HMN 2025: How Interactive web site maps non secular variety throughout Mississippi

A brand new University of Mississippi mission maps the state’s often-overlooked non secular variety, mixing historic analysis, video interviews and sacred music to highlight religion communities throughout Mississippi.

Religious research professor Mary Thurlkill created the interactive Religious Diversity in Mississippi website to chart the state’s up to date and historic religious landmarks on a rolling foundation. The mission launched this month with an inaugural five-student cohort who’re researching and organizing particulars of the primary featured location, Magnolia Grove Monastery in Batesville.

“I hope it may be a website that’s of use for everyone,” Thurlkill mentioned. “I’d love for public college academics to share this website with their social research lessons, and their college students can construct tasks over this and for politicians to have the ability to take a look at the county and the districts they symbolize and see how various their inhabitants is that they are representing and contemplate the implications and issues of laws being thought of.”

The one-stop, interactive useful resource involves life with technical assist from Adam Clemons, assistant professor of scholar assist and information companies on the J.D. Williams Library. As it takes form, Thurlkill sees the web site filling a necessity for individuals transferring to and all through Mississippi looking for a brand new place of worship.

“There’s not a simple place to google non secular variety in Mississippi and even what number of Buddhist or Hindu temples there are,” she mentioned. “There was nobody central place.”

The pupil {experience} was funded by the William Hal Furr endowment, established by his household to honor the beloved philosophy and faith research professor who died in 1974.

The 5 college students come from Ole Miss’ historical past, music, non secular research, movie research and Southern research departments. The interdisciplinary make-up of the group is crucial in bringing the map’s first featured website to life.

For instance, customers can study foundational practices at Magnolia Grove and founder Thich Nhat Hanh’s connection to Martin Luther King Jr.

The group shared a few of these info on May 23 in Bryant Hall as they unveiled the positioning.

Bryce Ledet, a senior music main from Hazlehurst, was conscious of the highly effective chants related to monks, however he was shocked to find the Panola County monastery is house to a surprisingly eclectic mixture of musical variety. He plans to pursue a doctoral diploma in musicology and is happy to assist showcase how the historic website’s music contains every part from cellos and guitars to collaborating with rap music artists.

“There is a lot to study,” Ledet mentioned. “We wish to doc all these extremely wealthy histories and present that Mississippi has this nice cultural background that you do not usually get to see.”

A starvation for {learning} about totally different religions struck Ledet after his leap of religion from atheism to Christianity at age 18. Even in its early phases, this multimedia hub makes it simpler to feed non secular curiosity with entry to data that may converse to totally different customers in several methods.

“Our state’s tradition is made by so many alternative cultures colliding collectively,” Ledet mentioned.

“Music is a common language that connects the world, permitting the performer to talk to a different’s coronary heart. Its inclusion in almost each non secular practice isn’t any coincidence. Humans and music are inseparable.”

Highlighting Magnolia Grove Monastery’s spirit is simply the beginning, Thurlkill mentioned. She has proposed utilizing Second Baptist Church in Oxford as the subsequent featured website.

She envisions working with future pupil cohorts, professors exterior her division and historians to share that the South’s non secular id isn’t just a homogenous tradition of principally Protestant Christians.

“They will be capable of establish their very own websites after which add that data,” Thurlkill mentioned.

“I’d love to have the ability to work with different universities in Mississippi as a result of it will be considerably troublesome, for instance, to go right down to a Buddhist monastery on the coast. But (University of) Southern Mississippi has non secular research professors, and I’d love if we might make this collaborative all through the state.”