Scholarship on religion, like historical, sociological, literary, cultural, and most other humanistic and social scientific scholarship, has been predominantly terracentric. And why wouldn’t it be? These are disciplinary inquiries about human beings, and human beings live on the land. Or do they? What about human relationships with the 70% of the earth that is ocean water? This talk opens up a discussion about the study of religion offshore, in the spaces of the world’s oceans. How has the ocean appeared in religious traditions and practices? How has oceanic labor shaped religion? How might the view from the water transform our understanding of religion and how we study it? The talk will pay particular attention to the 19th century American whaling industry, and Indigenous whaling practices, in exploring this topic.

Dr. Richard J. Callahan, Jr., is interested in the intersections of religion, cultures of work, natural resource extraction, and comparative studies of religions and globalization. He received his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MA in Folklore and Folklife Studies at Western Kentucky University. Dr. Callahan is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust, and editor of New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase and The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. His latest research explores a religious history of the nineteenth-century American whaling industry and its global networks of exchange in the spaces of the ocean. He is currently a fellow in Yale University’s Material and Visual Cultures of Religion program.