2023: Mona Oraby on "A Universe of Terms"

Sarah Hammerschlag: Just about the moment when I was kind of taking on the task of editing the new Critical Terms for Religious Studies, these essays appeared, and one of the things that I found so exciting about them was the way in which, rather than – in the Critical Terms volumes, you have one author for each term. And one of the things I think is really exciting about the Universe of Terms is the fact that you have these multiple perspectives. That was really exciting to see. It was exciting to see how the digital format allowed that.

I guess my first question – you had such amazing people writing, and then there's some overlap in the terms, but such really creative terms and such amazing authors for them. But I think especially because I don't know how familiar everybody is with that project or with how it relates to the book, I'd love to hear you just tell us a little bit about the evolution from the digital project to the book volume.

Mona Oraby: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, and thank you to the Marty Center and the Sem Co-Op for hosting this event. It's truly just such a privilege to be here. And thank you to Emily and Brie for organizing the logistics. It's wonderful to be back in Chicago. I was a grad student in Northwestern and got to come down here every so often for brilliant events. So thank you for being here.

So the genesis of the book. The first stage of this project, A Universe of Terms, started off in an editorial board meeting for The Immanent Frame in New York. Before COVID, we would meet at least once a year with editorial board to generate ideas for content that is published every academic year. And there was an idea during the editorial board meeting. We were talking at that time, The Immanent Frame, or the Religion in the Public Sphere program, which hosts The Immanent Frame, was in the process of reapplying for funding. One of the topics we were discussing in that board meeting was making The Immanent Frame accessible to broader audiences. As a result of those conversations, this project, the digital version, was developed in collaboration with my colleague Daniel Vaca at Brown University, and Olivia Whitener, who was the editorial assistant for TIF at the time. I was also at Amherst College in my first professorship, and a question I was constantly asked by students is: "What's the right answer?"

So a confluence of factors came together that helped Dan and I, for the digital project, conceptualize a digital project that would provide – particularly undergraduate students – several entry points into the study of religion, organized around concepts that scholars of religion across the social sciences and the humanities could use, primarily in their teaching. It's one of the main, main uses of The Immanent Frame, actually, is as a teaching tool, something I learned through the data analytics on the platform.

So that was the beginning of the digital project. It was published in academic year 2019 and 2020. And as that project was winding down, it was spring, it was around the time of March 2020. We had scheduled – so Emilie Flamme and I, my co-author for the book and the content designer for the digital project – she and I had been having conversations about what to do next with the project, because it had been so positively received. We had at that time scheduled and organized an exhibition of some of the artwork that was developed for the digital project, which was exhibited in Frost Library, Amherst College, just for a week until the college closed. And again, a confluence of other factors. The events of spring and summer 2020, conversations with Winnie Sullivan here, who's one of the co-editors of the Religion and the Human series at [Indiana University] Press, led Emilie and I to propose this book at IU.

Sarah Hammerschlag: I mean, that raises a really interesting question for me, because I feel like for most of us, we know that there are books out there, physical objects – and some of us, I personally prefer them – but of course, they're not always accessible. So then sometimes I go and I look and try to find the digital version, or I buy the e-book because I don't have time to get to the bookstore or I can't get to the library. And so most often, really the trail is from physical book to digitization. It's fascinating to think about the fact that this book reverses that process. I guess I wonder: How does it change the way we think about the relationship between the experience of reading between pages and how we access digital content?

Mona Oraby: I appreciate that question because it helps me understand actually that there are many types of canvases that we as scholars can use to communicate ideas. It was really interesting: When we first submitted the book for review, it had a preface that was completely different than the final version. In the initial version of the preface I had described – I had made some remark about this version being more accessible somehow, that diminishing the prominence of text would lead to a more accessible project. The reviewer pushed back, and the reviewer ended up revealing her anonymity. So Sally Promey, she said: "The visual is not necessarily more accessible." The idea here being that scholarship can make use of several different canvases for multiple expressions of idea and of thought.

I think because this project wasn't imagined from the very beginning as having multiple parts – that first there would be a digital version, then a book, and then maybe some other – but we were creating different modes, different presentations of the project as we were reacting to things that were happening around us – so politically, socially being reflexive about our identities as scholars.

Sarah Hammerschlag: Okay, so now I have so many questions. I am curious as to why and how you changed the preface, and what made you change it.

Mona Oraby: I wonder, actually, if you would agree with this, but in all of the writing I've done so far, or all the projects that I've developed so far in my very young career, I realize that I don't actually know what's happening in this project until the very end – or at least it could take me a very long time to frame what a project is, and what it's supposed to do, and why it's important. The initial submission had an introduction because it needed – we agreed, Emilie and I, that we needed some framing language, even though the spirit of the book is to not explain. I changed the preface because I was encouraged by Sally's comment, or her report, that the book was possible because of a relationship that Emilie and I had, and that I needed to center that story to really explain how the book came to be.

Sarah Hammerschlag: So maybe you could talk to us a little bit about how you imagine your reader using the book? I don't know if you want to do that. I mean, I know that Emily printed some copies – I wonder if you want to do that by allowing the audience to go through with you how you imagine it being used.

The thing that comes to mind is I can see how rich this would be in the classroom, so of course, that's one aspect. But also having had my own experience reading, I do wonder how you imagine – and I have many questions that follow from this – how you imagine it fostering certain kinds of thoughts, certain kinds of conversation. You say in the introduction some helpful things about trying to take down hierarchies in scholarship, trying to reverse the relationship between reader and writer. You quote, or you at least reference Nancy Levine and this idea of shaking up scholarship.

I imagine all of those are at stake in thinking about how one would use this book, but I'd love to hear you speak to any of those, or all of those.

Mona Oraby: Yeah, absolutely. So Emilie and I imagine the book to be an object that someone would pick up over and over again and see different things each time – that one could open any two-page spread and engage it in any order. So the format of the book lends itself to multiple uses, but one thing we impose on the viewer or the reader is a two-page view, and that's a really important feature of the book.

So it was really important to us that we impose a two-page view on the reader, in part because, in many cases – and you can't tell based on how the citation appears here – but in many cases, the two-page view allowed us to put scholars in conversation in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be in conversation, or gave us the space to articulate an idea on one page or explore it further on another.

I think "Space and Place" is a good example. So, here we have – the text is derived from a piece that Mark Cauchi, who's a philosopher of religion based at York in Canada, wrote, an essay that he wrote for The Immanent Frame's 10th anniversary project, "Is This All There Is?" And following from this spread, we have a series of spreads that illustrate language taken from Judith Weisenfeld's contribution to A Universe of Terms on the term "space, place."

We can look at a relatively high order of abstraction and say: Well, one use of this project is to demonstrate to readers, whoever they are – they could be undergraduate students or graduate students, could be other scholars, it could be scholars who are not affiliated with an institution, an interested public – what would it look like to thread together or to convene a conversation between multiple thinkers, who perhaps don't share a disciplinary affinity, let alone an institutional one? And that takes the work of the teacher to help the student understand, but also the resources are available in the back of the book to invite readers to explore further.

So I imagine many different uses, and probably others that I haven't yet imagined, that people have taken up the book are drawing my attention to.

Sarah Hammerschlag: That raises for me, in some sense, the two different reading experiences I had. The first was before I understood how the back matter operated. I looked at the images and I looked at the quotations, and of course, I didn't always know when one quotation bled into another. It wasn't at first clear to me that the pages were delineated in that sense. And in fact, what struck me was that as a reader and a viewer, I see an image, and I'm not quite sure of the point of view. In fact, the images in many ways, one of the things that's distinctive about them is that they're actually kind of without point of view. The text itself, when read without the back matter, can almost feel without point of view, because there are assertions on the page. And then I went and read the back matter, and I had such a different experience in terms of thinking about the dynamics of conversation and authorship.

I guess I would love to hear you speak to this question of point of view, because so much – I think a lot about points of view. I teach this course called "Writing Religion," which is all about getting voice back into academic writing. And of course a lot of that is about reminding students that people want to know why you think what you think. It's a leftover concept from early undergraduate writing that because students have a tendency to say, "I think," "I believe" too much, there should never be an "I" on the page. And so I tend to think of that space of voice, of experience, and there's so much experience actually at stake in these excerpts from these essays.

I would love to hear you talk about how you see point of view working, and maybe speak to the sort of sense in which it can at first seem absent, and then it's restored, right? What's at stake in that process?

Mona Oraby: Oh, geez. I will give an answer now, but I'm sure I will think more about this question.

I would say, on voice and experience and point of view, one reason why we mess with citational convention is to open, to do something that I say in the preface, which is to allow – well, maybe it's my point of view here that ... in many cases the reader, as much as or more than the writer, is deciding what is really going on on the page. So not marking within the visual elements of the book which scholar is speaking, for example, I think makes the reader or the viewer more essentially part of this project. So they can ask this question: Who is speaking? Or when the text asks a question, they're compelled to answer it for themselves.

So in one spread in the "Spirit" chapter, what happens when you add a modifier to "spirit"? Does making "spirit" Black help to clarify things? And it's a question that invites the viewer or the reader to answer. I would say that's the most immediate answer that I have right now.

Sarah Hammerschlag: I have two questions that follow from that. One is actually about "spirit," which I want to come back to. I do want to think about the emphasis on collaboration, which is, in some sense, all over the Universe of Terms to begin with. You described the process as deeply collaborative. And on the other side of point of view is the sort of sense that the world of scholarship is dominated by this idea of authorship and originality. There's something so deeply collaborative about everything in this book, and I just wonder – this is sort of a larger question that goes beyond the book, but I would just love to hear you – [collaboration] is clearly a value that you're invoking, and I would just love to hear you speak to how it can shake up scholarship, and how it can speak to some of those values that you address in the intro.

Mona Oraby: I so appreciate that question because it allows me to talk about what it looks like to maintain really the hallmarks of what we do, which is publishing with university presses, adhering to standards of peer review, methods of evaluation that are absolutely deeply collaborative. In some ways, they are hierarchical; that's not always a bad thing. I've learned tremendously and have been guided in numerous ways by very senior scholars.

The way that we were playing within these conventions of publishing the university press, adhering to standards of peer review, seeking the support of various senior scholars – we still did something that those senior scholars and the director of IU Press had never seen before. And that was, I mean, it was so humbling to be in a Zoom room during these manuscript workshops for this book, and see Webb Keane marvel at this project. These giants of scholars of religion and media really not only [understood] this project, but [understood] that it was new. One of the things we do in this project is show that collaboration can be both rigorous and original.

Sarah Hammerschlag: I think that I did end up finishing the book with a question about the boundaries between scholarship and art, and whether this crosses that boundary. Again, it's a question that I think about a lot in teaching this "Writing Religion" course, and in my own interest in the connection between scholarship and creative writing.

You are a newer generation, obviously, than I am. I feel still like I'm inheriting a lot of paradigms from my teachers. I mean, we need to mark that boundary on some level, don't we? I think it's important. How do we mark that boundary? Does this book help us mark that boundary in some way by challenging it? I mean, can you speak to that?

Mona Oraby: I've been thinking a lot about this, because I'm in the process, or will begin very soon the process of explaining to people who determine – who maybe in some ways have the power to determine where I stand next, my position in the academy. And so on one hand, I felt empowered, or maybe emboldened to take on this project, precisely because I was fairly confident that my traditionally first book would be published with Princeton, and that it would be solo-authored, no question about who's responsible. But even then, anyone who reads acknowledgements to an academic book knows that no one generates ideas in a silo. But still, I'm a solo author, great press, and so forth.

So I felt emboldened to take on a much more experimental project, because I was able to put a check mark on what I knew was expected of me, and a goal I had for myself, which is to transform this project into a monograph. In terms of the boundary between religion and art, there's a lot of language I think in many – and again, I'm answering this question from a position of someone who has a remarkable amount of privilege in being in a tenure track job. In many promotion criteria, research is described both in terms of scholarly innovation – so the generation of new ideas, data, and so forth – and also in terms of creative works.

Whether this is viewed as art or scholarship, I would make the case that it's both. In terms of religion and art, what's interesting: Emily asked about the reaction of scholars who were quoted in this book, and I shared some of those, some of that backstory. Some of the feedback we got, especially in how some scholars interpreted some of the signs or symbols in the book, was maybe that it privileged Christian iconography. That leant itself to a series of other conversations and debates.

So, I am pleased that the book raises the question about the line. I'm not sure it settles it.

Sarah Hammerschlag: Right, but it creates the conversation, which itself is important. So that brings me to one of the terms I wanted to ask about, which is "spirit," which of course is one of those terms that one could assume somehow might have a privileged Christian reference. My reaction to it, to be slightly confessional here, has always been ambivalent, because on the one hand, I associate it with geist, I associate with its German concept, with its relationship to the humanities, to the sense in which that it's itself not translatable. I think of Hegel. And so it has this kind of rigorous history to me. I mean, of course there's the Holy Spirit, but trained as philosopher of religion, I tend to think about Hegel first, I have to admit. But on the other hand, I've always had this kind of allergic reaction to the, "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual."

So one of the things we haven't really talked about yet today is how this is a religious studies text. There are moments in which it's not entirely obvious that that's the case. The "space and place" one, for example – there's actually not that much about religion in there, though I think of space a place, probably because of J. Z. Smith, as such a key concept in the study religion. But "spirit" is so interesting because it tacks both the most rigorous side of what we do and, in some sense, the space in which you get anxious that people think what you do has no content. Behind this question, or behind this musing, I guess you should say, is also the question of how you went from fifteen terms to eight. Maybe "spirit" is a site in which you can talk about – why was "spirit" one of them?

Mona Oraby: This is great. I love talking about process. I had

Because I was the editor for the digital project, I knew these contributions like the back of my hand and had worked with the authors on refining their language. So I had, by the time Emilie and I were creating the book, a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge of the contributions and the language used across the project.

Emilie and I had agreed from the outset that we were going to maintain the style of the digital project. We also committed to avoid certain representational issues. We also examined the contributions at the sentence level, and we asked ourselves: Can this sentence be illustrated using the iconography that Emilie had developed?

So we assembled a number of criteria to decide what was included and what wasn't included. One of the reasons we begin with "spirit" is because Emily Ogden's language about what "spirit" is captures the sense of what we're trying to do in this project, which is demolish some things. So the spirit of "spirit," if you will, is demolition.

We begin there, and further, if you read or engage with the book linearly, you see that we incrementally mess things up in terms of the presentation of the spreads.

Sarah Hammerschlag: That raises the question of the relationship between the visual and the textual. To start off that conversation, which I think is a big conversation: Does it matter that there are multiple authors to the textual side of this, but one illustrator?

Mona Oraby: Could you repeat that one more time?

Sarah Hammerschlag: Multiple authors to textual element, but one illustrator.

Mona Oraby: You're asking some tough and interesting questions. No, this is so great. Maybe I'll address the illustrator side. So every spread here, every image here was developed through a conversation – often, actually, a series of conversations between me and the illustrator. So it wasn't the case – and many graphic novels and memoirs, for example, this is not how collaboration works. There's a very clear, let's say, textual narrative, and then an illustrator provides a visual element. In this case, Emilie, since the moment she became the content designer for the digital project, had been having conversations with me about the visual representation of language. [That's] partly why I insisted that she be recognized, not simply as the illustrator of the book, but my co-author. That's something that I want to mention.

Let's say there's one design sense, maybe – but even then, there are some spreads where, for example, Emilie imposes her handwriting within the book. So I think there's actually some variation in the design style in the book. Maybe someone who was not familiar with the digital project could open the book and think that multiple illustrators were involved. I'm not sure, but that's one possibility.

Multiple authors and more singular illustrator – I think the decision there was, I don't know if we thought about it in those terms, to be honest. We knew that we were going to cite and illustrate language from multiple authors, because that advances the idea of the digital project. We did not think to bring on multiple illustrators. I think the timeline of the project would have changed quite considerably.

Sarah Hammerschlag: I guess I have two questions that follow. One is about what it means to be a close reader of a visual text, versus a text – visual image versus a text, to be more accurate – and how you think those skills are different, and what you want to solicit by engaging both of those facilities of the reader/looker.

I guess it is a related question, so I'll just ask it and you can answer both of these, And I think after that I'll try to open it up to everybody else. I'm struck by the fact that I just noticed this – that Mark Taylor is one of your blurbers, right? He happens also to be the editor of the first volume of Critical Terms, and was once upon a time, my colleague in my first job at Williams. He strikes me as a person – I understand why he would love this book, but it raises for me the question as to whether this is ... I can see Mark thinking this is the ultimate version of what religious studies can do, but I want to talk back to Mark in my head and also be like, "Why couldn't this happen in any other discipline?"

I guess the second part of my question is really: Is there something that makes this a religious studies project, or can you imagine this as a kind of collaboration or a kind of visual, textual hybrid that could be multiplied in other fields? Or is there something particular about religious studies that makes it the right place to do it?

Mona Oraby: I'll be honest here: At first I thought, no, this can happen in all disciplines and fields. Absolutely. When I think of these sources are cited in our bibliography – there illustrated texts in the hard sciences, in philosophy, and in mathematics that have been doing this, that have communicated specialized knowledge using the tools and techniques of the creative arts. So in that very broad sense, can scholarly knowledge be illustrated in fields and disciplines beyond the study of religion? Absolutely. Is there something about this book or this project that is specific to religious studies? I would say, yes. And that specificity is, and I talked about this in the preface: Scholars of religion, whether they're trained in social sciences or the humanities, are probably some of the most sophisticated thinkers about the human, what makes us human and distinctive as humans. And so in that sense, I think that's what makes this a religious studies book: that it's an exploration of the human amid catastrophe, amidst social change, and it raises questions about responsibility and about communication.

Sarah Hammerschlag: Great answer.