In the fall of 2010, I was a MA student beginning my second year of graduate school at Georgia State University. Molly Bassett was a new hire for our department, in her first year teaching in a tenure-track position. The previous semester I had taken a graduate seminar with her on material culture theory and method in religious studies, and it was there that I found her perspective and approach to teaching really engaging.¹[1] She presented her ideological stance in that course, often reiterating that religious studies is more a field than a discipline, and that became even more in clear the course we discuss here, "Religious Dimensions in Human Experience." In our preliminary discussions about this series, Molly referred to her pedagogical approach to that class as an “ensemble approach.” That will bare itself out in my reflection on the iteration of the course I took in 2010 and in our discussion about the one she’s organized for this fall. It’s also, I think a meta-term for the way she methodologically approaches religious studies more generally.

"Religious Dimensions" had two primary lenses that Molly made clear in her syllabus. The first was that the class was anthropological in nature. “In this course,” she noted in the course introduction, “we will not assume the category of ‘religious experience,” but rather interrogate various dimensions of human experience that we might call ‘religious’.” While this may not satisfy all scholars skeptical of phenomenological approaches, it was more than adequate for reasons I’ll explain later. The second lens, a subcategory of the first, was that of narrative. Overall, one of the main takeaways of the class was an implicit request that we become more cognizant of the primacy of narrative—not just in “religions,” but in the ways we make sense of the worlds we encounter as scholars. The sheer variety of approaches, media, and sources in the syllabus—the ensemble approach—worked together to make this latter point clearer over time.

I’ve been slow to listen to Florence + the Machine’s newest album, "How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful," which is rather odd given that I’m a long-time fan, and thus have waited in patient, eager anticipating for over three years for new material from the fiery musician who so many, myself included, see as  "flamboyantly imaginative" and "captivating," whose “exceptional sense of melody” produces songs that “let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines, leaping deftly across her registers.” As I’ve often said about another of my favorite musicians, Karen Berquist of "Over the Rhine," Florence too sings like she’s having an orgasm. How could one not be captivated?

Yet, when I first heard “What Kind of Man?,” the first single from the new album, soon after it was released in February, I was disappointed. It’s blues-pop vibe just didn’t jive with me—or, rather, it just hit the wrong note, evoking more of a feeling of post-coital ambivalence and regret then of orgasmic release. I’d recently been through a tough breakup of my own, and wanted the melancholic, abstracting Florence of “What the Water Gave Me” and “Breaking Down” or, even better, the melodic Florence of “Dog Days are Over” and “Shake it Out:” the Florence of upbeat, empowering hopefulness. I was looking for the blues without the pop, or even the pop after the blues. But not both together.