Lucas and Joel were on Spring Break this week while Sean was swamped with his semester steadily approaching finals and unable to join in this time. But there was still plenty to talk about! It’s a twofer this week as Joel and Lucas tackle Robert Segal’s 1998 essay “Diagnosing Religion” and a more recent response to Segal’s point of view and central “doctor/patient” metaphor from Noah Salomon and Jeremy Walton. Their essay is the last in the 2012 Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies and is titled “Religious Criticism, Secular Critique, and the ‘Critical Study of Religion’: Lessons from the Study fo Islam.” Joel and Lucas get into the insider/outsider distinction in RS, the interesting relationship between “critical religion” and “critical theory,” and wonder whether the kind of “scientism” advocated by some in religious studies has a colonialist tone. Spoiler alert: it does.

“The Seminar Room” (TSR) is a religious studies podcast by and for students and scholars of religion that engages specific texts and concepts in religious studies theory and method, philosophy and critical theory. Our regular contributors are Joel Harrison, Lucas Scott Wright and Sean Capener.

The format and title of the podcast are meant to reflect “the seminar room” in which grad students encounter and reflect upon texts in their respective graduate programs. Our goal is to provide an online seminar room in which contributors may debate texts and ideas in a way that opens up further discussion with our listeners.

Episodes are released every other week on Saturdays. In addition to our podcast recordings, this blog contains supplementary introductions to and reflections on the texts, and links to each text we discuss.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or using FeedBurner.

If you want to contact us you may find us here:

Gmail: seminarroomcast@gmail.com

Twitter: @TheSeminarRoom