Assembly

Political Theology Network

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Conversation at the intersection of religion and politics

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S4 E9: Why Synthetic Religions? On Nature, Culture, and the Political Struggle to Slow Down Time

As we reach the conclusion of the current Series, Amanda and Sher take a deep dive into the thematic framework for binding the previous eight episodes: synthetic religions. Tune into to hear about the story behind the term, works such as Christopher Preston's The Synthetic Age & Catherine Albanese's Nature Religion in America that inspired its fruition, and memorable moments in conversation with our guests that enriched our understanding of synthetic religions as a conceptual tool for disrupting the binary between nature and culture that has long sustained the disciplinary boundary between the STEM sciences and the humanities and exploring the synthesis between the two. How might theorizing religion as a potent force that materially transforms nature as opposed to a private affair or worse a relic from the past with merely symbolic value demand its scholars and practitioners alike to reevaluate how much power they can exercise in the realm of politics and civic engagement? What would higher education look like if religion was no longer pit against the study of science and technology but on the contrary studied as the synthetic assemblages which sustain the promise of life amidst fears of extinction? What does our imminent future look like if imagined through the lens of synthetic religions and how might it slow our experience of time? Join us as we broach these broad questions while asking what is 'synthetic religions?'

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S4 E8 – Religion after the Outrage

The advent of new digital technologies has made surveillance ubiquitous and inconspicuous. From facial recognition software designed to detect your mood to social media apps that track your daily shopping habits, we are now constantly surveilled in the absence of a guard watching over us. Indeed, a peculiar feature of digital media is that its turned over the burden of surveillance from state-sponsored policing agencies onto civilians. How might digital technologies both destabilize the power of authoritative figures ranging from the President to the Pope while simultaneously buttress wide spread institutional corruption and lack of accountability by transforming civic society into a motley of mobs policing each other over words typed on social media accounts? Furthermore, what is the role of religion in shaping these novel challenges and promises of exercising power as computer users? Are digital surveillance technologies akin to a religion of control? Alternatively, how might religion help us develop bonds over the web that are not sealed by feelings of outrage? Join us today as we debate these questions on “Religion after the Outrage”. Dr. Jeremy Weissman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Nova Southeastern University and author of the recently released monograph “The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media," joins today’s show to discuss new surveillance technologies and the complex ethical and moral challenges these new technologies pose for religion scholars, theologians, and religious leaders. To learn more about Dr. Weissman’s work please visit the following link.

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S 4 E 7- Adaptive Reuse

More religious spaces are currently closing than opening in America today. Another recent study found that over 50% of religious communities are facing financial difficulties and hardships. In some cities, nearly 20-30% of churches have closed or are currently in the process of closing. Moreover, the covid-19 pandemic and rising inflation has exacerbated many of these existing problems and created added financial strains on already imperiled religious communities. How will these growing financial hardships impact the religious practices and beliefs of communities in the future? Is this the end of religion as we have known it? Is it possible that the closure of institutional religious spaces is heralding a new period of religious renewal and awakening? Join us for episode 7 of the Assembly Podcast as we debate these questions and explore the future of sacred spaces in the United States and globally. We are joined by Rebekah Coffman, a historian and curator whose work and research explores the concept of adaptive reuse and application within religious spaces. Over the course of her career working and advising religious communities, Rebekah has pioneered a collection of new methods and strategies for reconfiguring and reimagining religious spaces. To contact and learn more about Rebekah Coffman's work and exhibitions visit the following link. A transcription for the podcast is available via the following link.

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S4 E6- Deaf Harmonies

This episode is an exploration of deafness away from a loss of hearing to a hearing faculty and a practice of attuning to the harmonic sounds of everyday life that travel in between shortcomings of contemporary urban soundscapes. Joining us on the show is Alison O'Daniel. Alison is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a visual artist and a filmmaker working around sound, moving image, sculpture, installation and performance. She has screened and exhibited in countless galleries and museums both domestically and internationally. These include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Centro Centro Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles. The Tuba Thieves, an ongoing film project, explores how high school students listen and hear when one of the main instruments in their marching band is missing in response to a rash of tuba thefts that occurred between 2011 and 2013 from high schools across Southern California. Alison shares with us a riveting story about how the making of the Tuba Thieves led to the discovery of a barn-like concert hall in the green, hilly mountains of the Hudson Valley area where a pianist once sat in front of the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without pressing any key. Watch the teaser for the Tuba Thieves and an excerpt of the 4' 33" scene. Make sure to follow Alison's instagram handle to stay up to date on her future works. Read about her past works as well such as the installation at a former chapel of a German monastery which in the form of a colorful carpet captures the feeling of hard to hear and the transcript of an interview about Tuba Thieves that Alison conducted with Anne Ellegood .

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S4 E5- Anger’s Anatomy

Anger can be a crippling emotion when we are forced to consider the limitations of our body. Perhaps no one else can better testify to this predicament than people with disabilities who routinely hear jeers and jokes about the assistance they depend upon to do things that able bodies take for granted. But what if anger could transform into a seed that nourishes people with disabilities to grow legs to walk on, pass through the crowd, and demand to be seen much like Moses at the Red Sea. This episode explores the regenerative potency of anger alongside two women with disabilities who also identify as punk: Adina Burke and Francis Stewart. Adina Burke is a punk musician and a poet. The Hat Box Collective, a collaboration with Evan Koch of the WARSAW Band, is a series of poems with distortions of the guitar to accentuate the coupling of two seemingly antithetical emotions: anger and empathy. Adina is also the author of A Bird’s Eye, her inaugural publication which was followed by Wheelchairs, Whips, and Bondage Tape: A comprehensive guide to f*****g, disability, and falling in and out of love poetically. Lastly, Adina is a Jew who reminded us that Moses was disabled. Our second guest Dr. Francis Stewart is the Implicit Religion Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln England and a pioneering figure in the study of punk and religion. She is the author of Punk Rock is My Religion: Straight Edge Punk and Religious Identity and presently working towards the publication of her second monograph on punk women in her homeland of Northern Ireland. You can support our guests by immersing in their publications. We also highly encourage you to consider purchasing the Hat Box Collective. For directions, simply click on this link.

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S4 E4 – The Unnatural Costs of Healthcare

From skyrocketing medical bills to medical error and nursing/physician burnout, the US healthcare system incurs great costs to our health and well-being. While we might be healed from illness, our experiences with the healthcare system routinely leave us with mounting medical bills and emotional trauma. One recent study estimates that healthcare spending per person will surpass $15,000 annually by 2023. What exactly is the root cause of these growing costs? Governments, institutions, and corporations are investing more energy and resources than ever before into understanding and redressing these increasing costs, yet they only continue to accumulate and grow. In fact, venture capitalists are reportedly investing more money than ever before into new technologies to decrease the costs of care while these technologies simultaneously and paradoxically only increase the costs of care. Is it possible that we are fundamentally misunderstanding the root cause of healthcare’s unnatural costs? Join us for episode 4 of season 4's Assembly Podcast, “The Unnatural Costs of Healthcare” as we debate and explore how the healthcare system's historical denigration of spirituality and religion incurs an unnatural cost and one which reveals the root problem with the US healthcare system. We are joined today in our discussion by Dr. Janet Roseman, The Sidney Project in Spirituality and Medicine and Compassionate Care™ Course Director: Janet Lynn Roseman, Phd, Associate Professor, Integrative Medicine. She is the author of numerous works, including If Joan of Arc Had Cancer: Finding Courage, Faith, and Healing from History's Most Inspirational Woman Warrior. Dr. Roseman joins us on today's show to discuss her pioneering work on The Sidney Project in Spirituality and Medicine and Compassionate Care™, why the figure of Joan of Arc is a model for cultivating a humanistic approach to medicine, and how her work with traditional medicine healers informs her understanding of the relationship between religion, spirituality, and medicine. Dr. Roseman also discusses the recent completion and publication of her curated collection of interviews with traditional medicine healers, LISTENING TO TRADITIONAL MEDICINE HEALERS: WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT WELLNESS? Dr. Roseman can be contacted at jroseman@nova.edu. The transcript for today's episode is available via the following link.

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S4 E3- When Dirt Can’t Be Seen

We purge our trash yet trash never disappears. It travels from the recycle bin to the dark abyss of rivers and oceans and returns to us as toxic contaminants in the fist we eat. As a consequence, we now face ecological hazards that are far worse than ever before. How did religion shape this predicament? How might religion point to its resolution? What are waste sites and why are they so useful for practicing a different kind of environmentalism, one marked by embracing the trash around us so that they don't haunt us back when Dirt Can't be Seen? Joining us on the show for this third episode of Season 4 Synthetic Religions are Cavan Concannon, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California and author of the brand new book Profaning Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Susumu Nejima, Professor of the Faculty of Regional Development Studies at Toyo University, Japan and author of NGO's in the Muslim World: Faith and Social Services (New York: Routledge, 2016). This attachment contains resources on the institutions, images, and publications which are referenced in the podcast.

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S4 E2- Missing Attachments

Amidst the pending Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court case, how does miscarriage disrupt the ongoing debates over abortion rights? Fears over the potential demise of the famous 1973 Roe v. Wade has galvanized contemporary advocates of a woman's legal right to an abortion to share their stories of abortion out loud, with examples including tennis legend Billy Jean King. A woman’s body orchestrating an abortion onto itself, a phenomenon that the field of medicine refers to as spontaneous abortion, is still a taboo. But this predicament is not uncommon. Mayo Clinic estimates that 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Missing Attachments, episode 2 of Season 4, is a conversation on miscarriage with Ikhlas Saleem, a Moorish American Muslim mother of two children named Mohammed Ahmed and Nur Jannah. Ikhlas recounts the brief moment when Nur Jannah’s heart stopped beating and describes the lasting attachment to her daughter's spiritual life. Do consider viewing this document after listening to the episode. It lists non-profits that help women cope with miscarriage, links to other stories of miscarriage, and lastly a link to the homepage of a podcast called Identity Politics that was hosted by Ikhlas herself.

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S4 E1 – Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders is the inaugural episode of the Assembly Podcast Season 4 “Synthetic Religions” that explores how political theology is an expression of a contestation over the natural and the unnatural, pivoting ever so intensively since the advent of biotechnology. This particular episode journeys onto the undulating and rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania and the flat commercial areas of sprawling metropolitical regions across the US to explore how a crossing over the boundary between the built and the natural environment is what ultimately gives rise to the phenomenon of American Religion. Co-hosts Amanda Furiasse and Sher Afgan Tareen are joined by M. Shobhana Xavier, author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures (2018) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of several books including The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) and most recently Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (2020). This document contains resources for the materials discussed in this episode. We hope you find them useful for teaching, research, and/or community engagement.

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S3 E5 – Race, Theodicy, & Philosophy with Anthony Paul Smith

In this episode of Assembly, Zac and Amaryah talk with Anthony Paul Smith about his Contending Modernities piece, Provincializing Theodicy. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter, Fanon, Laruelle, and others, Smith discusses the relationship between this piece and his forthcoming work on theodicy, the function of theodicy in contemporary culture, and theodicy and state of the university.

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