indigenous self-representation in literature, other arts, and activism. I did my undergraduate degree, however, not in English or art history or  political science or even anthropology, but rather in the comparative study of religion, which combined all of those areas and more.

I think I was drawn to the study of religion for two primary reasons. First, because I was fascinated by how different peoples construct their worldviews. And, second, because I was interested in comparative approaches. What happens when we put different conceptions of the world into generative conversation?

Because I was particularly interested in studying indigenous worldviews, I was struck that, although the study of religion was expansive in its interdisciplinarity, it was also rather conservative. When I was an undergraduate, the field focused primarily on so-called “world religions” that had one or more central written, sacred texts. I like to think the field has expanded beyond such limitations, and I think one reason more people should study religion is to push the academy to continue to expand its understandings of the breadth, diversity, and, really, the complexity of human experience

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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. 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!