Tag Archives: religion

#55: Oregon’s Black Exclusion Laws and a Salem Church with Peri Joy Long ’23, Religion

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Peri Joy smiling and sitting on a rock wall in a flower garden.

Peri Joy planned for the work of her thesis year to center on race, religion, and the history of Oregon, and her writing focused on archives related to a 19th century congregation in Salem, Oregon led by Reverend Obed Dickinson. Dickinson’s decision to admit three formerly enslaved Black persons—Elizabeth Johnson and Robert and Polly Holmes—into his congregation marked the beginning of a six-year conflict between Dickinson, the white church members, and the broader Salem community over the issue of race.

Reed community members can read Peri’s thesis, “Bringing the Truth to Bear: Obed Dickinson and an Imagined Community of Racial Equality in Nineteenth-Century Salem, Oregon,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.

You can learn more about Obed Dickinson and Oregon’s Black exclusion laws from the Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon Encyclopedia.

#42: Studying Borges with Natalya Hill ’22, Religion

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Natalya and Amelie talk about how Natalya found Reed and became a religion major. This is also our last episode of the semester. We’ll be back after winter break with more interviews from the class of 2022.

Reed community members can read Natalya’s thesis, “The Ineffable Center: Islam in Borges’s Intertextual Universes,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.

#22: Afghanistan and the Taliban with Ethan Sandweiss ’19, History

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Our host, Amelie Andreas ’24, speaks with Ethan Sandweiss ’19 about his thesis on Afghanistan entitled “Highway to Hell: Afghanistan, America, and the Fragmented State.” Since this episode concerned recent events, this interview focuses a little more on the content of the thesis, and a little less on the experience of writing the thesis, than our interviews usually do. It is also a little bit longer than most episodes.

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#10: The Politics of Pat Robertson with Lewis Chapman ’19, Political Science

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Lewis had a secular upbringing, but was fascinated by Fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. from a young age. His political science department thesis gave him the opportunity to research Fundamentalism by examining the politics of Pat Robertson. Lewis spent a year and a half visiting churches and interviewing Fundamentalists, and also took an unplanned dive into social theory to find a working definition of “fundamentalist” in order to support his thesis.