In partnership with the Religious Studies Project (RSP) it is our pleasure to bring you the audio recordings of five very important lectures, hosted on the RSP website.

The first is the NSRN Annual Lecture from April 2011, recorded at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham:

• Atheism Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Atheistic Thought
  Jonathan Lanman (Queen’s University, Belfast)

The other four are the keynote lectures from the NSRN’s Biennial Conference, recorded at Goldsmiths University, London, in July 2012:

• The People of No Religion
  Callum Brown (University of Dundee)
• Secularization and Non-religion in Non-Western Contexts
  Humeira Iqtidar (King’s College, London)
• Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular-Religious Distinctions
  Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (University of Leipzig)
• Belief and Unbelief: Two Sides of a Coin
  Grace Davie (University of Exeter)

Chris, the managing editor of the NSRN website, is also one of the Religious Studies Project’s ‘editors-in-chief’ and therefore, when the NSRN wanted to make available some podcasts from recent events, it seemed like a win-win situation for both organizations for the RSP to host and disseminate these podcasts on behalf of the NSRN. These lectures come as part of an extensive series of podcasts from the RSP which touch on the study of non-religion – from a recent roundtable discussion on Studying Nonreligion within Religious Studies, to interviews with Linda Woodhead, Callum Brown, and Lois Lee.

For those of you who don’t know the RSP, please take a moment to survey religiousstudiesproject.com which features a few dozen of their weekly podcasts with leading international scholars on exciting developments in theory, method and empirical study within the social-scientific study of religion, in addition to roundtable discussions, book reviews, feature essays, opportunities digests, and more. The RSP is presented with generous support from the British Association for the Study of Religions.

As the RSP has a wider remit than the NSRN, they did not wish to fill all of their listeners inboxes with five quite lengthy podcasts and, therefore, have not made these podcasts available though their iTunes channel. However, they are all available on the RSP website and shall be linked to from the NSRN website. Due to the lecture style of these recordings, it is somewhat inevitable that the audio quality will be lower than we would like, and that there might be references to PowerPoint presentations or other events happening in the room. However, we know that these will be minor irritations when compared with the stimulating scholarship that you are about to hear, and we are very grateful to the RSP for working with us to bring you these lectures.