Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies

African Biblical Studies: Unmasking Embedded Racism and Colonialism in Biblical Studies, by Andrew M. Mbuvi

2024-10-02T18:13:24-04:00

Muslim Women in Contemporary North America: Controversies, Clichés, and Conversations, by Meena Sharify-Funk

2024-09-24T14:12:37-04:00

Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation, by Christopher Jain Miller

2024-10-02T18:13:09-04:00

Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism, by Jacob Paul Dalton

2024-10-02T18:13:02-04:00

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film, by Daniel Mourenza

2024-10-02T18:12:53-04:00

John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers: Volume 3. 1997–2000: The Return of Religion, edited by Eric Weislogel

2024-09-24T14:39:35-04:00

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by Benjamin M. Friedman

2024-09-24T14:43:05-04:00

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience, by Patrick McNamara

2024-09-24T14:49:12-04:00

Volume Introduction

2024-10-02T18:13:38-04:00

Editorial Address

2024-09-24T12:50:50-04:00

Thinking through Decolonial Pedagogies

2024-10-02T18:12:24-04:00

Developed through the Decolonization and the Study of Religion Workshop Series, this paper will explore some concerns about decolonizing pedagogy in theory, practice, and the classroom. Weaving insights from a set of important thinkers in the field – like Achille Mbembe, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, Anabal Quijano, and Paulette Regan – the aim of the paper is to introduce some questions for pedagogues to think about in relation to the question of decolonizing pedagogies and to some of the discussions had at the workshop. The paper explores topics and discussions about structural critiques of the university, material versus epistemic analyses of decolonization, learning and unlearning as a central method in decolonization, the importance of how to make space for African and Indigenous Traditional Knowledges, and thinking about how to unpack power relations in the classroom and curriculum. The paper is more concerned with opening dialogue and making space for insights than an attempt to answer definitively questions of decolonization and pedagogy.

Decolonial Affordances

2024-10-02T18:12:17-04:00

This article considers the affordances of utilizing practical applications of music, sound, and orality, as alternatives to the dominant visual-centric, text-based forms of communication in Religious Studies pedagogical settings. The premise of this article is that sound and musicking can be explored in terms of their potential to dismantle academic, discursive, visual-centric, and linguistic forms – some of which are so ossified in a particular collectivity or conversation that we can no longer “say somethin’” as the bass player Charles Mingus puts it in the context of jazz. This approach attempts to revise the colonial structures upon which much of higher education was built by modifying and destabilizing the foundation through which concepts in Religious Studies are introduced and processed.

Believing in an Otherwise

2024-10-02T18:12:10-04:00

This paper will propose that Gloria Anzaldúa’s “spiritual activism,” as a praxis wrought through the confluence of the spiritual and the political, could also be a model for embarking upon the study of religion differently. Walter Mignolo emphasizes that to understand what it means to decolonize requires specificity, through “looking at other W questions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?” I shall suggest that spiritual activism as a decolonial framework demands that scholars of religion ask themselves, in turn, what they believe.

Decolonizing Judeans

2024-10-02T18:12:03-04:00

The confluence of decolonization and the Anglo-American study of religion has generally followed a mode of critical self-reflection which aims to illuminate, problematize, and undo the field’s colonial contours. While crucial to decolonial processes within the academy, less appreciated or understood are the ways in which decolonial language has been invoked across a far broader social landscape, often indexing a range of political commitments and aspirations that depart considerably from more conventional decolonial frameworks. More often than not, such articulations are either rejected as fraudulent or cast off as mischaracterization of more noble decolonial projects. Using Jewish and Zionist communal discourses as a case study, this essay instead proposes to take seriously these articulations through a deeper inquiry into its undergirding religious, historical, and theological logics. In thinking through such orthogonal transformations of putatively decolonial claims, we may thereby arrive at a more capacious theoretical model that can organize divergent (and often contradictory) modes of decolonial interpretation by a range of social actors.

Questioning Devotions, Reorienting Commitments

2024-10-02T18:11:55-04:00

This paper is a methodological reflection on my time as a graduate student studying Indian Residential Schools through archival sources. I broadly survey relevant secondary studies to access the current state of the field and to chart prospective avenues for future scholarly engagement. I suggest that, for religionists, the frameworks of church history and mission history can be selectively utilized to examine the history of residential schooling. I argue that the ‘Indian Residential School’ (or IRS) terminology creates a narrowed understanding of colonialism and assimilative education by disregarding other modes of schooling deployed in Indigenous communities: the day schools and mission schools, but also hospitals, convents, and other church-operated institutions. Largely dating to the pre-Confederation period, mission schools especially fade from view when studies focus on the national model of the IRS launched in 1879 and expanded in 1884. In many regional contexts, mission schools of the colonial era laid the literal and conceptual groundwork for the later launching of the IRS system.

By studying the works and the records of specific church bodies, religionists might elucidate with greater clarity the evolving differences, synchronicities, or collaborations of ideologies, policies, and practices among members of church and state over several centuries. Attending to pre-Confederation, colonial history also lends a transnational scope to a topic that is often framed in the context of national history, i.e., ‘Canada’s residential school system’. A global perspective on colonial education could assist historians of religion to assess the legacies of church, empire, and imperialism on Canada’s national model of residential schooling.