This piece tells the story of one man, Siddharth, who is a disciple of the yoga guru Baba Ramdev, and has firsthand experience of the benefits of his teachings; however, it also brings in members of Baba Ramdev’s corporate leadership, experts in Yoga and Ayurveda and a scholar of modern religion, to weigh the different and difficult questions that Baba Ramdev’s ascension brings.

A Yoga Guru of the Modern Era: The Politics of Preserving Tradition

Sergio Silva Manuel, a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, explores the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA, which deals with a fundamental problem in the history of slavery and colonialism: how to commemorate the lives of people whose names, as a result of the violent institution of slavery, were not kept for history? How to represent both their presence and the erasure of that presence in the shape of the Memorial?

Afterlives in Stone

This piece drops you into the middle of a remote Tibetan valley, into Larung Gar, the world’s largest monastery. But there are no yoga mats, singing bowls, or healing crystals here, only some brilliant intellectuals striving to make the world a more compassionate place. Join Andrew Taylor, a scholar of religious studies, who speaks with one of Tibet's first female philosophers.

Tibet’s First Female Philosophers

In the late 1890s, a man named Blatta Gebre Egziabeher went from being the model colonial subject in Eritrea to a prominent anticolonial figure. After waking up to the evils of Italian colonialism while serving as chief interpreter, he began writing letters to Menelik II, the Emperor of Ethiopia and other Ethiopian officials exhorting military intervention and condemning Menelik’s sale of Eritrea, once part of the Ethiopian Empire, to the Italians. Gebre Egziabeher’s letters were intercepted by the colonial government and he was imprisoned for treason. In 1899, Gebre Egziabeher and other prisoners staged a sensational escape and fled to Ethiopia where he became a prolific anticolonial writer, intellectual, and political advisor to the emperor.

This piece was produced by Amanuael Tsighe Gebremichael, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, for UVA's Religion, Race & Democracy Lab.

Escaping Colonialism: The Story of Blatta Gebre Egziabeher

Santa Muerte. Holy Death. To outsiders, she’s become a symbol of cartel driven violence in Mexico—a “narco-saint,” worshiped only by traffickers, and venerated at crime scenes. To her followers, she’s a protector with roots stretching back to the pre-Hispanic past.

Dr. Jessie Marroquín joins us to explore the complex history of the saint, now one of the the fastest growing religious movements in Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.

Sacred & Profane

La Santa

In Liberia, the West African Ebola Outbreak claimed an estimated 4,810 lives between April 2014 and December 2016. Most of these cases happened in the early stages of the crisis when information about the virus was harder to access and accept, and many of these cases traced back to previous funerals and religious gatherings. Health workers and aid organizations worked to find effective ways to spread information quickly and convincingly in order to slow the spread of a highly fatal and contagious virus. One of the key groups of informants was faith-leaders. Liberia has an extremely high rate of religious participation: 86.2% of the population identify as Christian, and another 11.7% identify as Muslim. Since imams, pastors, and other faith leaders already had the attention and trust of their communities, their actions and statements about Ebola had the power to effectively educate followers about public health measures and counter disinformation. However, this same influence could be used to exacerbate sentiments of fear and denial and put lives at risk.

This project surveys the stories of six Liberian individuals who lived through the pandemic: an aid worker, an imam, a Christian youth minister, a transgender rights activist, and two Ebola survivors. Each guest has a personal understanding of how religious leadership affected their lives and the country during the outbreak.

"Invisible War: Faith in Liberia and the Fight Against Ebola" is by Zoe Larmey, who created the piece when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia and a participant in the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab's documentary research program.

Invisible War: Faith in Liberia and the Fight Against Ebola

Fresh Beats from Snoop to Euripides, by UVA graduate student Abigail Bradford, is an experiment in telling stories about the past by highlighting similarities between the ancient and modern worlds.  The ancient Greeks were not static, faceless entities but rather thinking and feeling people with their own individual tastes, beliefs, and motivations.  This piece aids in breathing life back into these long-gone people and in showing just how surprisingly consistent humans are over thousands of years.

Produced with support from the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.

Fresh Beats from Snoop to Euripides

The University of the West Indies' sound archives contains an impressive collection of talks by major Caribbean cultural figures, including the work of Barbadian historian and poet, Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Scholar Jordan Burke highlights Brathwaite's lecture on the 1831 Baptist Revolt of enslaved laborers in Jamaica led by Samuel Sharpe, and how Brathwaite imagined the soundscape of these Black revolutionaries' struggles for freedom.

This piece was produced by the University of Virginia's Religion, Race & Democracy Lab as part of their documentary research program.

Speaking in Sharpe Tongues: Kamau Brathwaite and the Sound of Black Power

This project begins to explore the relationship between Hinduism and Ecofeminism in South Asia. In it, Smritee Thapa, a student research collaborator with the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, explores questions such as, does Hinduism see connections between nature and feminine energy in the universe? How long has Ecofeminism actually been around? Throughout this podcast, we see that cultural context can lead to a more thorough understanding of what has led to the present-day Ecofeminist movement in South Asia and Hinduism’s role in these movements.

The Divine Feminine in Hindu Ecology

I did not know that Gary Mance, my father, had participated in integration until later in my life, much later than you might expect. He had buried the story under many others about football, his favorite childhood memories, and my great-grandparents. Thankfully, the details of how my shy, reserved father integrated into an upper-class, southern, white private boarding school in the 1970s were preserved carefully, and come to light in this audio documentary, "New Kid: The Integration of Woodberry Forest School."

Written and produced by Tolliver Mance for the University of Virginia's Religion, Race & Democracy Lab.

New Kid: The Integration of Woodberry Forest School

For decades, the media has declared Detroit a "dead" city. But people like Detroit gospel legend, Dr. Mattie Moss Clark were simultaneously bringing people together through music and faith. As crime rates increased, youth could find a safe place in Moss Clark's choir; when opportunities for financial achievement were few, Moss Clark and her daughter provided inspiring messages that encouraged Detroiters to strive. In this story, you will hear from native Detroiters who saw firsthand the socio-economic issues and were simultaneously affected by Moss Clark's artistry and civic engagement.

God’s Economics, Not Reaganomics: The Detroit Mix

This podcast is the story of one small moment in a small town: at a Black Lives Matter vigil outside a Chapel Hill church in July 2020, a young Black woman was physically attacked by a white man walking by. She did not sustain serious physical injuries, and the attacker was arrested and charged. But despite the obvious racism of this attack, it took a sustained community effort to get him charged with North Carolina’s equivalent of a “hate crime,” because the state law is so narrow and weak, a fact which the young woman tried to fight, along with her state representatives.

Staying Visible: North Carolina, Hate Crimes & Black Lives

When a student first arrives at the University of Virginia (UVA), there are many common words they will hear such as “Grounds,” “The Lawn,” “Honor,” “The Corner,” and “Madbowl.” But as they start immersing themselves in classes and other extracurricular activities, they will also hear “Student Self-governance.” This concept, like with many things UVA, is held proudly by UVA to promote student advocacy. As the name suggests, student self-governance entrusts the decision-making process to students. This can be seen as many reputable organizations at UVA such as Honor, the University Judiciary Committee, Student Council, etc. are all run entirely by students. When Fawzia Tahsin first came to UVA as an undergraduate, she thought it was amazing for students to have significant power to make vast administrative decisions. However, she did not realize how much weight it holds onto students. The work these students do is beyond admirable, but behind the scenes, this work is also burdening and can negatively impact students.

Student Self-Governance in HRL at the University of Virginia

In Philly, we lived for a long time under the shadow of two such objects, both dedicated to the same man, Frank Rizzo: a bronze statue in Thomas Paine plaza (across from City Hall) and a colorful mural in South Philadelphia’s Italian Market. Frank Rizzo was a police commissioner in Philadelphia who was elected mayor in 1971. He served as mayor throughout the 1970s. Rizzo was very forward about his commitment to the constituencies that brought him to power, those he called “white ethnics”—especially Polish, Italian, and Irish-American communities in South and Northeast Philly. Already as a beat cop and then police commissioner in the 1960s, he had built a reputation for hostility to Blacks, Latino/as, and civil rights demonstrators. This reputation was exactly what some members of these “white ethnic” groups liked about him. And that politics of resentment was the jet fuel that propelled him into city hall.

The City’s Salvation:  Frank Rizzo and White Christian Nationalism in Philadelphia

Since May 2021, Jessica Johnson has observed public school board meetings in Hanover County, Virginia. Conspiratorial thinking about the teaching of “anti-White” critical race theory, mask mandates, and transgender student policy have converged in articulations and enactments of White Christian nationalism in this secular space. Few people of color regularly attend the meetings, but one Black woman who testifies before the school board is Pat Jordan, the current President of the Hanover chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Fighting a Confederate Legacy in Public Education Today

How are the images, music, and material culture of Catholicism used to construct political attitudes and racialized ideas of nationhood? While there has been a flurry of media and scholarly attention to “Christian nationalism” and white evangelical racism, less attention has been paid to conservative (liturgically and/or politically) traditionalist Catholic communities. Trads are often defined as Catholics who prefer the liturgy and social teaching from before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Some associate trads with an affinity for the Latin Mass and Gregorian chant, while others focus on their often right-wing political leanings. To explore the connection between these two images of trads, Lauren Horn Griffin speaks with a scholar of Catholic communities, Dr. Tricia Bruce, as well as two self-identified trads, Fr. Garrett O’Brien and Scarlett.

Trads: Manufacturing Tradition in Catholic Churches in New Orleans

Like so much in American religion, the 2021 Buddhist ceremony May We Gather combined elements of suffering, solidarity, and healing. Once again, prejudice tried to destroy those who are viewed as outside the white Christian American ideal. But this time it also inadvertently stimulated the creation of something beautiful and strong: a new form of Asian American Buddhist gathering that responded to America’s racial karma with defiance, historical awareness, and communal care.

May We Gather

Leif Castren discusses the concept of “frontier” which, as he explains, is as much a material landscape (the frontier of the American West, for instance) as it is a series of imagined possibilities, myths, metaphors, and ideas.

Frontiers

Najiyah Najiyah discusses the role of volcanos in both the geographic and cultural landscape of Indonesia.

Volcanic Cosmologies

Dr. Rosamund Rodman discusses her research on the ways that Biblical place names were used as a colonial technology of exclusion and displacement in the United States.

The Work of Place Names

Institute guest speaker Evan Berry discusses his book, Devoted to Nature: the Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Dr. Berry reflects in particular on the role of mountains: how enthusiasm for mountains informed the lives and activism of the people whom his book is about, the Mountaineers, and how a view of the Cascades and Mount Rainier during the writing of this project connected him though time to the subjects of his study.

On Mountains

Guest speaker Niya Bates, former director of the Getting Word African American Oral History Project at Monticello, discusses the creation of the recently completed contemplative site designed to memorialize the lives of the 607 enslaved people who built, and worked at Monticello. Monticello and the University of Virginia are the only sites of domestic slavery on the UNESCO World Heritage list. As Bates explains, their joint nomination to UNESCO, which was based on their shared architectural features under the standards for outstanding universal value, focuses heavily on the design contributions of Thomas Jefferson, eliding the contributions of the Black, enslaved, skilled artisans and craftspeople in these sites’ construction. Revising these documents, Bates tells us, should be a priority.

A Site of Conscience

Guest speaker Rachel Havrelock discusses her book River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line, and how water has been a literal and metaphorical through-line in her work – from researching the Biblical myths which inform historical and contemporary understandings of the Jordan River in Israel/Palestine, to her organizing work protecting freshwater sources in the Great Lakes watershed of the American Midwest.

To Think a Watershed

Guest instructors Carolyn Schyuler and Dorothe Bach discuss their class, “Restoring Our Relationship with Nature,” an undergraduate course exploring the human relationship with the environment, which they co-teach at the University of Virginia. They also describe the workshop they led for Institute participants at Foxhaven Farm. Place-making in nature, Schyuler tells us, is an important part of child development all over the world. Moreover, replicating these forms of play and exploration can benefit our creativity, sense of connection, and wellbeing, throughout the entire lifespan.

Restoring Our Relationship with Nature

Mary-Jane Rubenstien, author of Astrotopia: the Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (2018) and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2022), discusses the “religion-like structures” at work in the contemporary regard for a post-earth humanity in space.

Astrotopia

Guest speaker Matthew Burtner, co-creator of the Coastal Conservatory, discusses the eco-acoustic method: How sound and listening offer us a way of knowing and experiencing a place unlike other practices of observation, and a way of collaborating with the environment, as human-nature hybrids, in the creation of music.

Glacier Music

Guest instructor Dr. Jalane Schmidt discusses her public scholarship on the history of human enslavement and white supremacy in Charlottesville. Dr. Schmidt’s methods entail using archival and primary source data to tell the unheralded or suppressed histories of places, which can have the effect of “de-naturalizing” the landscape. In the case of the auction block located in Charlottesville’s historic court square, this work has transformed an unmarked site of human suffering into a site of conscience and public memory.

Denaturalizing the Landscape

Guest speaker Rosalyn LaPier discusses her book, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet. Dr. LaPier discusses the book’s core methods, which blend oral histories from Blackfeet elders (the storytellers) and archival materials originating with missionary and colonial scholars (the storytakers). As she explains, the religion of the Blackfeet entails increasing connection and awareness of the “invisible reality” of which our perceptible world is just a small part, and establishing kinship relations with supernatural animal allies. As part of her research for the book, Dr. LaPier and a first language Blackfeet elder reconstructed the “annual round,” the yearly migration path, of a Blackfeet band–a lifeway practice that was lost as Blackfeet people were forced onto reservations in the 19th century.

Invisible Realities

A story about the statue at the pinnacle of the U.S. Capitol Building and its hidden connection to the antebellum debate over slavery.

Freedom'sHat

Art is what made life survivable in the precarious context of postcolonial Africa, as seen through the legacy of Paa ya Paa gallery and poet, Okot p'Bitek.

The Fire at Paa ya Paa

The reparations that came as a result of the holocaust has since been used as evidence for the necessity of reparations in the US and around the world. However, the question remains, do reparations work? In this piece I sought to find the qualitative results of holocaust reparations. More broadly, I raised the questions: to what extent do reparations remediate cultural trauma? And, what relationship do victims have with the reparations they receive?

Holocaust Reparations: A Reflection on Repair

This is a story about birth and rebirth, power and perseverance, resurgence and resistance. This is a story about more than just a mountain, more than Western science versus indigenous mysticism. This is a story about the voice of ancestors, the perpetuation of culture, the livelihood of a people. It is also a story about U.S. colonialism in Hawai‘i.

Kū Kiaʻi Mauna: Mauna Kea, Protecting the Sacred, and the Thirty Meter Telescope

The purpose of democracy is to confer political legitimacy. Political leaders are legitimate when democratically elected. Laws are legitimate when passed by valid democratic procedure. 

But what happens when a democratic system reaches, so to speak, the wrong conclusion? How should we think of democratically elected leaders who are unfair or unjust? What if they pursue policies that undermine democracy itself? 

Many nations are confronting these questions, but they are felt with special force
in Hungary, whose relationship with democracy has never been more fraught.

Hungary's Illibral Democracy

Charlottesville, Virginia; it’s probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think of refugees in the US. However, much to our surprise we found this small city in central Virginia to be a hub for refugees from all over the world. You can find them pretty much where ever you go in the city, but you can also live in Charlottesville for an extended period of time and never interact with any of them. That’s the thing about being a refugee; it’s not spelled out on your forehead. Refugee status is not a race, religion, gender, nationality, or even a single unified community. It is nonetheless, for many refugees an important part of their identity. It’s a major part of their individual story which too often goes completely unnoticed. But what makes their experience(s) so invisible?

The Other Side of Charlottesville: Invisible Stories of Refugees

As the Covid-19 pandemic has a devastating impact on countries worldwide, the small nation of Bhutan located between China and India, has only had 300 positive cases and zero deaths, eight months into the pandemic. With testing, swift quarantining, and robust tracing, their results are remarkable and efforts are clearly paying off. In this project, UVA PhD candidate, Michelle Walsh interviews her Bhutanese friend as he experiences lockdown and Covid-19 restrictions in Bhutan. They explore how religion is impacting the way Bhutanese are experiencing and responding to the global pandemic, the struggles, and one way the situation is transforming them.

Sacrifice, Solidarity, and Transformation

In the summer of 2019, when the Hong Kong government proposed the legislation of the extradition bill, which would have sent people suspected of crimes to mainland China, millions of people marched across the city to voice their opposition. Elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religions emerged in this process to transform the identity and aspirations of this growing community of protesters. They are symbolic of the city’s freedom of expression and the shared spirit of protesters.

From Water to Air: The Spirituality of Protest in Hong Kong

Reparations has recently resurfaced in public discourses. Most notably, scholars and politicians are trying to center the conversation on a compensatory payment for African Americans, based on two centuries of unpaid slave labor. This project, by University of Virginia graduate student, Ryan Russell seeks to examine how reparations pose challenges for colleges and universities, and to also see how these institutions have approached the topic of reparations more broadly. There is a specific emphasis and focus on how UVA has or has not taken adequate steps to ensure that it is a leading institution in creating policies that acknowledge and provide forms of reparative justice.

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