The Classical Ideas Podcast
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,...
info_outline EP 290: Science Fiction and Dune w/Dr. Patrick J. D'SilvaThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 289: The Cake Baker and the Coach w/Dr. Charles McCraryThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 288: Multiracial Cosmotheandrism w/Dr. Aizaiah YongThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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....
info_outline EP 287: Moon of the Turning Leaves w/Waubgeshig RiceThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 286: Political Organizing and Teaching about Theology w/Reverend Naomi Washington-LeapheartThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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: Visit Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart:
info_outline EP 285: Jewish Cemeteries at the US Border w/Dr. Maxwell GreenbergThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 284: Teaching, Curriculum, & Standards w/Dr. Elizabeth JemisonThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 283: Racial Science of Protestant Missions w/Dr. Matthew J. SmithThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outline EP 282: Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England and Modern Traditional Catholics w/Dr. Lauren Horn GriffinThe Classical Ideas Podcast
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...
info_outlineRachel Quist specializes in East Asian Buddhist imagery with focuses in pre-modern Japan and China. Her research centers on questions of interaction with imagery, materiality and object agency, and the accessibility of image-based practices. She has written on topics such as Buddhist reliquary design and expressivity, the didactic project underlying the hell tableau at Baodingshan, and the construction of a collective memory surrounding the Shingon monk Kōbō Daishi at the temple complex of Mount Kōya. Rachel is currently conducting research on early imperial patronage of Daigoji, a Shingon temple in Kyoto, for her dissertation.
Michael VanHartingsveldt received an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature before teaching in South Korea in at an English immersion school. While there, he became enamored with the religious art of East Asia. He finished a Master’s degree in East Asian art and its markets from Claremont Graduate University in 2017, after which he worked for two years as an Asian Art collections specialist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael has collaborated with the Los Angeles office of The Japan Foundation in the curation of three exhibitions and two public lecture series. He now studies at the University of Kansas.