On Wednesday, November 14, Mariam Goshadze, a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion, delivered a presentation on the politics of religious sound in Ghana's capital, Accra. Mariam's talk covered her pre-dissertation fieldwork in Ghana throughout the summers of 2014 and 2015.

To contextualize her research interests, Mariam first talked about the religious landscape of Accra. In the contemporary framework, Christianity is the religion of the majority. Among the different denominations available to followers, the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is the most...

On Wednesday, October 21, Philip Balla led the weekly World Religions Café with his presentation entitled "Exploring Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia." Philip is a MDiv candidate at HDS and is a resident at the Center for the Study of World Religions and this was his first presentation at the Center. Philip began his presentation by discussing the circumstances of his two exciting trips to Cambodia to study Theravada Buddhism which occurred in May of 2014 and May of 2015.  Philip had this opportunity as he was a two year McMaster Scholar of Defiance College's McMaster School for...

At this week’s World Religions Café, Jiou Park, a second year master of theological studies candidate and a CSWR resident, presented an overview of blasphemy laws in Pakistan.  For her presentation, Jiou first emphasized that despite the disparate importance given to control of religious speech in Muslim majority countries, regulation of religious speech is far from a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. To support this claim, and show that “blasphemy laws” are not the only ways that a government regulates religious speech, Jiou presented several legal provisions from various countries....

At this week's World Religions Café, Naohito Miura, a second-year master of divinity degree candidate and CSWR resident, recounted his summer field education experience in Brazil.... Read more about Mokichi Okada and Nature Farming in Brazil