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.

 

Why Study Religion? with PhD Student Elise Robbins

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 Elise Robbins, PhD Student in the Department of English, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “So in my Masters, I had a professor tell me, when I expressed that I was interested in studying religious literature, he told me, ‘OK, well you better be ready for people to argue with you.’

And I think that’s why, for me, the study of religion is so important. It’s because it is so high stakes for so many people, and people have feelings about it. I have feelings about it!

So, my main area of interest is the intersection of English literature and Christian religions in the Renaissance, which is an incredibly formative time for our modern culture. I mean, our country probably wouldn’t exist without the Protestant Reformation and what came out of that.

And, so if I had to sum up in one word why I think it’s so important to study religion, it would be the idea of “inheritance.” This idea that our past is not really our past. It informs our present and will continue to inform our future. And we can just let it take us on that ride, or we can be more critically aware abut how we shape the future coming out of the past.

So, I’m really interested in creating these connections between past individuals and religious communities to help us better understand ourselves and our very religiously steeped culture. For me, I’m particularly speaking about the Protestant-majority United States, which is my world, which has been incredibly shaped by our religious past. I think being able to understand that makes me and makes others critically aware citizens of this religiously informed community, whether we’re practitioners of religion or not. And for me personally, it helps make me a more critically aware reader of religious texts and practitioner of religion myself.

I think being able to intervene critically and see these traditions as not things that have to be the way they are but that can be changed—that originated in a specific moment in time and therefore can be different than they are—helps us to hold some things a little more loosely. And that can help us assess and evaluate these past inheritance and decide what beautiful parts of those inheritances we can hold onto and what harmful aspects of those inheritances we can—to borrow a biblical metaphor—prune in order to grow towards a more just and loving society.”

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

Dr. Solimar Otero on her Recent Book, Archives of Conjure

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to host Dr. Solimar Otero, professor of folklore at Indiana University, at OSU as she presented on some of her most recent work, including her 2020 book Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. We also got the chance to sit down with her and talk in more detail about her work in the book—her approach, motivations, biggest take-aways, and future plans. Take a look at the video and interview below to get a taste of how Dr. Otero’s research opens up new possibilities to think about how the material artifacts of the archive actively forge meaningful and transformational bonds with our ancestors. FOLLOW THIS LINK to learn more and purchase her book!

Q & A with Dr. Otero: 

How did this project start? 

I began the fieldwork and archival research for Archives of Conjure at the Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) as a Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Religions in 2009–2010. The support from the WSRP allowed me to travel to Cuba to set up the initial framework for the book, which at that point was primarily ethnographic interviews and participant observation in rituals conducted with women and LGBTQ practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions. My move to incorporate the archives of Ruth Landes and Lydia Cabrera came later with additional support from The Reed Foundation. With these elements in place, I felt I could creatively incorporate literary criticism of Mayra Santos-Febres’ and Lorna Goodison’s works as a way to bring together interdisciplinary explorations of gender, sexuality, and spirituality in Afro-Caribbean and Afrolatina religiosity.

How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

The relationships I established in Cuba with the religious community started with my dissertation research that eventually led to my first monograph, Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (University of Rochester Press, 2010). The fieldwork and oral histories for this book took place primarily in Lagos, Nigeria. However, the connections and circulation of religious practices, particularly creolized religious practices, between Cuba and Nigeria made a deep impression on me. Doing the work of reconstructing the lives of Afro-Cuban repatriate Yoruba with their descendants planted the seeds of doing the of work vivifying ancestors through research. I wanted to focus more deliberately on gender, sexuality, and race in Archives of Conjure. Thus, I incorporated queer theory, transnational feminist thought, as well as the important theoretical interventions and practices of the communities I worked with in Cuba into the project. The result is a book that reflects a range of interests, approaches, and geographies that is tied together by the idea of tracing ancestors’ intentions, movements, and interventions in the words and material culture they leave behind.

Why was it important for you to write this book?

I wanted to highlight the Afrolatinx communities, past and present, that were doing creative work in archiving their rituals through what I call residual transcriptions. These transcriptions can take on many forms, paper, beading, dolls, altars, etc. It seemed significant that these practices and objects could be shared transnationally and across linguistic differences.  I believe these forms of interacting with memory, the world, and each other is an important way to grapple with the trauma of the violence of colonialism and slavery.

Can you describe your methodology/methodologies? 

I am an interdisciplinary folklorist who engages with fieldwork, archival practices, and critical methodologies. My work involves thinking through cultural and artistic practices through multiple lenses guided by Afrolatinx religious communities’ ways of being in the world. I am particularly excited by practitioners’ own methods for documenting, reinventing, and activating their history. The theoretical perspectives of Édouard Glissant and José Esteban Muñoz also provided much inspiration for navigating issues of creolization and queer identity in the text.

What key questions do you hope this book will raise for readers?

I hope readers will take seriously the ways that everyday people practicing Afrolatinx religions work through the historical legacies of colonialism and slavery through spiritual inventions that are complex, open, and oriented towards healing. This means looking at rituals and archives in ways that make us question the authority and grand narratives that usually guide ethnography and historiography.

Where did this project lead you? What are you working on next? 

Archives of Conjure made me pay attention to the relationship between material culture and storytelling in a new way. I am working on a co-edited volume, with folklorist Anthony Bak Buccitelli, on performance and folklore, Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance. The book has essays written by folklorists, theatre scholars, and communication studies. My chapter in the volume focuses on how performances that call on the ancestors, like songs and the spoken word poetry, think through the materiality of the spirit through bodily imagery. These metaphors mark the mutable and pervasive nature of Black performance and ritual in a way that fights institutional objectification, violence, and eradication.

* * *

Video Transcript: My book Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures, deals with spirit mediums in Afro-Cuban religion, archival research from Brazilian Candomblé culture from the late 1930s, as well as Afro-Puerto Rican literature that deals with Orisha traditions and trans and LGBTQ communities. So, the book is actually really trying to get at the ways that ritual practice, archival artifacts and materials, as well as literature all come together, in Afro-Caribbean and Afrolatinx understandings of what ancestors do and their presence in our world. So, it’s an interdisciplinary book. But it’s a book that’s really based on how artists, scholars, and practitioners have ritual practices that intersect and create this—and it’s called ‘Archives of Conjure’—that create these ways of knowing that can be vivified or conjured in ways that allow us to think through histories that may not be found in the archive, that may not be found in traditional ethnography, but can be elaborated upon if we look at these folkloristic or vernacular ways of how people understand themselves, their history, and their communities.

It’s very rhizomatic. So, the cover of the book has these beads, right? Like these, this is an idé, but the beads that are on the cover are mazos. It’s actually very similar. So, when you see somebody wearing one of these, that usually means they are a priest or priestess. And it actually relates to a story, to a narrative and a particular road of the gods. Every Orisha has an avatar, and those avatars have colors and numbers and symbols associated with them. I’m a daughter of Oshun, so when people see this, they know that my road is Ibu Kole. Because the beads and the colors, have a specific rendering and numbering. And these relate to specific verses and stories that are all bunched up in these many different strands. So, the book, I tried to write it as if it was one of these strands, and they come together in these, we call this a moño, like a knot. And everything comes together, and they’ve come apart and together. So that’s the kind of rhizomatic, diasporic structure of how people can pass on these histories through difference in language, right, because you have similar beading, same beading happening in Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, and other spaces, and coded because of the ways that black religion was demonized during the colonial period in particular, is still demonized because of class and racism, in many different iterations in different places. So, this coding is something that can be read, but it also is a way of keeping history that’s not found in an archive or an ethnography or necessarily in historiography. So, this is a vernacular way of reading who somebody is, and it brings up all those other elements.

Why Study Religion? with PhD Student Savannah Finver

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 Savannah Finver, PhD Student in the Department of Comparative Studies, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “Why study religion? And why is it important to study religion? That is such a great question, and there are so many different ways that we could potentially answer it. Thinking about my context and what I study—I study the intersection of religion and law in the United States—I think that particularly in this country, there is a strong myth that there is a strict separation between church and state. But one of the things I’ve learned over the course of my study is that actually that wall of separation metaphor comes out of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association and actually doesn’t appear anywhere in the legal structure of the United States. So, what that leads to is quite a number of complications in determining what actually is the role of religion, especially when so much of the population sees religion—at least in the United States but also in other neoliberal, democratic nations—as this segmented off sphere of life that doesn’t really impact other spheres, such as politics or law—you know, “Religion is something you do on Sundays, it’s not something you bring to work with you.” Of course, as we can see, especially recently with the legal battles playing out in the Supreme Court, that’s not the case. Religion plays such a fundamental part in our lives. It informs for many of us in the United States a core part of our identity. And that, in turn, impacts how we vote. It impacts how we think about the major issues in our lives. It impacts our stances on key political questions and stuff like that. So, for me, the study of religion has allowed me to really think critically about the question of why do people do what they do? Why do they think what they think? Especially in our current moment being as divisive as it has been.

Also, religious studies is such a fundamentally interdisciplinary study that the answers that I’ve gotten when asking these questions about what people do and why they do it have been more rounded than, say, if you were only to take a psychological lens or only to take a social science lens. I’m able to get a more complete picture of how social groups form, how power operates, and what really is the role of religion in forming who we are and what we do.”

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. Solimar Otero

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. Solimar Otero of Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “That’s an excellent question! I’m actually a folklorist, and my work deals with everyday expressive culture. And religion is so much more than what people usually think of in terms of, say, formal rituals or formal texts. Religion is something that involves our everyday lives and our everyday expressions. Religions influence the way we eat, the way we think, the way we dream, the way that we understand ourselves, the way that we relate to other people. So religion’s embedded in cultural practices that many people don’t consider to be part of, say, official religious life. And so I think that we should study religions because it will allow us to learn more, not only about ourselves, but about other cultures and other people.”

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 Interim Director Dr. Hannibal Hamlin

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, and staff 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. Hannibal Hamlin, Interim Director of the Center and Professor of English, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “I’m Hannibal Hamlin. I’m the Director for the Center for the Study of Religion and a Professor in the English Department specializing in literature of the English Renaissance–Shakespeare’s time. And I’m particularly interested in literature and religion and in the influence of the English Bible on English literature.

“Why study religion? Well, in my particular period, in the English Renaissance, everybody was required to attend church by law. And there was only one Church–the Church of England. After the Reformation, there was a minority Catholic population, but religious belief and practice was virtually universal. And religion gets at the heart of what people think and believe, what they hold to be most important. It’s not just a sort-of ‘weekend thing;’ it touches every aspect of life in the period I study. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any work of literature that doesn’t, in some way or another, connect with religious questions, religious ideas. Salvation, sin, and death. More broadly speaking, religion is still a central part of so many aspects of people’s lives across the world. The majority of Americans are believers, are practitioners in one religion or another, and that percentage increases as you go across the world. And centers like Pew [Research Center], or people who keep that sort of data, tell us that over the next decades, that percentage is even going to increase. Religion simply gets at the heart of what is most important to people. Life; death; life after death, if you hold that sort of belief; sin; salvation; love; grief; forgiveness: all of these things connect to religion, and so, why not study religion?”

Why Study Religion? with Dr. David Brakke

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, and staff 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. David Brakke of OSU’s Department of History think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “You should study religion, not just because it’s a ubiquitous and important phenomenon of human culture and history–that is, that it really motivates and explains, if we can use that word, a lot of what has happened in our world. And so, it’s a basic motivation for why people do what they do. But the other reason you should study religion is because it is the quintessential interdisciplinary topic; that is, you do a little history, you do some anthropology, you do literary criticism. We look at religion in a variety of different ways, and it really introduces an undergraduate student to the different ways the Humanities are studied, rather than to just one single approach. And, of course, you should study religion because, in the end, we really don’t know what it is. And that‘s what makes studying it so fun and interesting. Because the whole time you’re doing it, you’re like, ‘what is this thing we call religion?’ and ‘does it really exist?’ and so forth, so there are just many great reasons to study religion.”

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

 

Spring 2022 Courses are Live!

Our website has been updated to include all of our course offerings for Spring 2022! As a friendly reminder to undergraduate students, Dr. David Brakke will be offering Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, a mandatory course for all Majors and Minors, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:20-3:40pm. Watch the video below to hear a little bit from Dr. Brakke about what you’ll be studying!

Transcript: “In the spring, I’ll be teaching RELSTDS 3972, which is Theory and Method in the Study of Religion. It’s required for all Religious Studies Majors because it really talks about what religion is in a kind of more abstract comparative sense than looking at any one specific religious tradition. But the class, I think, could be really useful to anybody who’s working in the Humanities because it asks very basic questions about how we interpret human phenomena like religious beliefs, religious activities, religious rituals, organizations, and the like. So, we’ll be reading what religious studies people call the ‘classic’ theorists, which are people like Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and so forth. And this is a 3000-level class, so we’re going to be reading Freud, not other people telling us about what Freud said, which should be lots of fun. But then we will work on problematizing, or kind of thinking about what these people missed, by reading some more recent theory in anthropology and feminist/womanist studies, African American theory, and the like, so that we can kind of see how religious phenomena are studied from a wide variety of perspectives.”

You can view a PDF of all of the Religious Studies courses on offer next semester here: SP2022 RELSTDS Courses

You can view a PDF of all courses that count toward the Major and Minor here: SP2022 Course Flyer 2

View a list of courses on our website HERE.

We look forward to seeing you next spring!

Community Lecture: “The Gnostic Jesus” with Dr. David Brakke

The CSR is gearing up for our upcoming Community Lecture: “The Gnostic Jesus: The Divine Savior in the Gospel of Judas and Other Early Christian Writings” with the Department of History’s Dr. David Brakke at 7pm EST on Nov. 4, 2021 at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Watch our brief interview with Dr. Brakke below and visit go.osu.edu/gnostic-jesus for more information about the event and location. Not located in Columbus? Registration is free via Zoom! We hope to see you there!

Transcript:

“My Lecture on the 4th will be on the Gospel of Judas, which is an early Christian gnostic text that first appeared in 2006, so it’s still relatively new. I’m going to focus narrowly on the question of how Jesus appears in this work. That is, what we traditionally call Christology, the study of who Christ is and what he does. So, we’ll be looking at the divine and human natures of Christ. Is he a divine being? What god sent him? And what does Jesus do to save people according to the Gospel of Judas? So, that will be our topic!”

Greetings from our Interim Director!

by Hannibal Hamlin

Warmest greetings to all in the CSR Community!

Though I know many of you who are Ohio State faculty, let me introduce myself to everyone as the Interim Director of the Center for Studies in Religion. First, though, thanks to Hugh Urban for his terrific job directing the Center over the past years! He also made my transition so much easier. Most importantly, we’re still reaping the benefits of the grant the Center received, under Hugh’s leadership, for the two-year-long “Living Well/Dying Well” program (about which more shortly). My own field is not religion per se, but English Literature. I specialize in the Renaissance period, and most of my work focuses on literature and religion, especially the English Bible and its literary/cultural influence. I am, you might say, one of those among us who studies religion, though not someone in Religious Studies.

My family is Unitarian, my wife’s is Mennonite, but I grew up in the Anglican Church of Canada, where I was a choirboy and later an adult singer, though as I moved into professional music-making I also sang in Catholic and United churches (the latter a Methodist-Presbyterian blend), as well as a synagogue and loads of concert halls. A vast amount of the vocal music repertoire is sacred or biblical, and decades of singing lodged passages deep in my head, which proved useful when I eventually arrived at graduate school and studied the Bible and religious history more seriously. The Bible is an inexhaustible collection of mesmerizing writing, and the history of its interpretation would take lifetimes to master. Nothing has had a greater influence on Western literature, and as I tell my students, vastly more copies of the Bible have been printed and disseminated than any other book in the history of the world. The historian Christopher Hill, who as a Communist had no vested interest in Christianity, wrote that if you read one book to understand seventeenth-century England it should be the Bible. But more than all this, the study of religion—whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other—draws me because it gets to what people hold most dear: good and evil, human nature, love and family, law and politics, temptation and sin, the meaning of life, which we all seek in one way or another.

Enough about me and my interests (though if you want more, I’m available for lunch or coffee anytime!). I’m delighted to announce that the Center for Studies in Religion has a year of terrific events and activities. This Fall, David Brakke will be giving a community lecture, “The Gnostic Jesus: The Divine Savior in The Gospel of Judas and Other Early Christian Writings,” based on his new translation and definitive commentary, coming out this spring. We’ll also be having at least one of our regular “No More Than a Page” discussions, letting us all explore the compelling work so many in the CSR community are doing. In the spring, the main event will be our two-day conference, The End of Life and What Comes Next: Perspectives from Healthcare, History, Anthropology, and Religion, March 29-April 1, featuring a keynote lecture by Thomas Laqueur, author of the brilliant The Work of the Dead, and a talk by Thomas Lynch, poet, best-selling author of The Undertaking: Life Studies in the Dismal Trade, and former funeral director. Other speakers will address topics including burial practices and the current migration crisis, healthcare and end of life issues, and death, burial, and the beyond in Southeast Asia, ancient China, and among African Americans.

CSR is also very happy to be co-sponsoring several lectures with other OSU centers (GO CENTERS!). In January, CSR and the Center for Folklore Studies are presenting Solimar Otero (Indiana University), author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. On February 25, CSR and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies are presenting Amy Appleford (Boston University), author of Learning to Die in London, 1380-1530. Finally, on April 14, CSR, American Indian Studies, and the Newark Earthworks Center are presenting Chadwick Allen, Co-Director of the University of Washington’s Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and author of the forthcoming Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts. We also hope to arrange a visit to the Earthworks in conjunction with the lecture.

Even if you can attend only one of these events, I look forward to seeing you, but if you’re like me you’ll want to attend them all!