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Hello everyone, welcome to New Books Network. I'm Jadim Slonghamer, the host of this channel. And today I'm here with Dr. Deimu Daira to talk about his book, Taking Religion Seriously, aces on Discursive Study of Religion.
Now, people who have been listening to this podcast and to me having a conversation with others will be aware that I'm very much interested in theories, specifically the theories of religion. And I'm very interested in having a conversation about that, but also at the same time, I'm very invested in thinking about theories in religion. So today I'm so pleased to be here with Dr. Deimu Daira to talk about his book, where he talks about the discursive way of trying to understand and study religion.
So without much giving much back on the book itself, let me just straightaway go through the author himself, because there is so much to cover in this book in this very short time. So let me straightaway go to the author and say an axiom. So Dr. Deimu Daira, can you tell us something about yourself?
Yes. Yes. If I briefly iterate my years into study of religion, I studied my studies at the University of Turquoise in Finland and I actually did my PhD there as well. And then I moved to Leeds, first as a visiting fellow and later on as a postdoc researcher in a project with Kim Noton Le Spool, in which we studied media portrayals of religion in the previous context.
And then after the project came to an end, I moved back to Turquoise and worked there as a university researcher until I was offered a permanent position from the University of Helsinki in 2015. And I've been at the University of Helsinki ever since. So I've been in different places, but I've always been in the study of religion departments. And that's a sort of short iteration of my years in the study of religion.
And my special areas have been threefolded. I'm saying that first, I've been very interested in theories and methods and especially these cohesive approaches in recent years. And then I've written quite a lot about atheism, secularism and non-religion. And the third area is religion and media.
So I think that in this book we are going to talk about, I'm mostly focusing on the first area theories and methods, but also a little bit to the other ones. Yeah, that's quite short and precise overview of what you have done and your background. That's quite really good. So this book, as it is said in the title of an overview of the different methods and theories of trying to understand religion, but also specifically looking at the discursive study.
How did this work and this book as a whole came about? Yeah, where to start? I think it would be appropriate to start from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I started reading books by Russell McCutchen and Timothy Fitzgerald, recommended to me by Vaconte Penen, who was a professor, my professor and supervisor at that time. So I started reading those books and at that time I considered moving the cultural history department to do my PhD.
But when I started reading more, let's say, critical approaches to the study of religion, I decided that, okay, I can live with the field of study of religion. This now looks more exciting than I thought. So I stayed in the field. And soon I started to be interested in problematizing religion, see it as a sort of history called category, that emerged in certain point of time and it has changed ever since.
And at that time my research wasn't focused on that at all, but I read that kind of stuff at the same time. And then I thought, okay, many of these studies that exist focused on the 19th century or even earlier times. And I was more interested in contemporary present times. And many of these early studies were large-scale studies, like how the category of religion emerged as part of modernity or something like that, in relation to nation states, in relation to colonial contexts, and how the category of religion was spread from the Western world to other areas in the Japan elsewhere.
And I thought, well, I'm not necessarily going to focus on that at any point of time, but then I thought, okay, but the negotiation and the debates related to the category of religion are going on all the time in our contemporary society. And I thought, okay, especially these cases in court cases and legal contexts in which courts and judges and laws are defining religion and negotiating with conscious religion are quite interesting cases to study. And then I started focusing on those cases. I mean, interesting cases don't come up every year necessarily, but whenever they come up and are sort of available for me as a researcher so that I can get the material, not just rely on second-hand information about those cases, then I think that I thought that, okay, I'm just doing one case study, then another, and then they start piling up, and then I started writing more theoretical reflections on what can we learn, and how can we conceptualize the field of study of religion more generally from this point of view.
Then I just published some articles and some of them are rewritten and updated for this book. And I think in practice, it was pretty much Russell McCutchen who told me many, many times that you should put these articles together and publish them as a book in this series. And I waited some years and then finally I had time to do that and now it's out. Yeah, I mean the journey that you have taken in terms of thinking about all of these ideas and that's why you have come and putting this essay in a book.
I think it really speaks about the very ingenuity of the book itself and also the work that you are doing, so I think the effort that you are also putting, so I think that's quite interesting. So let's just go into the discursive study and what really it is. Now religion as we know can be studied through the phenomenological aspect, the functional aspect, and also nowadays people talk so much about the leaf religion and how we can study from those perspectives. And also again coming to the discursive study of religion now I think one of the questions that people might also raise in the sense people who are beginning to try to understand religion might raise.
How can we study something which cannot even be defined or which doesn't even have a definition? So how do we really want to study this thing? So the question I think in your book you also deal on how to do discursive study of religion, but I think the question that I want to ask now is what is the discursive study of religion? Yeah.
In the book I don't give a straight forward answer to that question what is discursive study of religion, but I characterize quite broadly different versions of discursive approaches. I mean there are some of the things that need to be emphasized here. For instance, discursive analysis is quite common method in arts and humanities and social sciences. And when I was studying in Finland it was very, very popular.
So I read a lot about those introductory textbooks delineating discursive analysis. In most cases the field was not about religion but something like in social psychology or social sciences more generally. And when I'm talking about discursive study of religion I'm sort of referring not only those approaches that utilize discos analysis. They can be labeled as part of discursive study of religion.
Okay. And different types of approaches have some common elements obviously. In a very general sense we can probably say that discursive study of religion is the way of studying in which we study the construction of social religion. The construction of social reality through discourses or various meaning making systems.
We study language in use. That's a very brief way of putting it. But I also say that I would include discursive study of religion almost any kind of approach that utilizes the concept of discos. Even when it is not discos analysis in any specific manner.
So for example many scholars in the study of religion don't necessarily do discos analysis as such, but they utilize the concept of discos in studying the category of religion. And I include all those together but I make distinctions between them and I have my own way of doing discursive study in this book. And my own way of doing is such that doesn't define religion. Now there are discursive approaches that begin by defining religion and then study whatever is defined as religious.
How discos are operating in those contexts. I use Bruce Lincoln's great studies as an example of that approach. I call that approach religious discourse. But I differentiate mine from that by calling it discos on religion or discourses on religion.
And by that I mean that my approach is not giving a definition of religion. But in this book I'm focusing only on those cases in which I study others who are negotiating about what comes as religion. How religion is defined by law, by different speakers in different contexts, how different institutions are defining it and negotiating what comes as religion. So I don't give a definition of religion at any point.
And therefore my general message in this book is that we can do interesting studies in our field without defining our key concept religion. So that is an object of study for me. And I try to be consistent in this book about that. Yes, and I think one of the immediate questions that comes while you speak about that discursive study of religion and the way you portrayed it, one of the straightaway questions can be, then how do we do this discursive study?
Because I think in the study of religion today the idea of tradition and also it's so much dominant by the world religion paradigm and all of this perspective. And when we talk about historical perspective and all of those aspects are there. So in your book you deal a lot on how to do discursive study of religion. But here I think it was a short glimpse of how to really go about doing this discursive study of religion.
Yeah. Well, in the second chapter I provide a sort of outline of how discursive study can be done generally. It relates heavily or refers heavily to quite standard ideas on how discos analysis more generally is done. What kind of material is typical for such studies?
And how can we identify discourses or identify some key distinctions we can focus on in the studies and so on and so forth. But then I move more strongly to my own preferences and I'm not putting it in this book straight away this kind of step by step manner in how to do it. Because I actually agree with those scholars who say that discursive frameworks, how to put them into practice, should not be done step by step manner. But we need to be sensitive to the context we are working on.
What kind of levels we want to focus on? What is our material and what are our questions? But elsewhere I've tried to sort of give some how to say guidelines on how to do discursive study of religion. And I think in this book it is more obvious when we go to case studies.
Those case studies are providing a model one can easily follow and apply. At least that's how I've thought about it. Of course it remains to others to see how they can apply it. But I think that it is interesting to start with identifying a case in which religion is negotiated.
Whether it's a law case or something else, I study quite a lot about those registration processes that we can talk about those later. But then I identify key actors and key documents. And I don't really do interviews. I don't use interviews or questionnaires as a main data.
But the kind of data that I call naturally occurring data. That exists without the researchers input. So it is already there the data in public sphere. So they are mostly public documents provided by institutions or media materials or something like that.
And I see how different actors are involved. Like media officials, groups in question, scholars are quite often involved in those cases. And then I try to try to see how society is organized by referring to religion. So in that sense, I could say that I'm not studying at any point religion as a phenomenon in this book or tradition.
But simply how societies operate by referring to religion and what different actors are trying to achieve by doing that work. By claiming that something is religion or denying religion or political or political or political group, practice or a symbol. So that's a type of model I'm proposing in this book. But in the chapter two, which is more about method, I lay out the standard ideas of how this analysis is done in a typical sense.
And to kind of put this theoretical framework into a better perspective, I think we'll have to go into the case studies here. And this is where at first you talk about this one of the so-called new religion movement, which is the WICA. And I think you talk about here, I think in this chapter, we talk about the overlapping of the judicial process and the cultural discourses that goes about and how this weekend community can add attention to this one. So what can be true through this WICA movement, this new religion movement, what can be learned about the discursive study of religion?
Of all case studies in this book, this is the earliest one I did and also it is the oldest one in terms of what was going on in society. So this case study is about Finnish context when a group of WICA's Finnish Free Weak Society or Association tried to get registered as a religious community that was in early 2000s. And I mean, in the end they didn't get it through, but it went to a Supreme Court when it was voted for votes against registration and three votes for registration. So it was very tight in the season.
And this is an example through which I'm trying to see how a religion is used or how it operates as a discursive technique in society. And I focus on those weekends, what they tried to achieve, why were they interested in getting registered as a religious community in the first place? What would have they gained from the process if it had succeeded? So that's one layer in that.
But then another layer is the legal aspect. How law defines what counts as religion? And because it was such a tight decision in the end, I think it provides the material in highlighting what officials think religion is in the Finnish context. Of course there is law that provides some framework, but it doesn't provide strict definition of religion.
It provides some kind of framework of what religion is about, but it's not strict definition in the end. I mean, one way would be to study this type of case by focusing simply whether the law was applied correctly or not. But I also argue that in this particular context, when law doesn't provide strict and exact definition, people who are dealing with the law are referring to cultural, their own cultural understanding, what is typically religious. And I argue that that type of conceptualization comes from the Christian Protestant prototype of what religion is, and groups that doesn't fit with that prototype or go further away from that prototype force officials to spell out what they think religion is.
And then we can get to the understanding of what people conceive, what religion is, and how it is demarcated from what is not religious. And in this sense, I talk about boundary cases where there is no clear understanding or agreement whether this particular group counts as religious or not. And in this particular case, it was interesting that scholars also were more or less involved in this negotiation. And my point of view is in this case, and also in other cases, that I don't define religion, and I recommend the approach in which scholars don't go out in public or work as experts or in court cases in a manner that would give a proper definition of religion.
Of course, some scholars study, we comes, for example, as a traditional religious group. But I think that it is probably the best way to participate in public debates by not suggesting that this is a religion or this is not a religion, but rather by trying to reveal what those people are doing when they are trying to achieve, when they claim to be a religious community, or how the society operates when it has such laws, for example, that allow some groups to get privileges when they are registering as religious communities. Yes, and coming to the role of the scholar, I think in the second example that is when you talk about the Garhoon Kansa, one of the, you know, as they were applying for the forces of being a religious community, you talk about your personal involvement there. And I think, I mean, if anyone as, you know, scholar of religion or anyone talking about religion in that sense would like to be on the forefront of, you know, defining what is religion or what is not religion, but I think you talk about a different case here in terms of the Garhoon Kansa, where you talk about their movement and how your involvement has been.
So, can you please elaborate on that one? Yes, I mean, as I said, before some of the material in this book has been previously published and then updated and re-written, but this chapter is completely new one. And it is about the case of Garhoon Kansa people of the bear, quite a small group in Finland, and at that time when they were registering successfully as a religious community in 2013, they were representing what is called Finnish fate. And so, sort of rehabilitation of pre-Christian, Finno-Yukrik, also Finnish traditions through mostly scholarly sources, what is known about pre-Christian times and then some of those aspects are rehabilitated in their own interpretation of what life used to be and what was considered sacred at that time and so on and so forth.
So, this particular group, Garhoon Kansa, applied for a registered religious community, and first of all, they got the rejection letter. The Expert Committee thought that there are some problems with the way rituals are described and so on and so forth. Those are required by law, but the Expert Committee didn't think that Garhoon Kansa is really a religious group. And then, when I saw the Expert Committee statement, I wrote a blog post in which I didn't defend Garhoon Kansa.
I didn't say that they are a religious community and I didn't say the opposite either, but I tried to show how the Expert Committee statement relies heavily on a Protestant Christian prototype of what religion is, what counts as religion, and how it uses that as a yardstick in their evaluation of whether Garhoon Kansa would count as a religious group or community. And I also highlighted the composition of the Expert Committee, how all those experts were actually working very closely with the Lutheran Church. The Lutheran Church is the main dominant church in Finland. It appears that some persons within the Lutheran Church or people close with the Lutheran Church are actually deciding what counts as religion in Finnish context.
This was a question of image and many people saw it that way, so I wasn't the only one. And soon after the blog post, news media started to pick up the issue on the base of my blog post. And soon the Minister of the Interior, who was responsible for naming that Expert Committee and who was also known as Conservative Christian, not very much liked by the liberal media. So she responded to my criticism that was published in more mainstream media, not only once but twice.
It happened a couple of months later, and it was almost all important newspapers. So I calculated that the potential coverage of that story was within a couple of million in a country with 5.5 million inhabitants. So potentially it was really mainstream media case. I don't know how many people read it really, but I got a lot of feedback of that.
So I was very much involved in that case. At the moment when the group itself, Karan Kansa, handed in their improved application, in Finland, that is possible that if you fail to register, you get a letter and then you can improve your application and respond to that. But the interesting thing here is that I was very much involved in that public debate when the process was open. So I cannot claim or I cannot prove that my involvement really had direct influence to that case because the second decision, later by the Expert Committee, was positive and recommended.
Clearly that Karan Kansa should be allowed to register as a religious community. But the interesting thing is that suddenly the same group of experts that first thought that Karan Kansa definitely doesn't count as a religious group had changed its mind after a couple of months. And plain that of course this is a religious community. And one interesting thing is, of course it's my involvement is interesting thing, but I cannot prove that it had effect.
But I speculate in that chapter that perhaps it was the media who wanted to pick up the case because the media is happy if they can criticize by the Russian and who was the Minister of the Interior at that time and known as conservative Christian. And I think that the positive decision was partly related to the attempt to silence the criticism concerning the Expert Committee. That's because the Expert Committee definitely knew that if the second decision is negative as well, people will really discuss it. But it was positive and an interesting thing is that now the group was labeled by the Expert Committee as a near pagan community.
That was how the Expert Committee was able to figure out the door. Okay, if we classify groups in these ways, then we can say that Karan Kansa counts as a near pagan community. But the group itself doesn't use the term pagan or near pagan in its application at all. But that was the way the Expert Committee was able to label its religious.
So overall, that registration process is very interesting in itself because there are lots of interesting reasons why the group itself wanted to become registered as a religious community. We can talk about that later if you want, or people can read it from the book. But the way how I wrote this particular chapter highlights more my personal involvement in that case. And therefore it also highlights how scholars, even when they are not introducing themselves to the media that, hey, I'm an expert, you should listen to me, people may get involved in such debates.
And one can easily be a participant in such a debate without defining religion at all. I emphasized all the time that I'm not speaking for the community, I'm not speaking against them, I'm not saying what should count as religious and what shouldn't. But we can talk about more interesting things, such as why there is such a law in the first place that you have to negotiate whether this group can be resisted as a religious community or not, and how power operates in society. For example, through the Expert Committee.
And I think those are interesting aspects and the type of things that other scholars can hopefully understand that we can be also participants in public community. For participants in public discourses without providing a definition of religion. The reason why I emphasize this is that so many scholars have suggested that of course the public role of scholar is to say what really is a religion and what is not. And I oppose that approach.
And I even argue that that kind of approach in this particular case wouldn't have worked at all in favor of the community in favor of Karam Gansa. But precisely the fact that I didn't define religion or didn't speak for the community was helpful for the community itself. Yeah, that's a very good example and also the approach that you are proposing. And so something which is very interesting, I might not say that all scholars might agree to that one or I might also say that it depends upon the context.
But still I think that approach is something which I would also personally like to emulate in certain sense. So I think that's a very interesting approach that you have given there in a sense. So yeah, thank you very much for that. Now, coming to the next one that is you talk about the trade network and this is chapter or a paper that you have written Susan on.
And so this is where you talk about the power relation, clarity and media of how all of those perspectives intersect with each other. So how this trade network can record nation through this territory with registration. So I think can you elaborate more on how this gives out the perspective of discursive study of religion. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, as you said, this chapter is a collaboration with Dr. Susan Owen who works at Leeds Trinity University. And I met Susan originally, I think in 2007 in England and we were not working at the same institution, but we were working in the same city city of Leeds at that time. And then we got to know each other much better.
And then I mean, Susan has done a lot of work on indigenous religions and roots. And I have to say that, it's not my specialty at all. But at that time, I had done some cases like this week, I had done that at that time. So when I heard that the grid network was even green light by the charity commission to be registered as a charity in England and Wales, under the banner or under the title for the advancement of religion, which is one of the categories with which you can apply charitable status.
There are other categories as well, like like educational purposes or whatever. But I was interested in this case or I became interested in this case because this was very contentious and long process. And the charity commission report spends quite a lot of space in thinking whether we can accept the idea that the grid network and ruin grid in that sense is the religion. And so I started to talk with Susan about this case and we decided to collaborate on co-author.
And we participated in the launch conference of the grid network in 2010. And we talked to people and ended in a short questionnaire. And Susan knows those people quite well. So she was able to gather information from the field of gridry more generally, not just from the grid network, but there are other groups in England and Britain representing gridry.
And how we started to think how this decision may give a special position for the grid network in relation to these other groups, because the other groups are not registered as charities and not definitely under the banner for the advancement of religion. So, and then we started to consider what's this charity law, where it comes from, how in previous case, previous contentious cases, the commission has decided. And in some cases, it has decided favorably to some boundary cases, but in most cases it has rejected the application like a economic sensor and Scientology, for instance. And the reasons have been somewhat different.
And one of the key problems within the grid network was that the charity law requires that in order to be understood as religious, there should be some kind of guard or deity or divine entity that is worshipped. By the group. And within the grid, there's no transcendent guard. But rather the grid network tried to argue that it is nature that is divine or equal to that kind of divine entity.
Or in the application, it wasn't even clear whether it was nature that was divine or sacred or whether it was spirits arising from the nature or something like that. And we actually argue that in many ways it was the rhetorical choices that were important in the application that they used very often the word sacred, for example, and rituals, defining significance of something such as spirits or places or nature. And when the application was accepted, it raised some media debates and the most famous is is a column by Melanie Phillips, who is known as very, very conservative author or journalist writing for Daily Mail, which is a very conservative pro-Christian tabloid. And that column was very strongly arguing against defining grid as a religion, it labeled grid as a cult, implicating that these may be harmless, harmless, but definitely not on par with proper religion that is Christianity.
So that was a moment when in the British context, context people were debating what really counts as religion. And that sort of brought the implications and British oppositions of what people think religion is to the mainstream public. And also in this case, like in many other cases I discussed in this book, scholars were also involved. And namely in the charity registration context, it is possible, at least in this particular case, it was possible for the grid network to ask expert statement by a scholar of religion.
And they asked that from Graham Harvey, who is now a professor in religious studies at the Open University, and Graham Harvey wrote a very, very supportive statement, arguing that that grid is definitely a religion. And even emphasizing that scholars of religion worldwide in international conferences study grid as a religion. So I think that's a very nice example of how Professor Harvey was referring to scholars who may or may not have anything to do with the Keto case itself, but whose work is referred to that that grid is studied internationally in the field of study of religion. So scholars are sometimes directly involved and sometimes indirectly referred to in those cases.
And the statement was very supportive as I said, and it was very important because the charity commission reported heavily how this report. And that was very, very important in the decision. So they got the status of charity and all the privileges it brings. And interesting thing is that at that point we speculated whether this is opening the gates so all other so called pagan groups will be able to register as charities.
But that actually doesn't really happen so easily. So someone has written a couple of articles about the later cases and reflecting those at that. For some reason, the grid network case wasn't so successful for other potential singular communities to register as charities. So there are those many layers layers we discussed in that chat.
Yes, and I think the contestation of what is religion and what is not religion by taking different perspective is somehow quite interesting. And I think here your work specifically speaks on this one where the discuss of study of religion and I think that is a very amenable contribution in that sense which is worth your doing. And especially comes out through the case studies that you have presented. Coming to the next one, you're talking about the JD Knights.
Here, I just want to ask this one in this section of your discussion. What is invented religion? I think in this section, I believe this is something which is very important because I think so much discussion is going on in this topic in this area perspective. So I think the question, what is invented religion is important here.
So, yeah, please. Yeah, I start this chapter by talking about the concept of invented religion, especially with reference to Carol Cusack's 2010 book and in which he introduces this concept. And of course, many people say that well, in some sense, all religions are invented. Of course, but Cusack actually talks about deliberately invented religions.
So those so-called religions in which the founders and followers are quite explicit that this is invented or this is based on fictional accounts or something like that. So they don't try to hide the invented nature of their religion. So that's one of the key differences if you compare to Islam. It is easy to argue that it is invented as well, but it doesn't explicitly say that this is invented.
So in that sense, I understand what Cusack means by this concept. And I think the examples that the groups and movements see studies and later on others study under that term are very interesting. But my approach is somewhat different. I actually reject the concept of invented religion, but I don't find it that useful.
I see those examples, those groups and movements as just examples, one can study from the point of view of this cursive approach. And I use Judaism as an example in this particular chapter, but I talk a little bit about many others such as Pastor Farrians or the Church of Flying Spacket Timonster and also Swedish-based Copimism and many others. But my main focus is on Judaism. And of course, now I can't remember the year where there was 2000 or 16 or something like that when a group of Jedi knights applied for the charitable status in the England Wales.
But I don't really focus on that case. I focus on earlier case, which is a case of Chris Jarvis, who has scored it from the Job Sensor Plus, where he was looking for vacant jobs, because he was wearing his hood up hooded top. And he claimed that because of his religion, he is allowed to wear that. And Jedi religion requires that.
But he was escorted out, he complained. And later on, the Job Sensor sent an apology that we are sorry that we have done this against what you think is your religious belief. And then that became public, it was in the media, in the mainstream media, in tabloids and also in quality papers as guardian. And I argue that this is exactly the example of how people who don't necessarily have voice, like unemployed, uneducated, white, young man in British context, feels that he doesn't have any kind of voice.
But by referring to religion and saying that this is my religion, in this case, Jediism, somehow he is hurt in the public and he is taken seriously, at least for a moment. I don't think otherwise anyone would really listen to Chris Jarvis in public. And definitely there wouldn't be stories in the main top, or guardian about him. And I also suggest that this is exactly what is happening in society, at least in Western societies and in many Anglophone contexts, more generally.
And I call it tentatively, religionization of minorities, that it is useful and beneficial and expedient for many groups to label themselves as religions and present themselves in public as religions. That is how they are hurt and may get some benefits also or privileges. And in some cases, such as the State and the Temple in the United States is a good example of a movement that tries to challenge the existing privileges of other religions or privileges in Christianity, mainly. And in the end, it can be said that the aim is to end all privileges of all religions.
So it can be said that by presenting themselves as religions, they are also trying to highlight how empty or arbitrary this privileging on the base of religion can be. So it's also one quite clever way of criticizing either religions directly or society who grants those privileges to particular groups on the base of religion. So I think this is, again, I would say that I'm not a specialist in Judaism. I'm not really interested in Judaism as such what they really believe and what they really do.
But this is a very interesting case to be studied from that more general point of view of how society organizes itself by referring to religion and how public debates are being used. So, the public debates are also picking up religion if a small, relatively insignificant group of people, even individuals present themselves as religions. So religionization of minorities basically means a contemporary process in which people are quite well aware that this is how they can be heard in public. And that is something that scholars of religion should be interested in.
And that is why I don't think that these so-called invented religions are necessarily important as movements themselves. But from the point of view of how society operates more generally. Yeah, thank you for that. Our time is moving by so fast.
So let me just ask one last question. You have to get one whole chapter to teaching religion. So I request listeners to really read the chapter because it comes from Dr. Tyra's personal experience and he gives us some good way of trying to teach religion.
So I think that's a chapter that I would request listeners to have a look at it. My last question is about this one. Where obviously there are some critical remarks on this question study of religion. And I'm sure after the publication of this book there might be also some new critical remarks that might have come or might not have come.
So can you in brief talk about what are the critical remarks and what are some of the responses that are there? Yeah. Yeah, I want to highlight that I have left that chapter to the end of the book because I made a strategic choice that this is not a book in which I simply write about different positions in our field. But I try to show and demonstrate what kind of research we can do by utilizing these tools.
And in that sense, my aim is what was to be inspirational to give examples of how people can go on if they accept that religion doesn't have to be defined in every single study. But that we can study actually the category of religion. We don't have to study other scholars only. We can see that society is full of popular discourse on religion in various institutions and laws and things like that.
And I'm trying to say to people that get some inspirations from these cases, find your own cases and then go for it. Apply these tools as you see best in your context. But then the last chapter I try to discuss a little bit about different potential conversation partners, some of who may be critical towards discussing approaches. And I've chosen three examples.
One example is those who want to define religion anew saying that, okay, this is maybe interesting to say something about the historical emergence of the category of religion, but the field itself should go back to defining religion and applying that equally to all departments and that would unify our studies. I obviously don't go that route, but I raised some doubts concerning that, but I highlight also that those scholars, such as Kevin Schillbrack, who proposed that is doing some good work because his critical writings are forcing others to define their own position better and clarify what they want to do. So that's one discussion I enter in that chapter quite briefly. Another is so-called material or materialist and affective turns in the study of religion.
And I'm relatively critical of those approaches as well, mainly because they rarely are interested in studying the category of religion. Some of them, some of the scholars such as that type of criticism has run out of course, and it's not so relevant anymore. I still see that for example, so-called affective turn can be very interesting and relevant in studying human behavior and practices, but we cannot detach that from the critical study of category of religion. Because affective aspects or dimensions don't help us figuring out why some practices are named and labeled as religious or not.
So they should go hand in hand one way or another. And then the third debate I enter into that chapter is what is really meant by critical study. I argue that the discursive approach in the way I conceived is critical, but it doesn't have a normative goal. It doesn't say how societies would be organized, what is the best way to organize it.
But I argue that against the editorial statements by the journal critical research and religion, who is more about, which is more about trying to emancipate people from oppressive structures by stating what are the universal values they want to achieve and distribute in different societies. But I argue that one can be critical by simply showing, not saying people what to desire and what are the goals, but opening possibilities, opening possibilities by problematizing and historicizing the category of religion and trying to reveal what kind of power relations are in operation when societies use the term religion in their own institutions and public debates and law and so on and so forth. So the common thing between these two ways of understanding what critical study is, is that both are applying tools of social theory. And that is why I also argue that the conversation between them should continue and go on.
They shouldn't be completely separated from each other, although there are disagreements between what critical really means in those approaches. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good short take on critical remarks and responses. Coming to the end of the conversation, how do people reach out to you and is there any project that you're working on or you'll be working on? Yeah.
Yeah, I'm hoping to do some promotion for this book and this approach I propose in this book. But at the same time I'm editing a volume called A Theism in Five Minutes, and that should be out later on in 2022. It's meant for undergraduate students. So I'm hoping to do a book with 64 chapters and more than 40 contributors.
So it's in the process and then I hope to get into writing a book on A Theism in News Media and Media Culture. So these are the main projects I'm hoping to work with in the next year or so, but I also have a pile of articles waiting to be finished. So I'm hoping to work with these all three areas I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation. The methodology issues, especially discuss about approaches, then something about A Theism and Unreligion, and then also every now and then something about religion and media.
Yeah, and how do people reach out to you regarding any questions on the book? People can send me email. I'm also using Twitter. You can find me there.
Yeah, that's about it. Yeah, yeah. I would really encourage listeners to get hold of this book. Those who are interested in religion about those who are specifically those scholars who are working in religion, that this is methodological and theoretical knowledge.
The subject to the subjectological perspective, which needs to be talked about and also at the same time, dig my steeper and then really talk about it. So I think this book is something which needs to be called, hold off and then read properly. So thank you so much Dr. Deimu Daira for being here at New Books Network and having this conversation with you.
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