Religious Studies

Here is the text version of my talk on Seminar at the ML PSA Lab. Original announcement is here Dear colleagues, thank you very much for the invitation. It is a great honor and an excellent opportunity to participate in this seminar. My name is Nikita Obraztsov. I will briefly outline my background: my first degree is in law (I studied in Moscow at the Kutafin Moscow State Law University). After studying law, I made a sharp turn and moved into religious studies because I realized that this is what truly fascinates me. I completed my master’s degree at St. Petersburg State University in 2020, where I focused on the “Brights” movement using qualitative methods—specifically, conducting in-depth interviews. At the time, we didn’t have quantitative or computational methods in our program. Then, in 2025, I enrolled in the European University to study computational sociology, and right now, I have just completed my first year of the master’s program. ...

“Fiziki i Liriki” (Scientists and Humanists), Radio Mayak, 17 June 2026. Listen → An appearance on the Radio Mayak programme “Fiziki i Liriki”, hosted by Alexander Pushnoy and Rita Mitrofanova. The conversation covered contemporary religious studies as a discipline — what researchers in the field actually study today and what the research programme of the field looks like. A substantial part of the discussion was devoted to atheism: its different varieties, its historical forms, and what distinguishes contemporary non-belief from the atheism of earlier periods. ...

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. ...

Does a Secular Course in Religious Studies Affect Religiosity? A Proposed Randomised Experiment Essay for the course “Introduction to Causality” Nikita Obraztsov, European University at St. Petersburg, 2025 Read the article →

Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube On this channel we often dive into specific topics: religion, atheism, contemporary science, how people in different parts of the world relate to various things. But we frequently overlook a more fundamental question: from what standpoint are we actually talking about religion in the first place? From what framework? The question seems abstract and philosophical, and for a long time I treated philosophy roughly the way Alexander Panchin does — as something fairly vague and disconnected from real research. But I have rethought that position lately. ...

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. ...

Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube Academic religious studies are relatively free of pseudoscience compared to, say, medicine. But one myth still deserves serious attention: it can be heard not only from outright cranks but from quite respectable scholarly works. The idea in question is primordial monotheism. What the Myth Says Primordial monotheism holds that monotheism, the belief in a single god, is the original form of religious consciousness. All subsequent development of religious ideas in paganism represents degeneration, the result of a fall from grace, a loss of revelation. ...

Transcript of a public lecture delivered in St. Petersburg, 25 May. Video lecture: YouTube The goal of my lecture is to move through the main stages of the history of atheism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. A word on terminology first. What I do is secular, non-confessional religious studies. We present facts; we do not evaluate them from the position of personal belief or unbelief. A religious scholar can be a believer or not — what matters is that belief is left at the laboratory door. ...

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. ...

Based on a video lecture. Video lecture: YouTube Today I want to talk about agnosticism. At first glance, it’s a simple topic: ask anyone with an interest in philosophy or religion what agnosticism is, and they will confidently tell you it is the position that one cannot know for certain whether god exists or not. Neither believer nor atheist: a person allows for some higher power without asserting either way. The answer is broadly correct, just far from complete. ...

Based on a video lecture. Watch here (in russian) Erasmus of Rotterdam is one of my favourite figures in world history. A great humanist, forerunner of the Reformation, a man who could not abide fanaticism in any form, and who left a deep mark on the intellectual life of Europe. He was, in fact, the author of one of the first secular bestsellers in European history. Good material on Erasmus in Russian is scarce. The best I found is a programme from the Kultura channel. The format of “philosophy in five minutes” exists for students who need to pass an exam without doing the reading. So: a proper treatment today, covering biography, ideas, and texts. ...