Religion in Praxis is a monthly podcast hosted by Dr. Tornike Metreveli, Associate Professor in Sociology of Religions and Associate Senior Lecturer in European Studies at Lund University. The purpose of the podcast is to enhance knowledge and understanding about the fundamental historical, political and social processes affecting the relationship between religion, nationalism and theology.
NB: In the spirit of taking new tools seriously rather than pretending they aren't there, some of our episode artwork is generated with Gemini and ChatGPT.
Professor Paula Fredriksen joins me to discuss her new book, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press). We talk about a Roman world full of gods, where Jews and Christians argued less about whether other gods existed than about which one deserved worship. We ask when Christianity and Judaism became two separate things, how the surviving record was shaped by those who won, and what changed once emperors began settling theological disputes. We also ask whether Orthodox Christianity's account of this history as continuity can sit alongside a historian's account of contingency.
Paula Fredriksen is Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University and Distinguished Visiting Professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
31 Aug 2026
Ep. 51: The Church Down the Road
Anthropology spent two decades learning to take Amazonian and Melanesian ontologies seriously: worlds where persons are made rather than born, where objects act, where the self has porous edges. All the while there was a candle-lit church down the road doing the same thing, in Greek, on Sunday.
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University) argues that the anthropology of Christianity has been shaped by Protestant assumptions it never examined, and that Eastern Orthodoxy keeps getting filed as the discipline's "Other" as a result. Her answer: treat theology as data rather than decoration, starting with theosis, the communal process of becoming divine through icons, liturgy, and the ordinary texture of church life.
We get into what that actually changes. Whether ordinary believers can make theology or only receive it. Whether convert Orthodoxy in Appalachia is the most Protestant kind of Orthodoxy there is. What happens to the lone rights-bearing individual of liberal politics if salvation is something you can only become together. And the uncomfortable political history of communal ontologies, from sobornost' to organicist authoritarianism, and whether theosis can be taken seriously as an analytic without inheriting that shadow.
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University and the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham, 2022). Her paper is "Theological Possibilities and the Anthropology of Eastern Orthodox Christianity."
31 May 2026
The Looking-Away: How Tolerance Really Works
We like to believe the world divides cleanly: tolerant societies and intolerant ones, free and unfree, them and us. But what if tolerance rarely works that way? In this episode we sit with Professor Peter Ho and discuss his co-authored book that looks at how states actually treat religion, and finds something stranger than the headlines suggest. Sometimes the freedom to live your faith doesn't come from a right written into law, but from a quiet arrangement: an official who decides not to look, a grave that exists in the gap between the rules and the living. We ask where that leaves our confident rankings of who is tolerant and who is not, whether the "tolerant West" is as different from China as it likes to think, and what it means when social peace depends on everyone agreeing not to notice the contradiction. A conversation about law, belief, and the spaces in between. For more information about the book please visit the link https://www.recoland.eu/tolerance-of-informality/
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Spotify
5.0 / 5
17 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 33 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
54
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
30
Contact Religion in Praxis Conversation Series
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Religion in Praxis Conversation Series?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
