Category: Yale Institute of Sacred Music

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.

Across the Airwaves: Exploring Kurdish Identity Through Radio Broadcasting

Across the Airwaves: Exploring Kurdish Identity Through Radio Broadcasting

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.

Bridging Worlds: The Jewish Cantorial Golden Age with Jeremiah Lockwood

Bridging Worlds: The Jewish Cantorial Golden Age with Jeremiah Lockwood

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.

Toward Freedom: The Power of Art Inside Prison Walls

Toward Freedom: The Power of Art Inside Prison Walls

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.

Ryan Darr and the Ethics of Apocalypse

Ryan Darr and the Ethics of Apocalypse

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.

The Art of Chewing: Mopa Mopa Objects in the Colonial Andes

The Art of Chewing: Mopa Mopa Objects in the Colonial Andes

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.

Dr. Carla Neuss on the Transformative Power of Theater

Dr. Carla Neuss on the Transformative Power of Theater

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?”

African American Womanist Preaching: Word in Conversation with Sound

African American Womanist Preaching: Word in Conversation with Sound

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.”