Robyn Faith Walsh's Blog, page 8

Manufacturing Religion: From Christian Origins to Classical Islam

I am excited to announce that I'll be part of a webinar on Friday, March 4th, with the University of South Africa. The speakers include me, Willi Braun, and Ahmed El Shamsy.

Here's the official description from the University of South Africa:

“Religion” as concept, as collective noun for sets of discourses and practices, and as “object” of study, has, in recent years, been retheorised and redescribed as a discursive formation. Within the context of an anthropocentric study of religion, the concept “discourse,” together with the phrase “religion as a socialdiscourse,” does not just indicate that “discourse” (as even in the sense of religious discourse) is a collective noun for the contents of sets of significations that construct our way of knowing the world, it also includes the social location/s that form/s the originary matrix for the particular invention of these sets of significations; and it includes the social interests encompassed by or encapsulated in, and giving rise to, these sets of significations. This way of knowing-through-acts-of-signification is not just individual but is socially conditioned, that is, it is institutionalised in canons of tradition, schools of thought, habitus as habituated action, social formations, cultural and socio-political-economic conventions, that is, as discursive formations.

“Discourses are practices ‘that systematically organize and regulate statements about a certain theme; by doing so, discourses determine the conditions of possibility of what (in a social group at a certain period of time) can be thought and said’ (Eder 2006). Hence, discourse analysis does not only look at the textual and linguistic dimension of a topic but also at the practices that carry or change orders of knowledge. This includes institutions such as governments, courts, scientific associations, religious organizations, the media, as well as universities. These practices determine ‘the conditions of possibility of what can be thought and said’ from identifiable positions of power. That is why discourse research always pays attention not only to an analysis of what is being said or done, but also of who says or does it, and from which position and institutional background this is said or done” (Jay Johnston and Kocku von Stuckrad, Discourse Research and Religion, 3).

The study of “discourse” is, in this understanding, a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions, the way in which these manifest in social and political institutions, public texts and literary traditions … at all levels and stages of history.

These questions of discourse run as a golden thread through Willi Braun’s Jesus and Addiction to Origins. Towards an Anthropocentric Study of Religion, Robyn Faith Walsh’s The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, and Ahmed El Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.

The authors discussed in this webinar have all three in their various ways explored the formation of religious discourses (whether early Christian or Islamic), and the formation and institutionalisation of scholarly discourses both in Late Antiquity and in more recent centuries, thereby laying bare how religions and the study of religions are invented traditions and invented, mythographic histories. This webinar is an opportunity to draw the conversations elicited by these works into our research and teaching as resources for imagining scholarship differently, and for thinking with to the enrichment of scholarship, and for the promotion of inter-field and interdisciplinary/trans-disciplinary work on religion.

If you're interested in attending the webinar, please see this Word document:

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Thanks so much to the University of South Africa for inviting me!

Profaning Paul with Cavan Concannon

Recently, I interviewed Cavan Concannon for Ancient Jew Review.

AJR Conversations I Profaning Paul — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW“I would like to see nondisciplinary conversations about Paul’s archive, how his writings and themes moved through western history and how that movement involved configurations and operations with other texts, institutions, and politics.”ANCIENT JEW REVIEWSearch

Cavan's most recent book, Profaning Paul (University of Chicago Press, 2021), asks readers to rethink how we've studied Paul, to account for our methodology, to reconsider the ethics of Pauline study.

I always enjoy chatting with Cavan, but I suppose I especially enjoyed the fact that we got to parse the phrase "Paul's shit" in this interview. Is it a contraction? Is it possessive? Let Cavan explain…

Cavan Concannon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Profaning Paul (Chicago, 2021), Assembling Early Christianity: Trade Networks and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge, 2017), and ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale, 2014). He is also the co-director of the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative.

University of Cambridge New Testament Research Seminar

On Tuesday, March 15, 2022, I will be presenting as part of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Divinity's New Testament Research Seminar.

Here is a bit about the research seminar from their website:

The New Testament Research Seminar has a long and distinguished history, dating back to its establishment under FC Burkitt in c. 1912. Membership then, which was by invitation, was for Cambridge academics, not just from Theology but also from related disciplines, and visitors from other Universities also attended; of those days an early member wrote:

"After all it was terrifying, if you were unlearned and a newcomer, to take your place at that table, or to sit on a chair at the other end of the room and gaze on the learned from afar."

Our purpose is still shared serious academic engagement, but we hope it is somewhat less terrifying.

I don't intend to be too terrifying! I'm honored to be included in this year's program(me).

Please go to the Faculty of Divinity's New Testament Research Seminar page for more information and to acquire the Zoom link.

Appearance on Myth Vision

Sometimes, you get invited to appear on a podcast/YouTube channel called Myth Vision, and you can't say no because...well...myth vision! (Plus, if you are familiar with my love for Boston sports, then you know I can't pass up appearing on a show whose name is shortened to "MVP." Right?)

I had so much fun chatting about my work with Derek Lambert. This kind of thing was definitely out of my comfort zone, though: I'm far more accustomed to your typical, academic Zoom panel. Over the course of about 90 minutes, though, Derek and I cover a lot of ground.

Please enjoy the video of the interview below!