Religion, Mining, and Money

I have been interested in the connection between religion and primary resource extraction for a number of years. In 2020, I found myself unable to go inside anywhere with anyone and so I took up visiting state parks. I have visited all of South Carolina’s 47 state parks and almost all of North Carolina’s.

Hunting Island State Park, South Carolina

I walked and hiked and drove through the South Carolina countryside and kept seeing lakes created by hydroelectric dams, and occasionally, signs that churches and cemeteries had been moved. I also camped and hiked outside of South Carolina. At one point I visited Camp Creek state park and forest in West Virginia and saw cemeteries, natural gas extraction and police target practice in a single hike. The next day I hiked at Hawk’s Nest state park and saw that the land had been donated by a coal company. Seemed like a repeated trend.

Me in a cable car at Hawk’s Nest State Park

Since I research Mexico, I began wondering if this trend continued outside of the US. It does. I began reading about different sites, and in ways that connected to previous research, on Mennonites and Mormons, in film, and in law, policy and bureaucracy.

I also thought it would be interesting to visit more places. So, I drafted a multi site proposal for an NEH summer grant in which I developed a hypothesis that religion was a tool for control in mines and also a way miners resist colonial and neocolonial power.

I continued this research by attending the American Academy of Religion, and teaching a class on the topic in the Spring semester of 2023.

I also wanted to fund my sabbatical so I applied for many grants. I was rejected from 8 of them. I got 3 from my institution. The Hagley library – which rejected my NEH application – gave me a small exploratory grant. So I decided to go there and then use the travel money plus an additional institutional fellowship to go to Mexico in the fall, and then to Brazil and Bolivia in the spring.

I have enjoyed my travel (as you will know if you have read my posts) and have continued applying for grants. I am pleased that my efforts have been more successful this time around. I have continued to do what I have done in the past – contact people who have previously won the grant for their research materials and try to apply to things that will actually relate to my research – which I often find out about in acknowledgments to books and articles, and sometimes on twitter.

One grant I saw on twitter was at the Marian Library at the University of Dayton. I’ll be going there in June to conduct research on the Virgin Mary – as most of the religious sites I’m interested in seem to be shrines to the Virgin Mary, it seems like a good idea to learn more about Marian devotion. We will see how that goes but there are enough materials that it would take an entire career to read all of them so I think it’ll be good!