In the beginning, we argued over origins

At the most recent meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination upheld its policy of not ordaining women as pastors.

After voting to finalize the expulsion of churches with female pastors, Southern Baptists voted to further expand restrictions on women in church leadership, potentially opening up hundreds of new churches to investigation and expulsions.

The SBC's policies state, "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture."

As gender studies professor Susan M. Shaw wrote for The Conversation, such “battles over women in ordained ministry in the SBC are not new.” The matter of women’s roles as preachers, teachers and leaders at large have been debated by Southern Baptists since the convention’s founding in 1845.

One of the points used to undergird the argument to exclude women from ordination is a doctrine known as the “orders of creation” (or “order of creation”), which affirms God’s role in establishing social domains in the family, church and society through the very “order” of creation of the world, as recorded in the book of Genesis.

Shaw wrote:

In 1984, as fundamentalists gained greater control, the SBC passed a resolution against women’s ordination. The resolution said that women were excluded from ordained ministry to “preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.”

Indeed, the discourse around origins can be powerful.

In this post from “What You Missed Without Religion Class,” I explore the conflict over origins and show how dealing with the genesis of the universe isn’t necessarily about what happened (or not) in the past, but very much about ordering life, traditions and communities in the present.

Of αιτία and the κόσμος

For word nerds, etiology – when used within the realm of religious studies – refers to a quasi-historical or mythical description of origins. Drawn from the Greek term αιτία, these stories have to do with the cause or why of something — that which is responsible for a present condition, the reason for today’s state of affairs.

One type of etiology is a cosmogony, which is a myth on the origins of the cosmos (κόσμος) – a story that tells us how the grandest system of them all came into being in the first place.

When I first started studying religion, I was fascinated with cosmogonies.

I devoured stories like that of Rangi the Sky-father and Papa, the Earth-mother from the annals of Maōri teachings (akoranga), perused narratives about humanity’s creation from reeds (uthlanga/umlanga), as told among the Nguni peoples of Southern Africa (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi), and dove deep into Ancient Near Eastern origin myths like the “Enuma Elish,” the Hindu “hymn of creation” from the Rig Veda, and Maya myths like the Popol Vuh.

Coming from a Christian household, my original intentions were to compare these cosmogonies to that with which I was raised. I wondered what different traditions had to say about the origin of everything that ever existed and what these stories had to say about the relationship between humans and the cosmos.

Why origin stories matter

But my early investigations were plagued by a fatal problem: I was searching for an essence, archetype, or sacred thread that would link these various stories into one grand narrative or speak to some fundamental truth about how the Divine is related to life in the world today.

Today, some two decades after I first heard the story of the Rainbow Bridge — a Chumash narrative about how people came to the mainland from Limuw (Santa Cruz) Island after being created from the seeds of a magic plant by Hutash, the Earth-mother — I’ve come to view these texts from a very different perspective than what my previous lens could offer.

These texts matter, but less because of what they have to say about the essential nature of things (which I was in search of) or whether or not they are historically verifiable.

As a point of fact, the interpretation of creation myths has changed over time. Take, for example, how the “Creation story” in Genesis has been seen as everything from a poem to a quasi-scientific textbook concerning earth’s origins and used as a prooftext to support views ranging from “young Earth” creationism to evolutionary creation, “old Earth” creationism to intelligent design.

Instead, cosmogonies and etiologies matter because they provide a window into how communities, or the students and scholars who study them, utilize such stories to situate themselves in the world and in relation to others.

The search for origins always comes from a specific place, interested in defining truth from its own position. And, in doing so, establishing the otherness between “us” (placed perfectly in the perspective of eternal history) and “them” (hopelessly askew in the etiology of things).

As the SBC example shows, these accounts use some narrative from the past (i.e., the world’s creation, a nation’s origins, the conception of a community, or the genesis of a particular place or geological formation) to authorize a position in the present.

In other words, these origin discourses are not actually about how something came into being, but instead about legitimizing or benefitting the position of the one who is telling or hearing the tale today.

Comparing cosmogonies, evaluating etiologies

There are innumerable etiologies floating around the world. The student of religion is welcome to read and study them. In fact, it is critical that the student of religion pays attention to origin stories. But not for the reasons we might think. 

Rather, we should approach them as just-so stories that authenticate contemporary discourses or positions of power in the fertile soil of a past beyond our reach and understanding.

In the case of the SBC, that means reminding women that they come after men. And, further, because of that “fact,” they are not meant to serve as pastors.

The student of religion’s task in studying cosmogonies like that is to make sense of alternative orders of reality and how they shape social realities in contemporary contexts.

Above all, as we compare cosmogonies and evaluate etiologies, we should be careful to approach them as very human attempts at producing a comprehensive vision of ultimate importance. Even describing them carries the risk of uncritically reproducing them and therefore, legitimizing them.

We must always remind ourselves that as these stories are told and retold, studied and deciphered, they are meant to not only remind hearers of their place in the cosmos, but to form persons for a particular kind of religious, social, political, or economic life.

And finally, a humble student of religion will remember that’s as true of our evaluations as it is of the origin stories we study.

The Library of Forgotten Wonders

In a small, eastern German city, a treasure trove of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts invites visitors to explore the longstanding and ongoing connections between Europe and the Middle East.

You could walk by every day and not know it was there.

That is, if you could ignore a sprawling, white-walled palace perched high upon a hill, overlooking the town of Gotha’s bucolic environs in central Germany.

Known as Friedenstein Palace, it is one of the best-preserved examples of early Baroque European architecture. Established in the mid 17th-century by Duke Ernst I (1601-1675) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the building survived World War II and the Cold War, but the signs of its age are showing. With orange stains dripping from its windows, rotting support beams in its vaulted roofs, scaffolding clinging to columns in the courtyard, and the detritus of renovation strewn about its gardens, Friedenstein might look like a palace long past its former glory. But inside are resplendent rooms reflective of the riches of a dukedom at the height of its power and, in the east wing, a world-famous collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and artifacts.

PHOTO courtesy AramcoWorld/Fabian Brennecke.

Altogether, the Gotha Research Library holds about 1 million objects, including nearly 362,000 books, manuscripts, and print materials. Among them are 800 years of Islamicate scholarship, comprised of 3,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This “Oriental Collection” — featuring reams of legal, literary, grammatical, philosophical, geographic, theological, and other texts — sits side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves with paragons from the history of Europe, including a UNESCO World Heritage first print copy of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther’s "On the Freedom of a Christian,” published in 1520.

Each book and every manuscript has a story: from a famous hadith collection possibly pulled out from under a murdered mufti’s corpse during the siege of Buda in 1684 to an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great in Turkish, featuring a richly colored depiction of the Greek king’s mythical “flying machine” — a set of gryphons chained to a throne with rods of meat above. As they traveled, these texts survived numerous, disruptive epochs in European and Middle Eastern history — including two world wars, the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, scholars across the globe travel to Gotha to explore its almost encyclopedic collection of treasured documents.

The library’s history tells a tale of scientific adventure and of a contemporary renaissance in the study of Middle Eastern manuscripts. More than that, it reveals how such a significant treasury made it to a somewhat forgotten, small city in the former East German Republic.

*Corrections: the lead image on the website is of the Herzogliches Museum of Gotha, not the Palace with the library. Also, Kathrin Paasch did not become director until after the tenure of its previous director, Rupert Schaab, ended in 2005.

From Mecca to Mount Kailash: The Enduring Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World

As the summer travel season starts and the annual Hajj — the Islamic pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia required of all Muslims who are able — is expected to begin on June 26, it seems a good time to reconsider the concept of “spiritual travel” or, more specifically, pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is generally defined as a journey with a religious purpose, often taken to a place of spiritual significance involving certain rituals or paths.

More broadly, pilgrimage can be any journey and its associated activities, undertaken by people to and from one or more places made meaningful by the pilgrims themselves.

Though long associated with European Christianity in Western academia, or perhaps with significant sacred shrines like Mecca or Mount Kailash in Tibet, pilgrimage can also include trips to seemingly mundane places or movement to and from otherwise unexceptional locations.

Furthermore, pilgrimage is not restricted to institutional religions. Some pagans and others with a focus on old traditions (i.e., Reconstructionists or "Recons") travel to lands where they believe original gods were from or to ancient sites of significance. For example, a Greek Recon may go to Greece; Celtic practitioners to standing stones in the United Kingdom; heathens to Iceland; African traditionalists to significant sites in South Africa or Uganda.

Visits to nonreligious sites have also become increasingly popular as a form of pilgrimage in recent years. Large numbers of people find meaning in traveling to memorials of suffering, pain and bloodshed like the 9/11 Memorial in New York City or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia. There are also pilgrimages to places linked to such pop culture icons as Elvis Presley, Susan B. Anthony, Steve Prefontaine or Taylor Swift.

With all these varying expressions, pilgrimage — like other religious rituals and phenomena — is what we make it. Less than looking for the transcendent meaning or chasing after miracles, the student of religion should pay attention to the human elements of spiritual travel: Things like tourism and economics, politics and place.

The importance of place, people and politics.

Journeys to holy sites and major religious celebrations can be shot through with multiple meanings, personal motivations, and traveling trajectories.

Take, for example, the pilgrimage experience of those who make the expedition to Tepeyac hill in modern-day Mexico City. There, each December, pilgrims from all over the world gather to celebrate the annual feast of the Virgen de Guadalupe, joining a centuries-old Catholic tradition of celebrating what is known as “the miracle on Tepeyac Hill.”

According to celebrants, it was at that spot that May, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a Nahua villager named Juan Diego. The cloak she gifted him included an image of herself as a radiating, brown-skinned goddess robed in stars. Despite its linkages with Spanish colonialism and forced conversion, the image and festival have enduring cultural importance in Mexico. After 500 years of devotion, the annual celebrations are some of the most robust in all of Catholicism.

But each year, it is not only Catholic devotees who make the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. So do some of the city’s Sufis. According to religion scholar Lucía Cirianni Salazar, members of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi tariqa in Mexico City join millions of others to commemorate the Virgin’s apparition. Justifying their presence from a universalist perspective, the leader of the group — Shaykha Amina — told Salazar that the location represents one of the most powerful places for connection to the “one God.”

This example reminds us that far from removing people from the world, pilgrimage is all about places in the world. Less about the world beyond, pilgrimage is often very much about places we inhabit and fill with meaning.

This means that although often associated with the extraordinary and faraway, pilgrimage sites can be local and surprisingly unremarkable. What matters is context and the meaning people give such locales.

Pilgrims frequently journey with the expectation of miracles or receiving spiritual blessings from contact with significant religious figures, symbols and artifacts (e.g., relics or icons). Or they expect the travel itself will provide some transcendent benefit. Even so, pilgrims' progress and practices are intimately tied up with the worldly dynamics of tourism, local economies and the embodied experience of bumping up against fellow pilgrims with blood, sweat and tears along the way.

Pilgrimage also has powerful political overtones. For example, the disputed site of Marian pilgrimage in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is suffused with symbols of Croat nationalism, featuring prayer beads in national colors and Mary set against the backdrop of a Croatian national flag on everything from pillows to pillboxes. Still, despite its contentious place in the civil war of the 1990s and ongoing tensions in the Balkans, Medjugorje has become a huge draw for pilgrims drawn to its calls for peace and the renewal of faith along with prophecies of divine intervention.

Other pilgrimages such as the Hajj become playgrounds for political football, with nation-states and power brokers fighting over everything from logistics and management to the miracles and blessing associated with sacred sites.

The politics of pilgrimage are also at play around physical boundaries and borders that some spiritual travelers must contend with. Beyond visas and travel quotas, pilgrims must navigate the vicissitudes of state power and the various impediments that are put in place to deter, capture, or otherwise manage and control traveling bodies.

Those journeying to and from pilgrimage sites are often on the margins of official religious communities. Instead, their motivations for movement are linked to personal spiritual trajectories, frequently with little or nothing to do with institutionalized religion.

The physicality of pilgrimage must also be taken into consideration. To return to Tepeyac, Elaine Peña talks about Marian pilgrims’ “devotional labor.” Peña writes of “the moments of pain and discomfort” for pilgrims making their way to offer devotos to the Virgin of Guadalupe every December — “walking on blistering feet, proceeding on injured knees and cramped legs, with growling stomach and salty saliva, with too much light and too little sleep.”

Enjoy the journey.

As I write this blog, I am already starting to plan for my own travels this summer, including a visit to the largest mosque in the United Kingdom and some off-the-beaten-track churches in Berlin, Germany. While not explicitly pilgrimages, these trips will be filled with divine intimations.

This means I will be looking out for some of the very things mentioned above: The importance of place, the role of politics and economics and the position and plurality of bodies that inhabit a space or move around, through and within it.

Perhaps you too are getting ready for a trip. Maybe, you are embarking on a pilgrimage of your own this summer. As you do so, try to not only savor the spiritual importance of such travel, but the very human aspects of how these journeys are made holy in the midst of the mundane.

FURTHER READING:

•Read “A pilgrim’s progress: Resources for reporting on religious journeys,” from ReligionLink.

•Explore the Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism book series.

•Read Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement, by Simon Coleman (2022).

•Explore the Oxford Bibliography on Pilgrimage for numerous resources, studies and possible sources.

What is Hindu nationalism and how is it impacting the U.S.?

In August 2022, the township of Edison, New Jersey, celebrated the 75th anniversary of India’s independence with a parade through its central business district. Many in attendance, including local and statewide politicians, wore and waved India’s tricolor flag.

One of the floats in the procession was a bulldozer bearing photos of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, Yogi Adityanath.

The bulldozer’s symbolism was lost on many in attendance.

But, as Reuters reported, for Indian Muslims at the parade, the “baba bulldozer” – a blunt instrument used to demolish Muslim homes in India — was a “symbol of division and discrimination.”

In January 2023, after months in court, the inclusion of the bulldozer in the procession was declared an “act of bias“ after a joint investigation by the local county prosecutor’s office and police department. But they said there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges against parade organizers.

The incident highlighted the global relevance of Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that views Indian national identity and culture as inseparable from Hinduism as an ethnic category.

With origins dating back to the 19th century, Hindu nationalism — or Hindutva — encompasses a broad range of groups in India, but also among the Indian diaspora, from Europe to Edison.

The latest edition of ReligionLink provides background on what Hindu nationalism is, stories that show how it is influencing politics across the globe and experts to help you better understand its heady mix of ideology and national identity. 

Barely Anyone Reads the Bible in Germany. So Why Are Luther Bibles Selling So Well?

From “better an end with horror than a horror without end” to expressions like bloodhound, baptism of fire, and heart’s content, the German language is peppered with idioms from a source that’s more than 500 years old: the Luther Bible.

A translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the Bible continues to be a touchpoint for German culture, politics, and language. And in 2022 — over 500 years after its initial publication — it was a bestseller yet again.

According to the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft) in Stuttgart, they circulated 130,000 copies of the Luther Bible in 2022, accounting for almost half of their total distributions that year.

“After five centuries, it remains the most popular Bible translation in Germany,” said the German Bible Society’s General Secretary Christian Roesel (Rösel), “it is and will remain a classic.”

While the Luther Bible may remain a definitive example of German literature and hold a special place in its national psyche, ordinary Germans often know its catch phrases better than its contents. According to a 2017 opinion poll conducted by Insa-Consulare (Erfurt) and the German Christian magazine “Idea,” only four percent of German adults read the Bible every day. 70 percent say they have never read it once.

That begs the question, at a time when Bible sales are generally falling — related to a decline in Christianity’s share of the overall German population — why do so many Germans keep buying it?

BorderLine Impossible

As Hamza starts tellling his story, tears roll slowly down his cheeks.

Sitting on the back of a white pick-up truck with other Ghanaians, Hamza and his fellow countrymen are within eyesight of the rusted steel bollard fencing that demarcates the dividing line between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico.

On the other side of la linea, Hamza hopes to claim asylum in the United States.

It’s been a long, laborious journey to get this far. Hamza left Ghana for Brazil the day after his only daughter was born, which also happened to be Eid al-Fitr. That was May 2, 2022. It took Hamza another three, arduous months to make his way by foot, truck, train, and bus across the Amazon and then through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala to Mexico. Along the way, Hamza said he saw dead bodies hidden in the bush, witnessed multiple assaults, and suffered the pangs of frequent hunger without adequate access to halal food. He spent another one and a half months in Mexico, bouncing from shelter to shelter, struggling to maintain a halāl diet and keep to his daily cycle of prayers.

Then he heard about Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), a sanctuary in Tijuana for Muslim migrants run by the Latina Muslim Foundation (LMF) of San Diego, California.   

Sitting outside the shelter, tantalizingly close to his goal, he is filled with hope and fear, expectation and exhaustion. “Next week, insha’Allah, I will be in the U.S.,” he said.

Hamza is far from alone.

Described as a “waiting room” for “thousands of migrants who try to reach the border between Mexico and the US every month” and a principal landing point for deportees, Tijuana has taken center stage in the ever-unfolding drama of migrants’ journeys to the U.S.

Among them are Muslims like Hamza, from places like Chechnya and Afghanistan, Syria and Ghana. According to Eduardo Campos Lima, writing for Arab News, “thousands of people from Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa try to reach the US-Mexico border every month.” Although there are no firm statistics about these “Muslim migrant flows,” organizations in the region report that more-and-more are making their way north from Brazil to the U.S./Mexico border.

For Muslim migrants, the “normal” stresses of labor precarity, family separation and potential imprisonment, deportation, or death are compounded by additional complications. Arriving in Tijuana, Muslim migrants face added challenges of finding shelter where they can consume halāl food, access facilities for prayer, and procure information about asylum in a language they can easily comprehend. If they are able to cross over, a triple bind of Islamophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, and a host of American fears about crime, disease, and a loss of cultural privilege await.

To provide a humane, and helpful, place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana Sonia Tinoco García and LMF constructed a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Opening in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood in March 2022, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer and wudu area, halāl food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants. In the first year of operation, they served over 1,000 asylum seekers, deportees, and others seeking shelter.

What Hath Religious Studies To Do With Interreligious Dialogue?

When I moved to Germany, I was invited to take part in a pioneering project to map interreligious dialogue (IRD) efforts across the country.

In the aftermath of the 10th World Assembly of Religions for Peace in Lindau in August 2019, a group of colleagues got together to pursue the idea of an interreligious cartography in Germany. The goal was to make a comprehensive survey of local, national, and international interreligious initiatives and actors in German municipalities to serve as a reference for future research.

Through our investigation, we gained a clearer picture of what IRD looks like in Germany and who is taking part. From Bonn to Berlin, Flensburg to Freiburg, one of the things that became evident was that many of the local initiatives involved, or were led by, religion scholars and academic theologians. Based on my own research and experience, this holds true in the U.S. and elsewhere, with scholars often actively involved in IRD efforts at the local, regional, national, and international levels.

As I reflected on this, I pondered a few questions: Are religious studies and IRD natural companions or should they be carefully delineated and divided? Should those who study religion lead the way when it comes to multi-religious responses to the world’s pressing issues? Or, as some argue, should IRD remain an object for critical study and not participation?

Religion at the 2023 Academy Awards

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 95th Academy Awards in January, contenders included several movies with religion angles and numerous actors with faith backgrounds.

A short list for the ceremony, to be held March 12, 2023, includes the eco-spiritual themes of Avatar: The Way of Water, revivalist roots in the Elvis biopic starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, themes of “faith and fatness” in The Whale with Brendan Fraser, the Bible Belt cultural cues that are felt but never fully seen in To Leslie’s melancholic storyline, and confessions and questions of whether God cares about miniature donkeys in The Banshees of Inisherin.

That’s not even to mention Stranger at the Gate. Directed by Joshua Seftel, the film is about an Afghan refugee named Bibi Bahrami and the members of her Indiana mosque, who come face to face with a U.S. Marine who has secret plans to bomb their community center. That’s when the Marine's plan takes an unexpected turn. The moving real-life story is considered a favorite in the best documentary short film category.

Beyond awards season, 2023 has a slew of new religion-related releases sure to catch audiences’ attention.

It’s safe to say that if you head to the movies – or catch the Academy Awards ceremony – this year, you’re likely to run into religion. But what might we learn about religion and culture from this year’s many intersections between faith and film?

Religion in Your Face: Ash Wednesday and the Practice of Religious Facial Marking

Several years ago, when I was living in Houston, TX, a man walked up to me at a local café and kindly said, "Excuse me sir, you've...um...I think you have dirt on your face."

He was half right.

It wasn’t exactly dirt, but ashes. Ashes smudged on my forehead in the shape – if you looked at it just right and from a 43-degree angle – of a cross.

One could not blame the man for mistaking my visible marker of inward penance and outward allegiance to a particular strand of religiosity…for dirt.

These days, in places like H-town, you don’t see too many people wearing their religion on their face.

Nonetheless, later this month (February 22, 2023) millions of Christians across the world -- Catholic, Lutheran, Anglicans, others – will also don gray smudges on their brows to commemorate Ash Wednesday.

Traditionally viewed as the start of Lent – a 40-day penitential season of fasting and preparation preceding Easter – Ash Wednesday is most widely associated with the "imposition" or "infliction" of ashes on practitioners’ foreheads.

Christians, however, are not alone in marking their faces with religious symbols. There are traditions in India, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that involve religious symbology born on foreheads, cheeks, and chins.

While such outward signs of devotion may seem an extreme in our seemingly secular age, more often than not, these religious facial markings tell us relatively little about the “inner religion” of the devotee and much more about spiritual symbols’ social function(s).

The Past, Present, and Future of Religion

Every year, numerous pundits and forecasters offer their crystal-ball takes on financial futures, political potentials, and what they think will be the calendar-defining or epoch-making events in the year to come.

But what about religion?

As 2022 ended, I had the chance to look back on, and forward to, the year in religion.

Working with the Religion News Association (RNA) – a 73-year-old trade association for reporters who cover religion in the news media – I helped oversee a poll of its membership on the top religion stories over the previous year. Then, in my capacity as Editor for ReligionLink – a monthly resource for reporters writing on religion – I put together some predictions for the big religion news to come in 2023.

The two experiences gave me an opportunity to reflect on religion’s persistent and ubiquitous role in global events. They also underscored once more how a basic knowledge of religion is not so much about understanding worlds beyond, but the world we live in right now.

Spirit Tech is here to stay

In our house, we have a new laptop.

It’s shiny and new, with a fancy blue OLED touchscreen and widgets galore.

Perhaps you too — not long after “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” nor long before the festive, gift-giving season — will be purchasing new tech.

Maybe a new smartwatch? The latest video game console? How about a meditation headset from tech startup Muse?

Yep, you read that right. The Muse headband is a brain-sensing device that provides real-time neurofeedback during meditation sessions or, as the company promises, to help you focus, sleep, or otherwise reach peak performance.

It is one of many technological innovations promising to trigger, enhance, accelerate, modify, or measure spiritual experiences and deliver more peace and progress in the process.

From brain stimulation to synthetic psychedelics, new spiritual movements in Silicon Valley to the everyday ways technology is used in worship and devotion technology is changing the way we do religion.

This is what researchers Kate Stockly and Wesley Wildman of Boston University’s Center for Mind and Culture call “spirit tech.”

Not only do they believe “spirit tech” is here to stay, they also suggest it has the potential to heal our relationship with technology and radically alter the way we think and pray.

Recently, I had the opportunity to dive deeper into the world of “spirit tech,” writing two pieces to help you explore the wide world of religious technologies, their meaning, and their potential futures.

Oppression or Liberation? Sweating Over Modest Clothing

Sitting with Soraya under the shade of a palm tree along Balneario del Escambrón’s sun-soaked sand in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I could barely stand the heat.

It was 88° F (31° C) with high humidity. Sweat was pouring down my face as I listened to her talk about her experience as a Puerto Rican convert to Islam.

Amidst the discussion, she noticed my perspiration and laughed. “Hermano, you think you’re hot?! Imagine being dressed in a black abaya [loose over garment] and hijab!”

Bringing the topic up, I asked her why she chose to wear hijab — or Islamic headscarf. Soraya replied, “before I became Muslim, men were always judging my body by its curves, by how tight my clothes were and how round I was in certain places. Wearing abaya donning the hijab, takes those evaluations out of the conversation and forces people to take me for who I actually am, what I say, what I do — not what I wear.”

Even so, Soraya still gets stopped on San Juan’s streets and asked about her clothing, her religion, or whether she feels “oppressed.”

For many, the “controversial fabric” is a symbol of subjugation and segregation. Especially right now, as protests continue to rage in Iran after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Ahmini who was killed while resisting the country’s compulsory laws forcing women to wear hijab, the headscarf has once again become a trademark of tyranny and functional emblem of fundamentalist religion.

And yet, for millions of religious women, headscarves, veils, and others forms of conservative clothing remain a prized tradition, a fashion statement, or — as with Soraya — a means of liberation.

In my latest piece with Patheos, I explore the material contexts and colonial pasts that are imperative to keep in mind when discussing hijabs, veils, and other forms of modest, religious dress.

How migrants are changing Europe's churches

“Each apartment block has its own community, its own dynamics, its own culture,” Ute Paul said as she walked among the Plattenbau — formidable apartments built of prefabricated concrete slabs —  in Gotha West, a working-class suburb of the central German city, Gotha.

Originally constructed as a planned housing development (Neubaugebiet) during the waning years of the socialist East German Republic, the district is now home to migrants who have made their way from Ukraine and Eritrea, Afghanistan and Romania, Nigeria and Syria. Many of them are relocated to places like Gotha West, where they often end up grouped with their fellow countrymen and forming cliques based on shared language, religion, or background.

On Coburger Place, a centrally located square with shops and a small casino that serves as the neighborhood’s main hangout spot, there is a small storefront with the words, “from dark to light” written across its windows.

The shop is the principle gathering place for the Mustard Seed District Mission (senfkorn.STADTteil Mission). Since 2015, pastor Michael Weinmann and his wife Christiane have been leading Mustard Seed and “experimenting with new forms of community in Gotha-West,” said Paul, who joined the pair along with her husband, Frank, in 2021.

Focusing less on events and more on “relationships, ‘accidental’ encounters, and natural life in the district,” Paul said the mission has little to show in terms of deliverables or church attendance.

Instead, reflecting the challenges and opportunities of migrant mission in Europe, Paul said Mustard Seed has been able to “create a vibrant network of relationships between people of different backgrounds and origins from across the world.”

Along the way, Paul said the Mustard Seed team has had to unlearn a lot of what they thought they knew about mission and adapt to the everyday realities of those God has given them to serve.

Since the unprecedented migratory movements that shook Europe in 2015 and 2016, an increasing number of Christian organizations have had to reshape their institutions and rethink the identity of Christianity from below.

Mustard Seed is just one example of how the movement of asylum seekers, economic migrants, and internally displaced persons has created new commissions and institutions to meet changing facts on the ground across the continent.

Migration to Europe is not a recent phenomenon. But since 2013, some 17.2 million migrants from outside the European Union (EU) have come to Europe, finding their way to places like Germany and Spain, the UK and Italy. As they arrived, they have sparked public discourse around European culture, values, and religious identity.

Amid the debate, churches have played key roles in the process of integration. Beyond offering religious hospitality, a 2018 study from the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe (CCME) found how congregations provide “symbolic resources for positive self-identification and opportunities for interaction with others as well as crucial services.”

The result has been a transformation of the churches themselves.

The Theme is Religion, James Bond Religion

When you think of James Bond, you probably don’t reckon with whether or not the super spy is religious or if spirituality plays a major role in his action-filled escapades.

But if you look for it, religion is everywhere in James Bond:

• In the novel You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming casts James Bond in the role of a savior, prophesied by Shinto priests and embodying the saintly personage of the Catholic, dragon-slaying hero St. George.

• Live and Let Die — both the book and movie — heavily feature vodou and obeah, with a 007-emblazoned, customized tarot card deck specifically designed for the film.

• There is a “priest hole” and chapel on Bond’s family Scotland estate in the movie “Skyfall” (2012).

• Bond battles with a man dressed as a Nio guardian statue in the film, “The Man with the Golden Gun” and traipses through Cairo, Egypt’s Ibn Talun mosque in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

• In 2015’s “Spectre,” Bond replies to his love interest Dr. Madeleine Swann's question, "Why does a man choose the life of an assassin?" with, "Well, it was that or the priesthood."

The list could go on, but suffice it to say: James Bond has a long and complicated relationship with religion.

On the occasion of the 60th-anniversary of the world premiere of the first James Bond film Dr. No in 1962 (October 5, 2022), I take a look at religion in the Bond universe and consider what we might have to learn about religion — and the world-famous super spy — in the process.

But wait...is it a cult?

When I first moved to New Zealand to work with a Lutheran parish in Palmerston North, I came across some FAQs – frequently asked question – on the national church body’s website.

Along with the usual queries, I found one peculiar bullet point. It asked: are Lutherans a cult?

Granted, Lutherans can be strange people. With their penchant for sneaking carrots into Jell-O salads and an often-disconcerting fealty to European heritages, Lutherans are anything but normal.

But rarely, if ever, had I heard them called a “cult.”

Numerous communities and religious bodies have been labeled with the pejorative term over the years. From Jonestown to Aum Shinrikyo, the Manson Family to Raëlism, the Church of Scientology to Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and yes, Lutherans – all of these, at some point in time, have been labelled a “cult.”

Which is not a term you want used for your community.

Why? Because it immediately suggests things like brainwashing, mass suicide, and crazy-haired white dudes stockpiling women, weapons, and weed in the backwoods.

Therein lies the problem.

When we hear the term “cult” we already think we know everything there is to know about that group. They’re dangerous. They’re deviant. They don’t deserve to be called a “real” religion.

But if we take a moment to double-click on the term and expand on what it means from a social perspective, we might find that the word "cult" – or "religion" for that matter – doesn’t mean what we think it means.

On a Wing and a Prayer

Amid the hustle-and-bustle of checking in, making your way through the obstacle course that is security, and divining where your gate is, you might not have time to grab a bite to eat or sneak in a quick massage, let alone have time to settle yourself for prayer.

But, across the U.S. — and throughout the world — airport chapels, prayer rooms, and interfaith spaces offer travelers an opportunity to do just that: to meditate, catch a few moments of quiet contemplation, or perhaps beseech the travel gods for a bit of mercy when flights are canceled, or luggage lost.

According to sociologist Wendy Cadge,  airport chapels had their genesis in the daily devotional needs of Catholic staff working in the airline business. She wrote of how initially, airport chapels “were established by Catholic leaders in the 1950s and 1960s to make sure their parishioners could attend mass.” The very first was Our Lady of the Airways at Boston’s Logan airport, built in 1951. 

Today, major transit hubs across the world offer some sort of spiritual respite for the busy traveler.

Pew Research Center found  that more than half of the U.S.’s large hub airports (catering to 1% or more of annual air passengers) offer a chapel or interfaith prayer room of some sort. These include standouts like San Diego’s meditation room “The Spirit of Silence,”  Orlando’s former, centrally located prayer room,  San Juan, Puerto Rico’s decidedly Catholic chapel,  or John F. Kennedy Airport’s synagogue,  the only one of its kind in the Americas.

Internationally, you can find stunning examples like the Buddhist meditation space at Taiwan’s Taoyuan Airport,  Berlin’s Room of Stillness  and its formidable fire-brick interior façade, or the new Istanbul airport’s ecologically-certified Ali Kuşçu mosque,  which can fit up to 6,230 people for prayer.

Far from cheaply-packaged single-serving spirituality or simply a security threat,  airport chapels, prayer rooms, and interfaith spaces offer a chance to reflect on how we define religion, both at home and abroad. Their persistent popularity, and their place in our religious imagination, exhibit the pluralism, plasticity, and politics that typify global religion today.

Hail Mary, Mother of Midterms: Religion and the 2022 U.S. Elections

As President Joe Biden looks to the 2022 midterm elections -- and sees prophecies of a Republican surge -- perhaps the above has become his personal, as well as political, petition.

Whatever the Catholic President's prayers, and whether or not Republicans or Democrats come out on top, religion is sure to shape the results.

Fallout from multiple Supreme Court decisions and results from recent primary elections have shaken up the prospects for candidates on both sides of the aisle. Changes in access to abortion services, questions around notions of religious liberty and dramatic decisions impacting the interpretation of the Constitution's "Establishment Clause" are at the front of voters' minds along with religious takes on the rising cost of living, climate change and crime rates.

In this edition of ReligionLink, you will find important background, relevant stories, and numerous experts to help you understand the 2022 midterms and their religion angle with balance, accuracy, and insight.

Let there be nuclear light?

Christians wrestle with questions about radioactive accidents, technology, and replacing fossil fuels

By the end of 2022, Germany is set to decommission the last of its three nuclear reactors. But for local Christians, debates around nuclear energy will continue to have their own half-life. 

By December, Germany is pulling the plug on its last three nuclear power plants — Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim II — as part of the country’s Atomausstieg, or “nuclear power phase out.”

Amidst the shutdown, evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic are wrestling with the potential risks, rewards, and responsibilities of nuclear power. Discerning whether there is a Christian case for nuclear energy is not as simple as turning on the lights. At issue are questions about nuclear power’s potential to destroy life and poison the earth through toxic waste. 

Robert Kaita, 69, who worked for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for 40 years, said, “as human beings created in God’s image, we have tremendous power to create and destroy, to give life and to take it. 

“Nuclear energy isn’t inherently evil,” he said, “but we have to go beyond technical problems and consider the moral ramifications of what we are doing.” 

Indeed, as Germany shuts down its nuclear energy program, it is perhaps ironic that nuclear energy was invented in its capital, Berlin. In what is now the Hahn-Meitner building on the campus of Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann utilized Lise Meitner’s theories to discover nuclear fission on December 17, 1938. The splitting of nuclear atoms (fission) not only came to provide the basis for usable energy, but also the explosive force of the atomic bomb. 

Following World War II and the monumental, if monstrous, demonstration of fission’s power, Germany’s nuclear energy program kicked off in the 1950s. Its first power plants followed in the 1960s. Already, German anti-nuclear movements organized resistance to nuclear power’s proliferation. 

Local accidents and international disasters further propelled the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s. Between 1975 and 1987 small scale incidents in Germany led to local contamination, radiation emission, and worrisome fires. Then, the Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986 and fears of nuclear fallout became mainstream.  

Located in what is now Ukraine, Chernobyl lies around 775 miles from Germany’s eastern border. When the reactor was destroyed, radioactive waste spewed across swathes of Europe, including Germany. It not only threatened lives, but water and food supplies. Wild mushroom samples in German forests still show signs of Chernobyl’s radioactive contamination signature to this day. 

For Markus Baum, 59, Chernobyl was a decisive crossroads. 

Special Guest Episode at the Maydan

Podcasts are fun.

They’re even more fun when you get to do them with a valued colleague.

A couple of months ago, Wikke Jansen and I sat down to talk about my book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean. Wikke is a visiting fellow at the Berlin University Alliance Project “Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO) and received her Ph.D. in Global Studies from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, where we got to know one another through the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies.

Wikke not only carefully read my work, but also asked some poignant and pointed questions about what its points might have to say to other themes in the study of global Islam and decolonization.

The result is a special guest episode at the Maydan, an online publication of Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, offering expert analysis on a wide variety of issues in the field of Islamic Studies for academic and public audiences alike, and serving as a resource hub and a platform for informed conversation, featuring original articles and visual media from diverse perspectives.

Apocalypse now? When religion and natural disasters collide

As the Atlantic hurricane season begins, meteorologists are watching the Gulf of Mexico with increasing concern. A current of warm, tropical water known as the Loop Current is causing forecasters to fear “monster hurricanes” and a generally intense tropical storm season.

Hurricane Katrina, which went on to famously devastate large swaths of Louisiana and Mississippi, including New Orleans, crossed just such a Loop Current before making its harrowing landfall in 2005.

Extreme weather events like Katrina, climate convulsions and other natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes or tornadoes have inspired a range of religious reactions from the fearful or affected faithful. 

Some interpret them as a form of divine retribution and look for scapegoats upon which to place the blame. Others turn to religion as a form of “positive religious coping,” taking comfort in a higher power. Still others spring to action, providing critical support in the aftermath or offering prophetic hope for the future. 

With the hurricane and tornado seasons already upon us, post-summer wildfires looming on the horizon, global famine forecasts and potentially cataclysmic climate instability to come in the near future, this edition of ReligionLink explores the fascinating and often unsettling connection between natural disasters and religion.

Background

Experiencing something between sublime terror and numinous indescribability, when humans come face-to-face with volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes or epidemics they often seek to explain their upturned worlds in religious terms. 

Examining Americans’ experience with tornadoes over the years, historian Peter J. Thuesen wrote that reactions range between abject fear and awestruck fascination. “In the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar and religiously primal,” he wrote. Exposing them to mysteries “above and beyond themselves,” the tornado whips up a “vortex of theodicy and the broader question of whether there is purpose or chaos in the universe.” 

Likewise, historian Philip Jenkins said that time and again, the languages of apocalypse, persecution and judgment have been used to understand climate catastrophes. Looking back over the long term, Jenkins wrote that disasters and climate change often result in “far-reaching changes in the nature of religion and spirituality.” 

Astute religion newswriters have taken notice. Given the increasing intensity of natural disasters brought on by changes in climate conditions and the ominous threat of other cataclysms always a possibility, stories about the intersections between natural disasters and religion are featuring more and more in our reporting.

Although religion is not “the only aspect of human affairs that is transformed during climate-driven disasters,” Jenkins wrote, “it is a very significant one, especially because this has so often been the primary means through which human beings have interpreted the world they see around them.” 

Taking a look at the resources available through the link below, these stories chronicle a mix of terror, trembling and spiritual searching. They feature narratives of renewed passion and inspiring commitment, scapegoating and persecution, apocalyptic expectations and mystical interpretations. Above all, they show how the convergence of faith and disaster is an area ripe for more nuanced, in-depth religion reporting.