Past Events

Justin Stein
March 4, 2024

“Spiritual Therapies, Energy Medicine, and the Recuperative Middle”, Justin Stein (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, British Columbia)

In modern societies, attention to human beings’ complex needs has been largely divided into areas of specialization, with our bodies assigned to “medicine” (generally interpreted to mean biomedicine), our minds and emotions in the realm of “psychology,” and our souls entrusted to “religion” (or more recently, “spirituality”). Of course, lived practices often frustrate such differentiation, and recent developments like holistic medicine and integrative medicine try to attend to the health of individuals as whole beings. Holistic medicine tends to make space for the overlapping fields of “spiritual therapies” and “energy medicine,” whose promoters tend to posit the existence of a benevolent transpersonal force that governs human health. Practitioners frame their practices as a means to return to an ancient holism that predates the modern differentiation of human health into separate biochemical, psychosocial, and spiritual realms.

In this talk I will focus on the example of Reiki, often considered a paradigmatic form of spiritual healing and/or energy medicine, and consider how its practitioners and promoters have ambivalently located Reiki vis-à-vis the categories of religion and medicine. Drawing on examples from Reiki history as well as current efforts by practitioners to introduce Reiki to hospitals while also resisting state regulation, I will consider the challenges to secularity (and secularism) posed by appeals to a “recuperative middle” that predates the divide between religion and medicine.

Takashi Miura
February 13, 2024

Sacrificing Oneself to Save the Village - Takashi Miura (University of Arizona)

Thousands of peasant protests took place in early modern Japan (1603–1868), and many of them featured protest leaders executed by the feudal government for resorting to illegal protest tactics, such as bypassing legal channels of appeal and engaging in disruptive and at times destructive behaviors. Following the executions, surviving community members deified these “protest martyrs” for having made the ultimate sacrifice in exchange for bringing economic relief to their fellow villagers, often by forcing the government to rescind unpopular taxes and other fiscal measures. Shrines dedicated to protest martyrs mostly remained localized institutions, known only to their immediate rural communities. I argue, however, that the emergence of these “martyr shrines” was a widespread phenomenon in early modern Japan, a new religious current largely ignored in traditional historiographies of Japanese religions. In this presentation, I will examine case studies from three different regions of Japan (the Imabari, Karatsu, and Tsu domains) and highlight the ways in which religion, protest, and rural livelihood intersected in early modern Japan.

Levi McLaughlin , North Carolina State University
April 21, 2023

Soka Gakkai From the Ground Up: A Look Within Japan’s Most Politically Influential Religion

A presentation by Levi McLaughlin of North Carolina State University.

Jason Storm
April 11, 2023

“Dark Gods in the Age of Light” by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Join us for an event featuring Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm of Williams College.

Colorful powder in the air thrown by people in a crowd.
March 8, 2023

Holi Festival Celebration

Join the Office of Inclusion & Multicultural Engagement (IME), Office of Equity & Inclusion (OEI), Office of Spiritual Life as we celebrate the Holi festival!

Event details:
Date and time of event: Wednesday, March 8th from 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Great Plat Lawn
Who: Students, staff and faculty are welcome to attend!
April 20, 2018

Santa Muerte: Insights on Deeming “Bad Religion” by Teresa Rios Martinez

FESTIVAL OF SCHOLARS - “Hard to Digest” Panel

Santa Muerte is a folk saint in Mexico with origins in the old religion of the Aztecs that has an increasingly growing following not only in Latin America and the United States among Latinx populations, but also in the broader occult milieu. She is known as the patron saint of criminals or narcos, as a large portion of her devotees are involved in gangs, drug trafficking, and prostitution, however that is not the full demographics of her following. This paper examines why the cult of Santa Muerte is considered a “bad” and “dangerous” religion. Jason Josephson’s work on heretical anthropology, Ann Tave’s “specialness” theory, cult theory, and new religious movement theory is employed to gain deeper insights on the factors surrounding the labels attached to Santa Muerte and her followers. The Catholic Church claims that she is satanic and the Mexican government actively targets her followers and associates their crimes to her. To her followers she is a religious figure that helps them in a time of need, especially to those who are constantly surrounded by violence and death. By looking at Santa Muerte from these three different perspectives we can see that she is ultimately labeled a bad religion because of the challenge she poses the steadily declining Catholic population in Mexico.

November 27, 2017

“Spirit/Medium/Media: A Critical Examination of the Relationship Between Animism, Animators, and Anime” by Jolyon Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)

This talk critiques the oft-repeated argument that Japanese animation (anime) is thematically and aesthetically unique because it draws upon Japan’s ancient animistic traditions. I argue that when professional observers describe anime as “animistic,” they use a politically fraught and technically inaccurate term to engage in certain political projects related to environmentalism or cultural nationalism. I also argue that when these professional observers repeat the essentialist idea that “Japanese people believe that spirits exist in everything,” they categorically ignore the potentially “spiritual” qualities of the material objects that are actually used to make anime in the first place (celluloid, ink, computer screens, cameras, cables). I conclude by offering alternative language that can more accurately depict what anime directors and their audiences do when depicting or observing relationships between spirits and nature in animated film. These attitudes and ideas can be deemed meaningful and even religious, I argue, without relying on the loaded language of “animism.”
October 19, 2017

Religious Studies at Lewis & Clark

A quintessential liberal arts discipline!

A social hour with food, drink, and good conversation with faculty members, majors, minors, and other interested students about what the discipline of religious studies has to offer to the liberal arts; as well as a preview of courses to be offered in Spring 2018!
May 5, 2017

Senior Reception with Family and Faculty

Come join the Religious Studies department as we celebrate our seniors! Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP with Claire Kodachi at ckodachi@lclark.edu with the total number of people in your party. The event will be held in the Frank Manor House.
March 2, 2017

“’By the Sweetness of the Tongue’: Stories, Lives, and Hindu Holy Women in India” by Antoinette E. DeNapoli (University of Wyoming)

This presentation calls attention to the uncommon religious lives and worlds of Hindu holy women (sadhus) in India.
February 15, 2017

“Queering Vedic Culture: Paths to Celebrating LGBTQ Relationships in India’s Devout Hindu Communities” by Claire Robison (Lewis & Clark College)

Prof. Robison will speak on research conducted along with a colleague in 2014-2015 on the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association in Mumbai (GALVA). GALVA Mumbai is a local chapter of a transnational grassroots organization dedicated to increasing acceptance of LGBTQ identities within devout Vaishnava Hindu communities. For people in Mumbai who identify as LGBTQ, the organization seeks to foster a space that is not exclusive of or in opposition to the Hindu religious communities in which many of their members were raised. This project traces their efforts and the interpretative steps they take to construct a space for queer identities in Vaishnava Hindu communities today.
April 15, 2016

Festival of Scholars

It is our pleasure to invite you to the Festival of Scholars, an opportunity for student-scholars and artists to present their research and art, while also learning from one another.

October 29, 2015

“Oh, Hell! The Horrible and the Hilarious in Secular Japanese Picturebooks” by Heather Blair (Indiana University)

Authors and illustrators of picturebooks for Japanese children often appropriate characters, imagery, and plotlines with recognizably religious pedigrees in order to transfer them into the secular world of children’s education and entertainment. In this talk, I examine the transformation of Buddhist hell from dreadful to hilarious in picturebooks for pre-literate children and emerging readers ages 4 to 7. Arguing against conventional interpretations that frame these books as wholly irreligious, I show that hell has become a cornerstone in a national vernacular tradition and that it continues to serve moralizing purposes even as it makes us laugh.
October 15, 2015

Meet Your Major

It time to Meet Your Major! We’ll be gathering as a department on October 15th at 5:45 p.m. in the Howard 302. Current and former majors will be talking about their research projects (past life regression therapy, the Asideo community in Sellwood, Islamic law, and more!) and about their experiences in the major. Come hear from students about some really engaging projects and about why they chose Religious Studies for a major or minor. Of course, they’ll be food and drink. We hope to see you there!
March 13, 2015

Religion/Modernity: Living on the Slash by Robert Orsi (Northwestern University)

This lecture challenges the widespread agreement today among scholars of modern history and culture that modernity did not mean the end of religion, that modernity itself is a religious, as well as political and legal, project. This may be true, but such an account of the modern fails to capture the fate of special, supermundane beings since the sixteenth century: gods, ghosts, ancestors, spirits, demons, and so on. The “religion” that endured in modernity—that was legally codified, epistemologically sanctioned, and diagnosed as psychologically healthy—was purified of these beings. Modern “religion” consigned them to the past of the species and the infancy of the person. Looking at the experience of a Catholic survivor of clerical sexual abuse as she makes her way between the normative modern and “superstition,” which is the necessary other of the modern, the lecture considers what it means to live everyday life in a world of plural and incommensurate ontologies.
February 4, 2015

Discussion with Ian Blair and Rob Kugler

Join us for the first departmental gathering of the semester. Senior major Ian Blair will show us a video he created based on his research on religion during his semester abroad in Russia last year. Professor Robert Kugler will also talk about a recent conference trip that he took to Israel. We’ll have questions and informal discussion after each presentation. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome to attend.
November 4, 2014

“A Religion of Convenience: The Universal Life Church, Contemporary Weddings, and the Secular Sacred” - Dusty Hoesly CAS ’02

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN TIME.

Major national news outlets have observed that weddings in the United States, especially for young educated people, are increasingly performed by ministers who are friends or relatives of the couple and who become ordained online just for that purpose. The primary organization licensing these ministers, and thus authorizing these weddings as legally valid, is the Universal Life Church (ULC), which has ordained over 20 million people since 1962. To date, there has been no focused study of the ULC or weddings conducted under its auspices. According to my initial research findings, both ULC ministers and the couples who use them self-describe as non-religious, usually as agnostic, atheist, apathetic, secular, or spiritual. Similarly, they describe their weddings in non-religious terms, emphasizing the personalization of the ceremony to match their particular beliefs and tastes as well as the conscious exclusion of most religious language. These secular or spiritual wedding ceremonies reveal non-religious couples’ desires for an alternative apart from bureaucratic civil ceremonies or traditional religious rites. Using original archival, survey, interview, and participant observation data, mostly based in California and the Pacific Northwest, this paper explores why “secular” people employ ULC-ordained ministers for their weddings, and how ULC ministers and couples married by them label and valuate their “non-religious,” personalized wedding ceremonies. My examination of ULC weddings reveals not only the diversity of non-theistic self-identification and lifecycle ritualization, but also how constructs such as religious and secular can be co-constitutive rather than oppositional.
April 26, 2014

Festival of Scholars

It is our pleasure to invite you to the first Festival of Scholars, an opportunity for student-scholars and artists to present their research and art, while also learning from one another.
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