Religion, death, health, drugs–these topics and more are included in Gary’s conversation with Sacrilegious guest, Dr. Ali John Zarrabi, assistant professor, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, Emory University. Dr. Zarrabi’s clinical work and research focus on palliative care, including but not limited to cannabis and psychedelic treatments for cancer patients. How do we understand a mystical experience? Is the Church of Cannabis legit? Can psilocybin ease anxieties about death? Just a few of the questions raised in this episode of Sacrilegious.
Sacrilegious Episode 06: Dr. Ali John Zarrabi
Sacrilegious Episode 05: Anthony Pinn
In this episode, Laderman converses with guest Anthony Pinn, Agnus Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities, Department of Religion, Rice University. Some of the topics they cover include atheism, death, music, Afro-Pessimism, and the pandemic. A brief conversation but it packs a punch.
The Abuse of Yoga and Proposition YSB: Herd Immunity for Troubling Times
Patrick McCartney What precisely does a Yogic way of life consist of? How might evidence-based policy be generated? From what evidence are these policies derived?
My Dad Died While I Was Teaching Death and Dying
Gary Laderman In addition to all these peculiar and profound circumstances, I also watched and assisted in my dad’s death while teaching “Death and Dying” in the spring of 2021, simultaneously professing about data and history and comparisons to students, while learning in the real world that I know nothing, that I am a child in a world of wonders and mystery, and misery.
Animal Abuse in Modern Yoga Gastropolitics
Jonathan Dickstein Scholars have expressed that “‘abuse’ extends beyond individual yoga communities and is often performed through unacknowledged race, gender, and class privilege.” But what about unacknowledged species privilege?
Sacrilegious Episode 04: Kathryn Lofton
Kathryn Lofton, Religious Studies scholar and Dean of Humanities at Yale University, joins Gary in this freewheeling but religion-focused episode of Sacrilegious. In under 60 minutes they tackle a variety of topics, including Bob Dylan and Beyoncé; religious literacy and canon wars; public scholarship and the pandemics, all with an eye on the shifting power dynamics driving academic and public understandings of “religion.”
The Painful Process of Awakening: Harm and Healing in the Healthy Happy Holy Kundalini Yoga Community
Nirinjan Khalsa-Baker How does a community of practitioners, who have spent the past 50 years dedicated to spreading the light, move toward healing when there is so much darkness in the shadow?
How the Model of Money Laundering Can Help Us Understand Abuse within 3HO
Philip Deslippe If someone was sincere in their devotion, does it really matter if the object of that devotion was not exactly what it was supposed to be?
Sacrilegious Episode 03: Who?
Who on earth studies religion? What are the forces that motivate someone to take up religion as a calling–not in terms of faith, but in terms of teaching and study? This episode explores some of the answers with reference to the host of Sacrilegious, Gary Laderman, who shares some of his perspectives and experiences on coming to the study of religion, being saved by education, and what he hopes to achieve in this enterprise.
The Labyrinth of Molestation and Denial
Chuck Rosenthal Because you don’t start having sex with someone at thirteen and just stop at nineteen. You don’t just walk away. You carry it inside and live with it, hide it, go back to it, ignore it, fail to ignore it; you live with shame; you try to normalize what happened.