The Classical Ideas Podcast
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Gregory Soden
Simply stated, religion matters. Religion matters not only for personal reasons, but also for social, economic, political, and military purposes. Unfortunately, studies suggest that religious knowledge and cultural literacy for any religious tradition is either in decline or is non-existent in the United States, despite being one of the most religiously diverse nation on earth. Today, religion is implicated in nearly every major national and international issue. The public arena is awash in religious explanations and arguments for nearly every issue. The goal of The Classical Ideas Podcast is to empower students with the core knowledge of major world religions to improve citizenship and agency in a diverse society. Welcome to the show!
EP 291: Imam Professionalization w/Dr. Nancy Khalil
Nancy A. Khalil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with an appointment in the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program. Her research broadly focuses on the politics of the idea of American Islam and her forthcoming manuscript is on the profession of the Imam in America. Her academic work has been supported by several foundations, including the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, MSA National, IIIT, and the Islamic Scholarship Fund. She completed her PhD in anthropology at Harvard University, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale’s Center on Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration and the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Dr. Khalil previously served on the board of directors for Islamic Relief USA and the Muslim Justice League. Before academia, she was the Muslim Chaplain at Wellesley College. She is committed to serving the American Muslim community as a translator and bridge between academia and public service. Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024
Mar 26
33 min
EP 290: Science Fiction and Dune w/Dr. Patrick J. D'Silva
Patrick J. D’Silva (Ph.D., Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a faculty member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. His current research projects include analyzing the intersection of race, religion, and cultural appropriation in contemporary science fiction, as well as the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have engaged with yoga. His previous research examines the circulation of esoteric breathing practices between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia during the early-modern period. He is the co-author (with Carl Ernst) of the forthcoming Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan. He lives in Boulder, CO with his family. Visit Patrick D'Silva online: https://www.patrickjdsilva.com/ Visit Sacred Writes online: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024
Mar 20
51 min
EP 289: The Cake Baker and the Coach w/Dr. Charles McCrary
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
Mar 12
40 min
EP 288: Multiracial Cosmotheandrism w/Dr. Aizaiah Yong
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/
Mar 5
36 min
EP 287: Moon of the Turning Leaves w/Waubgeshig Rice
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.
Feb 16
43 min
EP 286: Political Organizing and Teaching about Theology w/Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart
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  
Feb 14
30 min
EP 285: Jewish Cemeteries at the US Border w/Dr. Maxwell Greenberg
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. Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023
Feb 7
59 min
EP 284: Teaching, Curriculum, & Standards w/Dr. Elizabeth Jemison
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
Jan 31
42 min
EP 283: Racial Science of Protestant Missions w/Dr. Matthew J. Smith
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
Jan 24
34 min
EP 282: Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England and Modern Traditional Catholics w/Dr. Lauren Horn Griffin
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
Jan 18
40 min
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