Interview

Interview for the SPEECH podcast, Litres. Watch: YouTube In this conversation with the SPEECH podcast team, we worked through several questions I consider fundamental to understanding what religion is and what is happening to it today. Can Religion Even Be Defined? Since Friedrich Max Müller, religious studies has never arrived at a single universal definition. Substantive approaches grounded in belief in the “supernatural” frequently fail: in classical Theravada Buddhism or in archaic belief systems, the concept of the supernatural is blurred beyond usefulness. ...

Interview for the project “Where do Religious Scholars Work? Our Alumni” I recently gave an interview to my alma mater—the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies at St. Petersburg State University (SPbU). As part of the alumni section, we talked about how a lawyer came up with the idea to study religion, why I decided to start my own YouTube channel, and how popular science videos are born. ...

Interview for Alexander Bydantsev’s channel on Yandex Zen. On religious studies as a science, the Brights movement, agnosticism, scientism, and the limits of the scientific method. Read in Russian→ Read the interview in English→

Published in April 2022 on Alexander Bydantsev’s Yandex Zen channel (“Trickster”). Read the original (Russian) → Read the interview in English→ Tell us about yourself. Where did you study? What do you do? I live in St. Petersburg — my home city. I spent four years studying for my bachelor’s degree in Moscow, which among true Petersburgers is considered a mortal sin. Better to sleep on a bench near Sennaya Square with a volume of Dostoevsky under your head than to rot in that spiritually bankrupt Moscow. I never saw it that way, and I still don’t. ...