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Deonnie Moodie, Ph.d., is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at OU. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014. Moodie's research and teaching focus on the ways religion, politics and economics are intertwined, especially in India. Her first book published by Oxford University Press in 2018, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata, drew on historical and legal sources in Bengali and English and extensive fieldwork in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) to show how a Hindu temple has been taken up in modernization projects in the city from the height of colonial rule in India to the present. Moodie's next book-length project examines the emergence of Hindu ideas in business schools and other corporate spaces, and the ways those ideas circulate between India and the United States through discourses on workplace spirituality and business ethics. She teaches courses on Hinduism, religious nationalism and religion and economics.
What has been your favorite course to teach?
I'm so torn! I love all of the courses I teach. But I would have to say my favorite right now is my seminar "Money, Power, and God(s): Religion and Economy East and West" because I think that the way that religious and economic ideas produce one another is so fascinating and so often overlooked. And it gives me a chance to think about all of the new scholarship being produced in this area on our own context of the United States in conjunction with what is going on in India. In the course, we look at the ways that economists rely on notions of what is natural or good or right. Folks like Adam Smith, for example, relied on a very clear notion of a "Divine Plan," as they produced their ideas about capitalism. We also look at how theologians lay out particular economic visions through their use of concepts like sacrifice. Very early Christians, for example, had a lot to say about economic exchange as they talked about Jesus as a "sacrifice" that paid humanity's "debt" of sin. Hindu theologians, too, think about debt a lot because there is a notion in Hinduism that all humans are born into debt to their families, gods, and nature. In the modern American context, Christian notions of mission inflect economic technologies including acquisitions and mergers. In neoliberal India, divine power becomes wrapped up in ideas about monetary wealth and even foreign currencies. So there's just a lot to unpack and think about!
What drew you to study religion, specifically religions in South Asia?
I actually started out in college as an International Studies major. Having grown up in Australia, I loved to travel and to see how people in different parts of world live and see things differently. I only began to study religion after studying abroad in India with a professor of Religious Studies. It was then that I became fascinated by the fact that people all over the world have completely different understandings of the fundamental truths of human existence. Coming from a Christian college at the time and seeing how religion in India in many ways looked completely different than religion in my home context, I wanted to learn more about how and why. As I deepened my studies, I became more interested in how religious ideas and practices are bound up in people's cultures – the ways they think about family and home as well as justice, value and authority – and how they are really inseparable from politics and economics. My dissertation work on Hinduism in the capital of the colonial empire in India – Calcutta – was an ideal site for me to think through these things. Now my work in business schools allows me to do the same but from a really different angle.
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