Episode 103: Major religions? Minor religions? Must we?

Transcript for Episode 103:

Available here and as a PDF!

Shownotes for Episode 103:

We talked a ton about the world religions paradigm, its problems, and its ties to imperialism in this episode.

We had a bunch of keywords for y’all this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

• minoritized, world religions, major religions, epistemic/structural violence vs physical violence

Story Time:

• Ilyse’s close reading this episode was Jonathan Z. (JZ) Smith’s incredibly well-read, well-cited, important piece for religion nerds, “Religions, Religions, Religious” (1998). It can be found here as a pdf.

• If you’re interested in reading more JZ, here’s Ilyse’s recommendations for where to start:

  • There’s a fun video interview with JZ about religion and death here.

  • There’s a really wonderful interview with JZ about his career, his intellectual work, and being a professor here.

  • Relating Religions is a volume Ilyse comes back to often, especially for teaching her theory & methods units/classes.

  • Ilyse also loved hearing JZ speak at AAR in 2010 as a far-too-eager graduate student. He talked about camp; she, a camper, was smitten. Here’s the video.

We also name-checked a few theorists we need in order to think about imperialism (and you’re encouraged to read or reread!):

• Edward Said, a scholar and critic best known for his book Orientalism; Ilyse cited Culture and Imperialism.

• Frantz Fanon, whom Ilyse mentioned with the notion of “the colonized mind,” was a scholar, philosopher, and critic best known for Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

• Zora Neale Hurston, known best for her literary works but whose anthropological scholarship is key here, is a meaningful, contemporaneous addition for US contexts.

Megan cited Vanessa Hidary’s “Hebrew Mamita,” which is worth a watch.

Ilyse always cites Eddie Izzard’s classic bit about how the British conquered the world through the cunning use of flags—before launching into some killjoy history of how imperialism = genocide.

Megan’s primary sources also mentioned the “CoExist” Bumper Sticker, how it doesn’t actually include all religions, but more importantly how it assumes we all start from the same position—she lamented that Sikhs, Muslims, and Jews don’t have a choice about “coexisting” with Christians, who definitely do have and make that choice.

Your homework for Episode 103:

Since this was a scholarship-heavy episode, we assigned a few pieces of our own designed to distill the problems of “world religions” or “major religions” using examples and crisp case studies .

Megan’s written a lot about minority religions. In fact, she has a whole book coming out about it! But this week she assigned:

• an article she wrote about religion, prisons, and excluding an imam from an execution in Alabama.

• an interview with Andrew Aghapour about minority religions and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was a follow up to Megan’s article about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt, cults, and the problems of depicting minority religions in media.

• Finally, Megan has three pieces up at The Revealer based on her forthcoming book, both of which talk about minority religions, how they are read, and how dangerous that is. Find them here.

Ilyse assigned y’all all that JZ above. But she also mentioned:

• Tomoko Masuzawa’s fantastic, mandatory book about world religions, The Invention of World Religions.

  • Here’s some other options, if your library’s copy is already checked out:

    • a podcast interview with Masuzawa about secularism, the university, religion, and history

    • a 3-video series featuring conversation with Masuzawa and Kathryn Lofton.

• Ilyse also suggested a few of her own pieces about world religions, major religions, and the damage categorization does.

  • Here’s a piece she wrote for Maydan about the category of religion beyond Euro-American sources.

  • Here’s another she wrote which gets at the problems of how a major religion—Islam—came to be understood as one thing (that is, violent).