Mona Oraby in conversation with Lisa Sideris and Joseph Blankholm

Organized around eight terms in the study of religion, Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme’s A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (2022) combines text and image to examine the human as both catalyst of crisis and principal agent for its mitigation. This graphic nonfiction book acknowledges the significance of certain terms to the social sciences and the humanities, narrates their limitations, and shows why we need a structure and style for thinking them otherwise. Through its unique visual lexicon, the book explores religious media in postcolonial and secular contexts, performances of religious feeling, the political economy of religion, sacred presence, and human striving amid social inequality and climate change. A Universe of Terms is a visual experiment, one that invites readers to think again and anew about how the visual is integral to thought. This conversation with Mona Oraby, Lisa Sideris, and Joseph Blankholm will trace how the book came to be and engage its broader argument for thinking differently about how scholarly knowledge is communicated.