The New Wave of Cult-Talk: Academic Perspectives on Amanda Montell's Cultish (HarperCollins, 2021), Panel

Benjamin Zeller, Lake Forest College, Presiding

This panel brings scholars of religion together to discuss Amanda Montell's book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. It explores how Montell’s book reflects and is shaping popular interest in the concept of cults and spiritual-but-not-religious networks more broadly. Panelists, drawing on their research areas and projects, will give papers speaking to the argument, method, and goals of Cultish. The broader aim of the panel is to analyze the latest wave of “cult-talk” in relation to running academic debates. In particular, it considers two approaches to the category of cults. The first entails a discursive critique of the category. The second insists on the sociological distinction of cults built around charismatic authority, agency, and harm. Overall, we explore how the latest wave acknowledges the problems of the category but doesn’t let the critiques inhibit using it.

Panelists

Jeffrey Wheatley, Iowa State University

Susannah Crockford, Ghent University

Cody Musselman, Yale University

Philip Deslippe, University of California, Santa Barbara

Religion and Sport Under Duress Panel: Sport and exercise provide many individuals and communities across the globe with rhythms to mark time and myriad ways to engage the body--physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. From three distinct perspectives, this session examines these dimensions in terms of transcendent and ethical values; the promotion of the integrity of health by attending to limitations; and an exploration of the benefits and risks associated with conceptualizing sport and/or exercise as alternative cures or comfort in addressing mental, emotional and spiritual challenges

Francis Klose, Rosemont College

Lent Disrupted: COVID-19 and the 2020 Major League Baseball Season

Cody Musselman, Washington University in St. Louis

The “Sport of Fitness” becomes the Sport of Health: CrossFit Health in the COVID Era

This paper traces the rise of CrossFit Health and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While recent scholarship on religion and sports attempts to move the subfield away from debates around whether or not sport is a religion, assertions likening sport to religion still animate the field. This paper joins recent scholarship in pivoting the conversation away from asking whether or not sport is a religion and instead looks at how certain actors within sport are doing religion. Through the example of CrossFit Health, a healthcare initiative of “the sport of fitness,” this paper examines how Glassman positioned himself as a health crusader with a global mission to save the world through diet, exercise, and the communal joys and accountability of sport. When gyms first closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, CrossFitters collectively vowed that CrossFit would survive the pandemic because CrossFit was more than a sport: it was healthcare.

Nicholas Fieseler, University of Calgary

Wrestling with Religion: A Theodramatic Exploration of Religion in Popular Culture

Author Q&A on my article “Training for the “Unknown and Unknowable”: CrossFit and Evangelical Temporality” with students in Prof. George González’s Religion of Everyday Life, CUNY-Baruch, New York, NY.