Sacred & Profane

Graduate student Kevin Stewart Rose brings us the story of a Christian community dedicated to creating a more environmentally sustainable future, but unable to extract itself from our unsustainable present. Part of "Field Notes," our ongoing series dedicated to highlighting documentary work from students at UVA.

Last season. we explored the impact of an ancient artifact with Biblical connections: the Cyrus cylinder. Cyrus's proclamation may be ancient, but it has a lot of resonance in modern discussions of religious freedom, immigration, and national identity. Perhaps then it shouldn't come as a surprise that Cyrus himself has become a political symbol, as well. We're looking at two very different leaders...

We're returning to our ongoing series Field Notes, featuring documentary pieces from students here at UVA. Jason Evans explores how black women—leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement since the beginning—are shaped by their faith, even as they question many aspects of the traditional black church.  

Santa Muerte. Holy Death. To outsiders, she's become a symbol of cartel driven violence in Mexico—a "narco-saint," worshiped only by traffickers, and venerated at crime scenes. To her followers, she's a protector with roots stretching back to the pre-Hispanic past. Dr. Jessie Marroquín joins us to explore the complex history of the saint, now one of the fastest growing religious movements in Mexic...

Months before COVID-19 closed borders across Europe, the EU was already facing serious divisions. Evan Sandsmark sent us this report last summer on the cracks showing in the foundations of modern Austria—especially religion, which continues to be a fault line in European politics. Plus, we check in with Evan about what Europe looks like under lockdown today.

In 1902, a young American headed to the Vatican to record a voice unlike any other. His subject was Alessandro Moreschi—the last known castrato. That is to say, a man castrated in childhood in order to preserve a high singing voice. Castrati's high, yet powerful, voices were in constant demand in both sacred and secular spaces across Europe for centuries. We talk to UVA's Bonnie Gordon about how t...

"He was a time-traveler and a translator. Or more precisely, the act of translating enabled Mira ji to time-travel." As we work to get our remote studio up and running, we're dipping into our archives to bring you some excellent short audio documentaries by students here at the University of Virginia—including this piece on the Urdu poet Mira ji, whose poetry refused to be confined by religion, ge...

In 1905, a young Zen priest named Nyogen Senzaki arrived in San Francisco from Japan. He was convinced that America, with its long tradition of religious freedom, was fertile ground for the spread of Buddhism. And he slowly built a diverse new community of Buddhist practitioners in California. But everything changed when the U.S. entered World War II. Beginning in 1942, the United States governmen...

In 1872, an act of Congress transformed newly acquired territory in the American west into Yellowstone National Park. The act declared that the land was "hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States...and set aside as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."And while it was our first national park, Yel...

Over 2,500 years ago, a victorious army marched through the open gates of the mighty city of Babylon. Soon after came a decree: that all the conquered peoples who had been brought to the city — the people who helped build its magnificent temples, gardens, and palaces — could return to their homelands, to worship their own gods as they saw fit. In the many years since it was written, the edict has...

When Americans think about Austria, it’s easy to fall back on quaint stereotypes — the home of Mozart and The Sound of Music, where people climb and ski the snow-capped alps and still wear lederhosen and dirndls. But Austria, like everywhere else, is much bigger and more complicated than its postcard version. Like many of its neighbors in the European Union, Austria is home to a large number of ne...

West Virginia has been shaped by resource extraction for hundreds of years. First came timber, then coal. These days, it’s hydraulic fracking. And it’s often difficult to hold out when extraction companies come to your area. When a drilling company showed up on their doorstep, a group of Hare Krishna devotees had to make the choice about whether to allow fracking on their land.

2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, when close to a million people were killed in one hundred days. UVA’s Larycia Hawkins sits down with Christophe Mbonyingabo, who’s been working to repair the rifts caused by the violence in his home country for over twenty years. He worried that after the genocide, Rwandans would learn to tolerate each other, but not truly forgive or trust...

In the 3rd century BCE, Ashoka Maurya ruled an empire stretching from the Kandahar valley of Afghanistan across most of the Indian subcontinent. It was an incredibly diverse place. His subjects spoke dozens of languages. And their faiths and philosophies were almost as varied: they were Hindus, Buddhists, Stoics, Zoroastrians, and Jains. Eventually, Ashoka began an audacious project: a code of eth...