October 07 2024

Interview with Megan Brankley Abbas

Megan Brankley Abbas joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Whose Islam?: The Western University and Modern Islamic Thought in Indonesia (Stanford University Press). Abbas's book "thoughtfully discusses the question of authority in Islamic studies, both religious and academic, infusing the insider-outsider debate with new empirical evidence and profound insights." 

Interview with Gloria Maité Hernández

Gloria Maité Hernández joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Savoring God: Comparative Theopoetics (Oxford University Press). Hernández's book "bridges time, linguistic difference (Spanish and Sanskrit), religious orientations (Catholicism and Hinduism), as well as mystical personalities and temperaments (John of the Cross and the Rasa Lila)." 

Interview with Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (The University of North Carolina Press). Wells-Oghoghomeh's book "tackles an impossible issue—giving a reckoning of the interior religious lives of enslaved women in the American South—and does so with breathtaking finesse."

Interview with Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm joins Kristian Petersen to discuss his award-winning book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (The University of Chicago Press). Storm's book is "a theoretical tour de force" that "charts a path forward to avoid the pitfalls, yet absorb the insights, of prominent theoretical and methodological strands that shaped the modern sciences and postmodern humanities."

Interview with Kathryn R. Barush

Kathryn R. Barush joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury Publishing). Expanding the concepts of “pilgrimage” and art as lived experience, Barush's book extends the idea of communities as culture. 

Interview with Adam Lyons

Adam Lyons joins Kristian Petersen to discuss his award-winning book Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan (Harvard University Press). Interdisciplinary in its orientation that seamlessly blends in-depth fieldwork with meticulous archival research, Lyons' book is a profound meditation on the relationship between carcerality, religion, and the modern State.

Interview by Nichole Phillips

An interview between Emily Gravett, 2023 Katie Geneva Cannon Excellence in Teaching Award Winner, and Nichole Phillips, chair of AAR Committee on Teaching and Learning

Namdrol Miranda Adams

Namdrol Miranda Adams discusses the state of Buddhist theological education, gleaning insights from two leading contemporary Buddhist scholars. 

Interview with Rhiannon Graybill

Rhiannon Graybill joins Kristian Petersen to discuss her award-winning book Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press). Through the book, Graybill critically and authentically engages with many of the Hebrew's Bible's most disturbing narratives, while displaying remarkable loyalty to the promise of remaining interested in the question of what comes after sexual violence.

By Russell T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama

Desktop computer screen showing the webpage for AAR's Academic Relations Committee, blue text on a white screen

In October 2023, I hosted a webinar for the American Academy of Religion’s Academic Relations Committee (ARC), which I currently chair, devoted to the topic of department mergers (a topic well known to many in our field). My guest was Steve Berkwitz of Missouri State, former chair of their Department of Religious Studies and now head of the newly formed (and considerably larger) unit, the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Religions. It combines what many campuses would call their Department of Modern Languages with Religious Studies.

Pages