Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is an interdisciplinary graduate center at Yale University that engages broadly with sacred music, worship, and the arts in diverse religious traditions and in civic life. The ISM podcast series focuses on different disciplines and perspectives that touch upon these subjects.
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Dr. Ephrem Aboud Ishac discusses his work with ancient Syriac manuscripts, the ways the church and scholarly communities can benefit each other, and the challenges facing the preservation of these ancient texts.
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Jon Bullock, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, joins Ariana Hones (M.Div ’25) for a conversation on how radio is used as a tool for shaping Kurdish identity. Using the lens of ethnomusicology and the sacred, Jon discusses the impacts of colonialism and technologies of sound, such recording and broadcasting on Kurdish music.
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Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood joins the Fellows Podcast to chat about the sounds and stars of the cantorial golden age. He also talks about keeping busy — and keeping up— with a rich and varied life as both academic and professional musician.
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Grounded in themes of tribulation, redemption, and hope, ISM Fellow and theater professor Dr. Ron Jenkins joins Ariana Hones (M.Div. ’23) in conversation on the transformational power of Dante’s Divine Comedies inside prisons. In this episode, Dr. Jenkins discusses his course, Gospel, Rap, and Social Justice, and his use of Dante’s poetry to create theater pieces with currently and formerly incarcerated people. He states, “bringing Dante and art into prison is a way of humanizing a dehumanizing situation.” Dante serves as both a mirror reflecting the injustices in our prison systems as well as a catalyst for freedom.
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In his interview with ISM M.A.R. student Madeleine Hutchins ’23, ISM Fellow and religious ethicist Ryan Darr pulls no punches in talking global climate crisis: “…we’re entering a mass extinction event, which would be, from what scientists have found about life on Earth, the sixth in Earth’s history — and the first caused by one species in particular.” Darr is a Postdoctoral Associate in Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture, and from 2019 to 2022 was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy and Religion at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University.
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ISM fellow and composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen explores his latest composition fusing gospel text, pan-African sound, and the passion tradition. He also chats about his earlier operatic work that engages the sounds and figures of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
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ISM Fellow and art historian Catalina Ospina investigates the oral production of resin-glossed mopa mopa objects by indigenous colonial Andean artists in her project, Identifying and Subverting Epistemic Asymmetries in the Colonial Andes.
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Kati Fitzgerald explores the embodied religious performance and practices of Tibetan Buddhist lay women in her ISM Fellows Project, “No Pure Lands: The Contemporary Buddhism of Tibetan Lay Women.”
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ISM Fellow Dr. Carla Neuss explores education and the transformative power of theater, medieval and modern, asking “When theater accomplishes something, or does something within us or within the audiences, how does it actually DO that?”
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ISM Fellow Dr. Melanie R. Hill explores how African American literature mutually influenced and informed Black womanist preaching. “Literature, music and theology . . . all of these elements have really been the heartbeat of who I am — not only of my research, but of who I am as a scholar and an artist.”