Episode 134 - What Defines Religion?

We're trying something new this time (and the following two episodes), to get us into the car at the same time, though we were in different cars for this drive; while Rev. Dangler was returning to Columbus from ConVocation 2026, and Rev. Avende was returning from blessing houses during the Anagantios rite our Grove does.

Zoom cuts out a lot of the background noise, which is mostly fine, but also changes the way we sound on the podcast... so we'll probably have more experiments to do to decide whether we like this as a solution or not. You'll also hear a couple of dropped and failed connections on this episode, which is the worst-sounding of these three episodes.

We discuss the following theorists / sources in this episode:

• Thomas A. Tweed's first chapter of Religion: A Very Short Introduction
• Niniann Smart (find an overview of his Seven Dimensions of Religion on this page: Definitions of Religion) (we learned in doing background research for this episode that Smart used he/him pronouns after the episode was recorded; our apologies for the accidental misgendering of this late scholar).
• Fenggang Yang's second chapter of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule
• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Title VII, Section 12 regarding Religious Discrimination
• Isaac Bonewits' Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame (ABCDEF) can be found on Neopagan.Net.

We also discuss the oddities of colonialism and state definitions of religion, and some of the conversations that go on in academia around those topics.

Rev. Dangler's vaccine article can be read on his Patreon. 

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