1. What is religion? What does it mean to be religiously literate?

Religiously Literate

With so many religions in the world it can be hard to keep up with what everyone believes. Religiously Literate is here to help! Join Jay and Ryan on this episode as we introduce the podcast and make listeners reflect on their own understandings of "religion."

In this episode, we discuss what led us to start this podcast, some of our favorite definitions of religion, what it means to be "religiously literate," and what we hope listeners will gain from listening.

Connect with us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ReigiousLitPod and Twitter: @ReligiousLitPod

SHOW NOTES:

AIHREA website: www.aihrea.org

Jay’s definition: Human behavior associated with the intentional differentiation between the sacred and the profane.
Bohanon, Jesse, “Rewriting the Written: An Analysis on Religious Studies,” December 14, 2009, 3.

James: ...the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin E. Marty, The Penguin American Library (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1982), 31.

Durkheim: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." (b) [Religion is] "the self-validation of a society by means of myth and ritual.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ed. Mark Sydney Cladis, trans. Carol Cosman, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46.

Geertz: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90.

KU Religious Studies website: http://religiousstudies.ku.edu/

Prothero Talk at KU 2018: https://religiousstudies.ku.edu/2018-friends-department-religious-studies-speaker-stephen-prothero

Prothero website: http://stephenprothero.com/

Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t. New York, N.Y: HarperOne, 2008.

Robert Orsi: https://orsi.northwestern.edu/

Harvard RLP: https://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/

Music used in this episode is City of Jewels by Destiny & Time