Sacred & Profane

We started our series with an exploration of how religious doctrine and belief became deeply entwined with both colonialism and the petroleum industry. We followed the stories of contemporary Americans whose religious beliefs -- and beliefs about climate -- shape their determination to stop pipelines and restore local ecosystems. But what about our future? We spoke with the Rev. Mariama White-Hamm...

There is a very long relationship between the Anishinaabe people and manoomin (sometimes known as 'wild rice' in English). The tribe received a prophecy to travel west from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes region-- they would know they had arrived in the right place when they found food that grows on the water. Manoomin is both a culinary staple and a spiritual and cultural one. In December o...

We'll be back with more episodes from our season on climate in the coming weeks. Until then, we're returning to our archive for an episode we recorded back in 2021 that feels especially relevant this week. Each year, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, parades, and barbecues. Celebrating July Fourth is part of what some scholars identify as America’s civil religion. And like any...

In 2014, Virginia’s Dominion Energy announced it would be building a new pipeline intended to carry fracked methane from West Virginia to a storage facility in North Carolina. The planned route brought the pipeline right through Virginia’s rural Buckingham County, with a compressor station proposed near a historic Black church and cemetery in the small community of Union Hill. Despite Dominion’s a...

Millions of Americans are traveling hundreds of miles for a chance to witness 2024’s total solar eclipse. As many eyes turn towards this rare event, we’re turning our attention to another wonder, one we sometimes take for granted: the night sky. Humans have a relationship with the moon and stars stretching back for millennia. Observing the night sky has given us practical things, like calendars an...

As the climate crisis on Earth worsens, some Americans — including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — have begun to think about a plan (and planet) B. They dream of escaping an increasing polluted Earth in favor of creating an advanced society on our nearest neighbor, Mars. To investigate the roots of our fascination with Mars, we headed to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona with our colle...

In 2021, the Biden administration laid out a goal of conserving 30% of the United States’ land and seas by 2030. That number comes from a UN agreement that urges member countries to protect at least a third of their land and marine environments from human development in order to promote biodiversity and fight climate change. But historically, environmental conservation in the United States was les...

Brigham Young lead his followers west in 1846, fleeing religious persecution. Young was looking for a place that his fellow Americans would consider too inhospitable to follow -- a place that would transform believers into a new people, where they could "blossom as the rose." But it was also clear as much as the desert would transform the church, the church would have to transform the desert. Only...

Energy vortexes and the climate crisis collide in Sedona, Arizona, where New Age practitioners are drawn to a stunning but swiftly changing landscape. We spoke with scholar Susannah Crockford about her own time spent in Sedona, and the tension between a movement that may love the landscape but prioritizes individual healing over collective action. And our hosts headed to Sedona to experience first...

On this season of Sacred & Profane, we explore how religions have shaped the climate crisis -- and how they offer ways to imagine a different future. In the United States, Christianity and oil have been entangled since the industry's beginning. Our guest Darren Dochuk says Pennsylvania's oil fields gave rise to "two gospels of crude;" competing versions of Christianity that would have a profound e...

On this season of Sacred & Profane, we explore how religions have shaped the climate crisis -- and how they offer ways to imagine a different future. Scholars and climate activists increasingly point to European colonization of the Americas as a kind of tipping point in not only human history, but climate history as well. Colonialism created a legal and cultural framework that prioritized private...

Bhutan is a small country in the Himalayas with a long Buddhist tradition, and a more recent reputation for embracing careful development and cultural preservation. Many of the visitors who are willing to pay the $200 a day tourist visa to come to Bhutan are drawn to a beautiful landscape that's seen as largely untouched by the problems facing more industrialized nations. But of course, no country...

Over the last few years, Americans have removed statues from public spaces at what might be a record clip. In 2022, we spoke with art historian Erin Thompson and our colleague Jalane Schmidt about why these demands by average Americans to control their public space are a departure from much of American history. But they're not without precedent -- and they're definitely not so unusual considering...

If you had to guess one of the best-selling poets in America, a long-dead Sufi mystic named Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi might not be at the top of your list. And yet, his poetry has found a wide audience in the U.S. -- centuries after his death, and thousands of miles from his home. You can find Rumi quotes everywhere, from Pinterest boards to Brad Pitt's underarm. But are these inspirational snipp...

Here in the States, it's become an annual tradition for conservative commentators to bemoan the "war on Christmas." That's the idea that Christmas is being pushed out in favor of non-Christian holidays or more secular winter celebrations.   But as our fellow Jue Liang tells us, in China, the government is actually cracking down on Christmas and many other holidays as the ruling party looks to the...

The Confederate monuments around Charlottesville’s county courthouse have all been removed, and a new kind of public memory is emerging in Charlottesville’s Court Square. The streets around the courthouse were the site of hundreds of slave auctions over Charlottesville’s history. The descendants of the people who were bought and sold in the square are at the center of a movement to bring their sto...

We're living in an era where robots are increasingly common in our factories and our homes. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that robots are also finding a place in religious spaces, too. Professor Holly Walters joins us to discuss how robots are finding a home in some Buddhist and Hindu temples. Some see temple robots as a simple continuation of religious technology like prayer wheels or churc...

Each year, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, parades, and barbecues. Celebrating July Fourth is part of what some scholars identify as America’s civil religion. And like any religion, civil religion is built in part upon foundational myths and symbols that Americans, regardless of their religious faith, believe in and rally behind. Those symbols include documents like the Cons...

The media often cover the Satanic Temple as an elaborate prank, pulled off by a group of dedicated trolls trying to rile conservative Christians. But despite those public perceptions, in 2019 the IRS recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax exempt religious organization. And even though many do not see them as a "real" religious movement, Satanists play an important role in American religious and po...

Renowned Biblical scholar Dr. Renita Weems joins us to discuss how the translation of one particular word can profoundly change the meaning of a well-loved book of the Hebrew Bible — and what translation choices can reveal about race and gender in the modern world, as well as the ancient one.

Today on the show, we dive into one the best-selling books in the early United States: a massive compendium of world religions. It's a work that's incomplete, and sometimes incorrect, but also one that shows how the first generation of Americans were exploring ideas about faith, tolerance, and religious pluralism. And almost as interesting as the book itself is its author, a woman who lived and di...

We'll be returning with a third season soon. But we couldn't ignore the biggest story about religion in 2021 - the pro-Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol hoping to overturn a democratic election. Journalist and author Sarah Posner joins us and charts decades of racist, anti-government rhetoric and conspiracy theories from the religious right to explain how white evangelical Christians came to b...

There are hundreds of Confederate memorials across the U.S. With our colleague Jalane Schmidt, we explore an often overlooked part of their history: religion. Not only are these monuments often steeped in religious symbolism, white Christian communities also helped to build and maintain them. And we hear from a group of Christians here in Charlottesville wrestling with that legacy today.

On paper, France is an egalitarian society. The republican ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité are carved into public buildings across the country. And formal equality is carved into French laws in other ways, including a policy that makes it illegal to collect information on residents’ race, ethnicity, or religion. That “colorblindness” has made it difficult for people of color to prove to...

Across the country, protestors are putting their bodies at risk from police violence and the COVID-19 pandemic, with the hope of creating radical change. We spoke with our colleague Larycia Hawkins about the power—and the price—of embodied solidarity.