The Seminar Room: Recent Episodes
The Seminar Room
“The Seminar Room” (TSR) is a religious studies podcast by and for students and scholars of religion that engages specific texts and concepts in religious studies theory and method, philosophy and critical theory. Our regular contributors are Joel Harrison, Lucas Scott Wright and Sean Capener.
The format and title of the podcast are meant to reflect “the seminar room” in which grad students encounter and reflect upon texts in their respective graduate programs. Our goal is to provide an online seminar room in which contributors may debate texts and ideas in a way that opens up further discussion with our listeners.
Episodes are released every other week on Saturdays. In addition to our podcast recordings, our blog contains supplementary introductions to and reflections on the texts, and links to each text we discuss. Visit the blog at www.tsrpodcast.com
If you want to contact us you may find us here:
Gmail: seminarroomcast@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSeminarRoom
It’s a new year and a new episode from The Seminar Room! After taking a break for the Fall term, Joel and Lucas return with a recap of their experience at the 2016 American Academy of Religion conference in San Antonio.
Episode 11, in which Joel and Lucas discuss an essay by Jacques Derrida and make the case for Derrida’s relevance in religious studies. Lucas explains why everyone should read more philosophy AND try to understand it. Joel explains why this essay by Derrida kind of puts a damper on a lot of religious studies scholars’ […]
It’s Episode 10! Lucas and Joel tackle two essays by J.Z. Smith (“Fences and Neighbors” and “The Devil in Mr. Jones”) from his collection _Imagining Religion_. Highlights include: Considering whether or not religious studies scholars should have to read philosophy before engaging in theory and method debates; a discussion of the use or incompatibility of […]
The Seminar Room returns after a six-week hiatus! For Episode 9, we tackle a recent editorial published in the April 2016 issue of the journal _Critical Research on Religion_. In many ways, the editorial sums up the issues addressed in the podcast thus far. What are the limits of the “critical religion” approach? What are […]
Lucas was sick for a while and Sean was swamped with the end of his first year approaching, so we departed from our normal biweekly schedule. But we’re back! This week Joel and Lucas discuss Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). But before they dive into the text, they give a recap of […]
Lucas and Joel were on Spring Break this week while Sean was swamped with his semester steadily approaching finals and unable to join in this time. But there was still plenty to talk about! It’s a twofer this week as Joel and Lucas tackle Robert Segal’s 1998 essay “Diagnosing Religion” and a more recent response […]
The long anticipated episode on Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) finally happens in Episode 6. It was AAR Judgment Day when we recorded (aka the final deadline for paper and panel submissions to the American Academy of Religion’s national conference in November), so Sean and Lucas reward themselves with a little […]
The long-anticipated appearance of Sean Capener finally happens here in Episode 5, where he, Lucas, and Joel discuss Max Weber’s _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_ (1904/5). They discuss the differences between Weber and other genealogical accounts of religion, Weber’s philosophical inheritance, and his occupation of a liminal space among reductive, interpretive, descriptive, […]
In Episode IV, An Ineffable Hope, Lucas and Joel discuss “Experience” by Robert Sharf, a chapter from Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998). They rehash the genealogical critique of the colonial history of “pillar” categories in religious studies and wonder why Sharf seems to put the blame on the colonized rather than the colonizers. Lucas questions the […]
Lucas and Joel discuss Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” from 1843 in the second of two episodes recorded together in Highland Park, CA over the holiday break. They consider whether Marx is committed to thinking that slavery is only unethical in capitalism or feudalism, what importance religion has, if any, to Marx’s understanding of […]