Religious Studies News communicates important events of the field and examines critical issues in education, pedagogy, research, publishing, and the public understanding of religion. Sometimes that involves sharing what others are writing about the field and these issues.
In Open Tabs, RSN editors will share the articles they’ve been reading and thinking about. If you have recommendations for articles, podcasts, or other media you’ve recently encountered that examine issues that fall under the purview of RSN, email us.
What We’re Watching and Reading
Leela Prasad on the Alive with Steve Burns Podcast
On the Alive with Steve Burns podcast, watch AAR President Leela Prasad engage Steve Burns in a thought-provoking conversation around our collective inclination to believe in something larger than ourselves.
“What Feeds Your Soul”: D’Angelo’s Sacred Secular Ministry
Published October 16, 2025, in Religion Dispatches
In this elegiac piece, Santi Elijah Holley writes about how the late D’Angelo brought his secular ministry to the world. From the article:
“D’Angelo passed away from pancreatic cancer this week, at 51 years old. He possessed a singular and remarkable gift, but also struggled with drugs and alcohol, faced arrest, and disappeared from the public eye for years at a time. In the days since his passing, tributes have flooded social and print media, with colleagues, critics, and fans calling him a genius, a once-in-a-generation talent, and a visionary, but also conflicted, troubled, disturbed.
As the church folk say: he’s been called everything but a child of God.
But D’Angelo centered Christ in his art throughout his life. Like Sam Cooke, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and many other of his soul music predecessors, he first honed his talents in his family’s church, listening to and learning to play gospel songs from records by Mahalia Jackson, Walter Hawkins, and Maggie Ingram.
[…]
In another life, young Michael Eugene Archer could easily have become a popular gospel or worship singer. He might have been a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher, like his father, mother, and grandmother before him. Lord knows he had that holy fire in him. But instead, D’Angelo chose to bring his ministry into the world.”
“What’s Truly at Stake When Universities Cut Back on Humanities”
Published October 13, 2025, in The Boston Globe
Read an op-ed in The Boston Globe from AAR President, Leela Prasad, on the consequences of universities quietly shuttering the humanities. From the op-ed:
“[…] when a university closes a department of philosophy, religion, or languages, it is not trimming a dead branch. It is felling part of a living forest of inquiry and imagination. As biologist David G. Haskell reminds us, trees are woven into vast networks of roots, fungi, birds, and soil. Cut one, and you wound many. Eliminate one, and you imperil all. A humanities department eliminated is not an isolated loss; it is a rupture in the ecosystem of the university, injuring a web of disciplines, communities, and generations of students.
Making humanities programs disappear quietly is more than an educational loss. It is a contraction of freedom itself. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said that freedom is more than the absence of coercion; it requires that we have opportunities to live lives we value. A right to vote is meaningless if there are no polling places. The freedom to speak is hollow without forums to hear multiple voices. Eliminating humanities programs hollows out the very opportunities that enable people to flourish.”
“In Chicago, clergy and faith-based protesters say ICE is threatening their religious freedom”
Published October 7, 2025, in Religion News Service
Jack Jenkins, a national reporter for RNS, interviews several religious leaders and faith activists who have been visibly protesting ICE in and around Chicago, advocating for immigrants and against violence. From the article:
“Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.
‘I invited them to repentance,’ Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. ‘I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.’
[…]
Churches with immigrant-heavy populations have seen attendance drop, and others have had direct encounters with ICE. Federal agents have conducted immigration enforcement near or on the grounds of U.S. churches at least 10 times this year, prompting one California pastor to confront apparent federal agents as they apprehended people in her church parking lot in June.”
“ChatGPT Can’t Teach Us About Religion (or anything else, for that matter)”
Published August 18, 2025 in Religion Dispatches
Beatrice Marovich, an associate professor at Hanover College and AAR member, investigates the use of ChatGPT in classrooms and why attempts to strip it of implicit bias may be doing more harm than good. From the article:
“Religious studies may actually offer lessons for how we might approach this problem—if we can acknowledge that pure objectivity might not be the solution we’re looking for. Absolute neutrality, as many scholars of religion (not to mention critics of journalism) have pointed out, is its own kind of myth.
When I engaged ChatGPT on these questions about religious (especially Protestant) bias among its user base, I mentioned that I was a scholar in the field of theology and religious studies. It was quick to mirror me back to myself, in order to assure me that it understood my frame of reference. The questions I was asking, it told me, ‘map onto’ the work of JZ Smith (especially his critique of “religion” as a colonial Christian construct) along with the work of Talal Asad (on the genealogy of religion as a category in modernity).
[…] I asked ChatGPT how it would deal with a user query about the key beliefs of Buddhists. It would, it told me, attempt to ‘correct the Protestant bias implicitly,’ offer an ‘introductory-level discussion,’ or confront the use of the term directly, all depending on its perception of the user’s background and disposition.
OK, I thought. If this is how ChatGPT might engage with my students who are using it, that wouldn’t be so bad. But just to be sure, I opened another browser window and asked ‘What do Buddhists believe?’ (without mentioning my scholar credentials). It responded with a tidy listicle of Buddhists’ ‘core beliefs,’ with absolutely no qualifications or caveats.”
“The Strange History of University Autonomy – and Why We Need It More Than Ever”
Published August 15, 2025, in The Chronicle of Higher Education
Adam Sitze, a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, writes about the history of academic freedom from the Middle Ages to apartheid South Africa to now. From the article:
“Both the Catholic church and the university are medieval institutions that survived into modernity. Both propose to dedicate themselves to forms of universal truth that exceed, from within, the narrower claims of the modern, sovereign, territorial nation-state. And both are governed less by equality than hierarchy, less by election than selection, less by completely free speech than by a certain experience of compelled or unfree speech.
In academic disciplines, after all, neither truths nor facts are up for a vote; unlike opinions, truths are dictated by rules of evidence and methods that one can’t choose or modify at will. The principle of the university, particularly in its medieval form, is not that all opinions are equally valid. It’s that some claims — true ones — are more worthy of expression than others, even if these more worthy claims should contradict or undermine opinions cherished by the vast majority of the taxpaying public. In all of these ways and more, the university’s alignment with modern democracy is historically recent, politically tenuous, and conceptually non-obvious.”
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