Hofstra Religious Mapping Project Connects Kalikow Student Researchers with Nassau County Religious Communities

Ann Burlein, PhD, Professor of Religion, Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Julie Byrne, PhD, Professor of Religion, Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Last summer, the Hofstra Religious Mapping Project team was in the midst of intensive fieldwork – visiting over a dozen local religious organizations within a few weeks, writing up field notes after our visits, organizing them alongside data gathered during the year, and planning for next year’s work – when suddenly the sky went dark.

On June 7, 2023, part of our team – one professor, two students – was scheduled to visit the Wednesday night Bible study of a local nondenominational Christian church a few miles from Hofstra’s campus. But Canadian wildfire smoke drifting south had blotted out the sun and filled the air with swirling particles. We donned face masks in the Heger Hall lounge, dashed to the car in the Public Safety parking lot, and got in as fast as we could, trying to preserve the more pristine air inside the car. The feeling as we started this visit was, well, apocalyptic.

Once we got to the church, however, the mood changed. We encountered a small group of perhaps 20 people who had gathered to study their scripture, despite the air quality warnings. We were the only guests, so we introduced ourselves as a group from Hofstra. We did what we usually do – listen; participate or not as we felt comfortable; absorb the details of this place, these community members, these words, these practices. This particular church, we noticed, featured a stage-like pulpit area with purple neon accents, and an unusual representation of men, for a weeknight Bible study. The young minister was enthusiastic, and the community members were tight-knit, sharing problems and praying for each other.

But it was not only enthusiasm and caring that lifted the mood. The connection between us – between community members and their unexpected visitors – also made a difference. “See, I was this close to calling in and canceling tonight’s Bible study!” the minister said. “But if I had done that, we would have missed out on these wonderful guests from Hofstra. They would have met church doors closed and locked!” As we departed, we made small talk with various members and were warmly invited to come visit anytime. The day’s apocalyptic sense gave way to something that felt more like a new beginning.

And that’s what the Hofstra Religious Mapping Project is ultimately about –a new beginning for connection, learning, and opportunity as the religious studies classroom goes out into the local community.

This spring, the Department of Religion celebrates two years of work on the Hofstra Religious Mapping Project.

Led by us, Ann Burlein and Julie Byrne, this project is an ongoing research collaboration with our majors pursuing the BA in Religion and Contemporary Issues (R&CI, for short). The concrete aim of the Mapping Project is to map the locations of the incredible variety of religious organizations in Nassau County, as well as to visit and build relationships with them. More broadly, we are forging connections between students’ classroom study and people’s religious realities, and between Hofstra and the wider Nassau community.

So far, the Mapping Project has employed five student researchers, provided internships to others, gathered data on over 100 religious organizations, started development of a website with an interactive map, and garnered over $30,000 in grants and awards. We have also visited over two dozen sites for events ranging from a bat mitzvah to a discussion about social justice at the Unitarian Universalist fellowship; from Sunday worship at Catholic and Anglican liturgies to the Greek festival at the St. Paul Orthodox Cathedral in Hempstead. Along the way, we have spoken with many interesting and dedicated people, and are slowly getting a sense of the various kinds of outreach programs that are happening all around Hofstra.

Versions of “mapping projects” have been conducted in a number of religion departments across the country over the last decade or so, most prominently the Pluralism Project at Harvard University

The concrete aim of the Mapping Project is to map the locations of the incredible variety of religious organizations in Nassau County, as well as to visit and build relationships with them.

The Hofstra Religious Mapping Project team gathers for a working lunch in Heger Hall in spring 2024. Clockwise from left: Abigail Anderson, Dylan Budhu, Grace Varnum, Dr. Ann Burlein (joining by Zoom), Elizabeth Hennessy, Dr. Julie Byrne, and Andrew Sine.

We started the Hofstra Religious Mapping Project for several reasons. First, the Religion Department has shifted to a model of studying religion and Jewish studies that emphasizes the importance of religious literacy for all career paths. “Religious literacy” means having a supple understanding of how religion shows up in public spaces and how it is practiced in communities. It is a crucial element of preparing students for future work and civic engagement with increasingly diverse populations, including religious diversity. Our R&CI major offers concentrations in health, law, and media, reflecting the shift toward teaching religious literacy as a critical skill for any future profession. In our view, experiencing religion in the communities where it happens is particularly important for such literacy, because so much of current work on diversity, equity, and inclusion tends to render religion into a static identity or even an abstraction. Yet people live religion in very particular ways. If you look only for beliefs and practices, you might miss how this congregation is focusing on antiracism work, or that masjid is mostly concerned with voting rights, or that temple runs a massive soup kitchen.

“The in-person visits to religiously affiliated sites [and] conversations with people are my favorite part,” said Mapping Project student researcher Abigail Anderson (R&CI and Psychology, Rabinowitz Honors College [RHC] ’24). “Talking about religion can be difficult or seen as taboo, and the Mapping Project has exposed me to so many different walks of life and taught me how to offer a space for people to share their experiences.

“I’ve always known that I want to work with people – whether it be teaching, researching, clinical psychology,” Abi added. “While I’m not sure what I’ll end up in, I know that the openness to experience and appreciation for the power of spiritual belief in people’s lives will serve me well.” Along with

Abi, in 2022-2023, we also recruited Andrew Sine (R&CI and History, RHC ’25) as the two founding student researchers

Second, we wanted to create a sense of a cohort among our majors, offering them a unique opportunity to deepen their Hofstra experience intellectually, interpersonally, and professionally. The Hofstra Religious Mapping Project builds relationships with professors, but also with other religion students and the community beyond Hofstra’s campus. They gain experience presenting research as a team at Undergraduate Research Day and at celebrations of the Rabinowitz Honors College Research Assistant Program. And they learn what it means to work on a team and build up a project. “The Mapping Project has developed my problem-solving skills and has shown me how to create structures and systems for a concept to make it a reality,” Andrew said.

In 2023-2024, the team expanded to include two more majors, Dylan Budhu (R&CI and Physician Assistant Studies, RHC ’27) and Elizabeth Hennessy (R&CI and Political Science, ’27).

“I currently aspire to enter the medical field where I would ... interact with people of various backgrounds,” Dylan said. “Familiarity with their religious beliefs will help me connect to their values and understand a meaningful part of their identity.” Elizabeth, who plans to practice law in the future, expressed similar views. “Being able to meet people from different religions, backgrounds, and cultures is essential for any career path,” she said. “It is also a great way to find out more about the area we are in. I have always been really intrigued by people’s different religions and beliefs and why, so being able to do that through this project has made it a really important part of my academic life.”

In both years of the project, we also added students with mapping experience via geographic information systems (GIS): Lex Besecker (English, Writing Studies, RHC ’23) and Grace Varnum (Sustainability Studies, GIS Studies, RHC ’24). Introduced to GIS mapping in classes with our colleague in Global Studies and Geography, Dr. Craig Dalton, Lex and Grace both hope to pursue careers involving GIS mapping in areas such as urban planning and environmental sustainability. Since Lex graduated,

Founding students of the Hofstra Religious Mapping Project at the Rabinowitz Honors College celebration of its Research Assistant Program, December 2022. From left: Abigail Anderson, Lex Besecker, and Andrew Sine.

Grace has continued the work of developing the website and transferring selected data gathered by the student researchers onto an interactive map.

The original Hofstra Religious Mapping team at Undergraduate Research Day, December 2022. From left: Dr. Julie Byrne, Abigail Anderson, Lex Besecker, Andrew Sine, and Dr. Ann Burlein.

Third, we started the project because we wanted to expand our ability to use two pedagogical strategies that are known to have a high impact on students: inviting religious practitioners as classroom guest speakers and including site visits as part of regular classes. We have had guest speakers and site visits in our courses in the past, but – as professors who commute to Hofstra from Queens and Brooklyn – we needed a way to get to know Nassau County better and translate those new connections into syllabus highlights.

Student researchers attest to the power of getting out of their comfort zone to witness religion firsthand. “Visiting a Hindu temple for their Hanuman puja was a really memorable experience,” reported student researcher Abi Anderson. “The people were incredibly welcoming, even giving our research team a tour of the temple and offering us food, and the ritual was very different from anything I’d ever observed. Rather than an orchestrated or structured gathering, it was more of a communal meditation. The people seemed to be connecting with each other and their gods on a more spiritual level, performing the ... ritualistic walk, bow, and offering alone upon entering the room, and then joining friends and family to talk, listen to the music, and just be. This visit redefined religion for me.”

Student researcher Andrew Sine said that visiting the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Hempstead was his most memorable experience so far. “When Fr. Elias [Pappas] offered the space to me as a peaceful place, not an attempt to evangelize,” he said, “I was touched because it made me feel like a part of a community, regardless of religious beliefs.”

The final reason why we started the project has to do with Hofstra’s exciting momentum to gain a Carnegie classification of R2 (high research activity) status and to offer more resources for grant writing and research. We found ourselves in conversation with other Hofstra units about large, multi-department grant proposals, such as recent RFPs from the National Science Foundation that call for partnership with local organizations. We realized that as a department, our contribution could be precisely what the Mapping Project enables: connection with community stakeholders in the churches, synagogues, masjids, gurdwaras, centers, and temples of Nassau County.

Everywhere in the U.S., local religious organizations are often the places where community members gather to envision possible futures, talk about common needs, organize collective action, and cultivate leadership. This is even more the case for many marginalized communities, in which religious organizations are sometimes among the few spaces that afford a sense of belonging and self-determination. If there are future Hofstra partnerships with Nassau County stakeholders for climate action, public health, or educational outreach, the Department of Religion via the Mapping Project will have built the bridges to make those partnerships possible.

The Mapping Project has been fortunate and grateful to receive a number of grants and awards to support the work, totaling $30,900 so far. We have received funding from Hofstra University entities such as the Office of the President, the Rabinowitz Honors College Research Assistant Program, the National Center for Suburban Studies, the Firestone Fellowship Program, the Peer Teacher Program, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Hofstra Cultural Center, and the Department of Religion.

We also secured two external grants. In 2022-2023, we won a Building Interfaith America Campus Grant from Interfaith America,ii a national nonprofit working to strengthen pluralism as a positive civic practice in U.S. public spaces. And in 2023-2024, we won a grant from the Center on Lived Religion (COLR), a project at St. Louis University funded by the Henry Luce Foundation that “employs digital research to explore, map, and study religious diversity.” iii The COLR grant enlists our Mapping Project team of seven to help test the beta version of a new app, “Where’s Religion?” which aims to make site visits and collection of artifacts of religion in public spaces as easy as entering the information on your phone.

Hofstra students have already recognized the Department of Religion as a locus of innovative and effective teaching. Ann Burlein won the Kalikow School Teacher of the Year Award in 2022-2023, and Julie Byrne won the Kalikow School Teacher of the Year Award in 2023-2024.

The Mapping Project allows us to expand and enhance departmental teaching excellence. In spring 2024, Ann is teaching a new version of her popular course RELI 88: Alternative Medicine, bringing in a naturopath, an acupuncturist, and a reiki master as guest speakers. And Julie is revamping a fieldwork course, giving it a new title and an unconventional structure to accommodate many site visits. The refreshed RELI 158 will be called simply Visiting Religious Organizations, and it will broaden the impact of the Mapping Project to students beyond R&CI majors. We hope to offer RELI 158 for the first time in spring 2025.

Footnotes i The Pluralism Project at https:// pluralism.org / ii For more on Interfaith America, please see https://www.interfaithamerica.org /. iii For more on the Center on Lived Religion at St. Louis University, please see https://www.facebook. com/livedreligion/.

Dr. Ann Burlein is professor of religion at Hofstra University, where she specializes in religion and medicine, and religion and the body. Her first book, Lift High the Cross, explored the role of biblical religiosity in mainstreaming both the religious right and white supremacist forms of contemporary religion. She has also written articles on the intersection between religion and genetics, as well as on Foucault’s notion of spirituality. In addition to the Department of Religion, she teaches courses in women’s studies and disability studies, and in Hofstra’s School of Health Professions and Human Services.

Dr. Julie Byrne holds the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies and serves as professor of religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Hofstra University.

Before arriving in New York, she previously taught at Duke University (2004-2006) and Texas Christian University (2000-2004). Her first book, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs (Columbia, 2003), tells the story of Catholic women’s basketball in the Philadelphia archdiocese from 1930 to 1975. Her second book, The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion, was published by Columbia University Press in 2016. It is a cultural history of independent Catholicism in the U.S. Her current book project, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars award, focuses on tristate families affected by 9/11 and its aftermath. As part of her research, she is learning to speak Spanish.

Dr. Byrne teaches about topics in comparative religions of the Americas, focusing on contemporary communities and connections to current events. Her courses at Hofstra include What is Religion?, Demonology, Religion & Media, and Sacred Drugs. She publishes popular articles and speaks frequently to the media, including The New York Times, Newsday, and Voice of America.