On October 20, the ARSP leadership team gathered at OSU for an all-day brainstorming session with our three pilot site coordinators. In Spring 2018, our project will be incorporated into university courses led by Christopher Cantwell, at the University

ARSP Advisory Board member and project co-originator, Kathryn McClymond, has a wonderful blog post up about her work with the ATL Maps project, in which she reflects on the value of sound mapping for studying and teaching about Atlanta’s religious diversity. We are excited about bringing our projects together in the near future. Stay tuned!

By Lauren Pond

Text by Amy DeRogatis
Recordings by Emma Pittsley
Photographs and Audio Editing by Lauren Pond

By Amy DeRogatis

Last Sunday, April 2, 2017, I participated in an interfaith pilgrimage through the streets of East Lansing. To prepare for the event, I spent a few days reading and thinking about pilgrimage. Why do people take pilgrimages? What do they hope to accomplish? Where are they seeking to go? And, significantly for this project, what are the sounds that I might expect to hear while on a pilgrimage?

Text by Caroline Toy
Recordings, editing, and photographs by Lauren Pond

At many sites and events where ARSP researchers record, we try to make ourselves barely noticeable to the community. While we get permission to record and answer questions openly, it’s not unusual for us to document a service or festival understanding that our recordings are only an auditory snapshot, a single, ephemeral slice of religious life at a particular place and time.

Recordings, photographs, and text by Lauren Pond and Isaac Weiner Audio editing by Lauren Pond

Congratulations to ARSP multimedia content producer Lauren Pond, who won the 2016 Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her color series, Test of Faith. Her photography project, in progress since 2011, documents a family of Pentecostal serpent handlers in West Virginia. In fall 2017, Lauren’s photographs and narrative essay will be published in a book by CDS and Duke University Press.

By Bree Gannon

The Imam prays. A baby cries. This is the human in ceremony, the spontaneous in orchestration.