What does belief look like? Or enchantment?
Such was the challenge facing Emilie Flamme ’20 as she illustrated the core concepts in A Universe of Terms, an online project in religious studies edited by Mona Oraby, assistant professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought.
The project is an offshoot of The Immanent Frame, a digital publication that Oraby also edits, and that concerns interdisciplinary questions of secularism, religion and the public sphere. It is published by the Social Science Research Council.
The new project is in part inspired by Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998)—“The idea is to demonstrate to students—as I always strive to do in my classrooms, as many professors at Amherst do—the variety of perspectives on a single question, on a single term,” Oraby says. For instance, for the entry on “body,” Ayesha S. Chaudhry, associate professor of Islamic studies and gender studies at the University of British Columbia, wrote three anecdotes about her experiences in different mosques around the world.
A Universe of Terms is a multimedia resource. Each term is accompanied by at least three essays, plus images, links to more writing and a public Spotify playlist.