Robert Orsi on History and Presence [MIPodcast #80]

Maxwell Institute Podcast

Christianity, Education, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can scholars of religion explain religious faith without explaining it away? Over the centuries many scholars have come to discuss religion as a purely human phenomenon, leaving no room for “special beings” like God, Jesus Christ, angels, or departed loved ones. Robert Orsi confronts such scholarship in his new book History and Presence, inviting scholars to take the experiences of religious believers more seriously.

But it’s a risky proposal. “Scholarship entails risk,” Orsi explains, “for the person whose world has been entered by the scholar, but for the scholar, too, whose own uncertainties ought to be on the line in the encounter.”

Orsi recently visited the Maxwell Institute to talk about how scholars should take special presences more seriously. We talk about it in this special 80th episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

About the Guest

Robert Orsi is the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. He has also taught at Fordham University, Indiana University, and Harvard Divinity School. He is former president of the American Academy of Religion. He studies American Catholicism and also writes on theory and method for the study of religion. His latest book History and Presence is an ambitious intervention into the field of religious studies.

The post Robert Orsi on History and Presence [MIPodcast #80] appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU.

Transcript

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0:00.0	As a word of caution, this episode contains a discussion of sexual abuse in the context of the Catholic Church,
0:05.2	so please listen with discretion. It's the Maxwell Institute podcast. I'm Blair Hodges. David Hume
0:13.8	predicted the day would come when modern women and men would read about religious believers in history
0:18.5	books and be baffled that anyone ever thought the gods
0:21.2	were real or present. That they could appear in groves of trees or statues or dreams. Hume was a
0:27.9	philosopher who predicted a steady advancement from primitive belief to civilized rational belief,
0:32.9	from ideas about gods interacting with humans to a recognition that it was all superstition.
0:37.4	It's been hundreds of years since Hume made that prediction. How was it held up?
0:41.5	In the words of religious study scholar Robert Orsey, the future that Hume envisioned for the
0:45.8	human race has not happened yet. The gods were not turned back at the borders of the modern.
0:50.8	The unseeing of the gods was an achievement. The challenge is to see them again.
0:56.0	Robert Orsci recently visited the Nele-A Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
1:00.0	to talk about how scholars should take special presences more seriously, whether they be God, angels,
1:05.0	and other divine figures.
1:07.0	How can religious studies scholars study religion without discounting or explaining these presences away?
1:12.4	Orsi wrote a new book on the subject. It's called History and Presence. And we're talking about it in this interview.
1:18.0	But before we get to that, I want to thank some of the people who recently reviewed the show.
1:21.4	There's Zach 0002, GNR Mormon and Wally Wall, each left reviews in iTunes, and you can do that as well.
1:27.7	I really enjoy reading each review.
1:30.2	You can also send questions and comments to me directly at MIPodcast at BYU.edu as well.
1:36.2	We're joined by Robert Orsi, one of the foremost religious studies scholars working today on this episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast.
1:49.1	Thank you. on this episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast. Robert A. Orsi joins us today. He's the Grace Craddock Nagel chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern
	...

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