Research Reflections
To Hell and Back, Again
Alyson Prude, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia Southern University Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey Delog ( ‘das log ) is a Tibetan word meaning “died and returned.” It refers to people who seem to die but revive several days later to...
“Does Your Diocese Currently Have an Exorcist on Staff?”
William S. Chavez, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Stetson University Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey In 2004, the Vatican requested that all Roman Catholic dioceses appoint and train an exorcist, but as Father Vincent Lampert, former exorcist...
Inventing a Church for Shinto
By Avery Morrow Around 1872, Shishino Nakaba, a young samurai and aspiring bureaucrat, encountered loosely organized village societies or confraternities that worshiped Mount Fuji as a god and practiced healing through hand-copied paper talismans rubbed...
Encountering Mirabai through Translation
By Chloe Martinez I was a college sophomore in an introductory Hinduism class when I first encountered Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Hindu mystic. Her poems felt alive and immediate to me. I remember staring at the page, wondering, “How am I just now...
Universal Blackness among the Muridiyya and Its Artists
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Francesco Piraino, Tenure-track Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Director of the Center for...
It Loves To Happen
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. I am a painter. The first thing I do in any new studio is to write—in tiny pencil letters, in a corner or by the...
Knowledge Like Life-Giving Rain
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Imagine living in a world where you are told that most of what is around you is only an opaque refraction of true...
Aryavarta, Land of the Noble Ones
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. In 1891, readers of a small American journal called The Path encountered an article by a Jodhpur pandit titled...
How Psychedelic Science Invented a History of Religion
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. It is challenging for me to imagine a time before the concept of “the psychedelic” existed, despite its emergence...
The Childless Ascetic
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. When I was seven years old, through songs and poems, my teacher, a widow, instilled in me an awareness of the...
