with Professor Wendy Doniger
This month The Religion and Culture Web Forum is pleased to introduce Playing with Fire, a new series of audio interviews and conversations about religion with academics and public intellectuals. The series title is drawn from “Playing with Fire: The Task of the Divinity School,” a 2010 talk and essay by Margaret M. Mitchell, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. In her talk Dean Mitchell argued that it is the “profession” of the Divinity School (and, indeed, all scholars of religion) to “play with fire”–to think, write, and talk about religion across differences and boundaries in spite of (or, perhaps, even because of) the risk it might entail. Since its inception the Web Forum has contributed to that conversation; with the addition of audio and video content it hopes to continue to do so, finding new conversation partners and new topics for discussion that make it possible to re-think its central concerns of religion and global public life.
To begin the series we invited Professor Wendy Doniger, one of the country’s leading scholars of religion, to talk to us about how she has “played with fire” across her long career. From dusty libraries to lunch with presidents and debates with Indian intellectuals, Professor Doniger has been part of shaping the global conversation about religion for nearly fifty years. Listen to Professor Doniger’s interview here.