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Introduction #

The Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast acknowledges the Onondaga Nation, Firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University stands. The episode features Davíd Carrasco discussing the legacy of Charles H. Long, a significant figure in religious studies known for his method of beginning with a text, myth, or story. Carrasco recounts Long's teachings, emphasizing the importance of creation myths and their role in understanding societal creativity and reality. Long's critique of America's racist history is highlighted, noting the persistence of core potencies that perpetuate racism. Carrasco shares Long's belief that those oppressed by colonialism, termed "colonizer watchers," hold the key to creating a new world. The podcast also includes reflections on Long's influence in Mexico, where his insights were highly valued. Raymond Carr discusses Long's papers and the challenges of categorizing his work, emphasizing Long's improvisational approach and resistance to neat categorization.

Show Notes #

Charles H. Long stands in this conversation as both memory and method, a voice that insisted we begin with a text, a myth, or a story and then keep digging until the ground gives way to origins. We trace his "musicality," the cadence that pulled students upward toward sky gods and the Dios Otios, and also downward into the water where creation begins before the word. The host recalls Swift Hall and a leather coat like mellow brown with a touch of blood red, small details that signal the scale of significance in Long's method: locate reverence in the ordinary and read it for what it reveals. That reverence is not naivety; it's rigor tuned to experience. The episode circles his mentorship, the Codex Charles Long of recorded lectures, and the archetype of "the teacher," not for celebrity but for a living style of seeking, finding, and telling wisdom about the human condition.

Creation myths, for Long, are not museum pieces; they are working engines. He taught that the "secret is in the creation story," where societies encode how new reality enters the world. The host draws out how this pre-logos ground---sound, scream, moan, and laughter---holds poetic wisdom that language later tries to capture. Through Morrison's evocation of women finding the key that breaks the back of words and Long's citation of ritual return to silence, we learn that truth is sung and danced before it is written. The power of a creation account is not nostalgia; it's technology. Retelling through story, gesture, and chant creates the atmosphere where people remember how to make worlds. That is why myth matters for communities under stress: it keeps alive the capacity to initiate new forms of reality when old forms turn violent or sterile.

Long's second lesson is sharper: this country is racist to the core. That word, core, is the hinge, informed by Vico and Herder---"origins cue the structure." Institutions may renovate their facades, but foundational potencies persist. The episode refuses easy comfort, noting how breakthroughs without deep critique merely reset the ritual. Long saw thinking as action, the slow, bright work that makes protest intelligible and resilient. He prized approximation, not as vagueness but as disciplined humility, letting thought stay alive enough to move. The point is to crawl back through history, to name what the founding inscribed into land and law, and to disrupt the clever priests who stabilize injustice through ritual language. This is intellectual courage as civic labor, and it casts hermeneutics as a public ethic rather than a private game.

The third lesson dares a horizon: the hope for a new creation myth lies with the colonized, the "colonizer watchers." Those who endured the tragic encounter know where the broken ground still breathes. The show honors Mexican colleagues who heard Long and asked for him by name; scholarship here is not extractive but reciprocal, built in plazas, archives, and sheds that open onto other worlds. The tribute from Eduardo Matos Moctezuma affirms how Long's speech carried across disciplines and borders, how wise words still make room for others to speak. Even the playful debate over names---Octavio, Pascal as signal---becomes an ethics of memory, a way to smuggle gratitude into the future through a child's middle name.

Then we step into the residue: nicotine-tinted books, yellow legal pads full of starts, file cabinets, floppy disks, and a makeshift desk. Long's workspace is an archive of improvisation, a bricoleur's laboratory where order hides under apparent scatter, ready to spark unplanned adjacency. A plume of smoke rises from a beloved book and turns into a joke about temple clouds; humor and holiness meet in the residue. The shed, half myth, half storage, becomes eschatological---time folds, and you emerge decades later. The lesson: don't over-polish a living thinker. Let the work perfume your own. Resist neatness when neatness lies. Keep categories light enough to dance, then ask who gets to draw the map that says East or West.

Finally, the hosts extend Long's impulse into sound and theopoetics, asking how theology listens as much as it looks. If creation begins in breath and cry, then scholarship should tune itself to rhythm, timbre, and groove, not only to citation. This is not anti-intellectual; it is a fuller intelligence that hears what text alone cannot hold. By the end, we carry three tools: creation as world-making practice, critique that hunts the core, and hope guarded by those who watched the colonizer and still chose life. The task now is to keep thought alive, to let approximation be dynamic, and to build archives of residue where the next makers find their first sparks.

About Our Guests #

Davíd Carrasco (Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America) is a Mexican American historian of religions with particular interest in Mesoamerican cities as symbols, and the Mexican-American borderlands. His studies with historians of religions at the University of Chicago inspired him to work on the question, "where is your sacred place," on the challenges of postcolonial ethnography and theory, and on the practices and symbolic nature of ritual violence in comparative perspective. Working with Mexican archaeologists, he has carried out research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan resulting in Religions of Mesoamerica, City of Sacrifice, and *Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. *An award-winning teacher, he has participated in spirited debates at Harvard with Cornel West and Samuel Huntington on the topics of race, culture, and religion in the Americas. He also directs the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard University.

Raymond Carr is an Assistant Professor of theology and ethics in the Religion and Philosophy Division at Pepperdine University. His research interests are theologically ecumenical, historically sensitive, and radically inclusive. Dr. Carr received his Ph.D. from Graduate Theological Union in Systematic and Philosophical Theology. He teaches courses on the theology of Martin Luther, Theology Born of Struggle, and the Old Testament in Context. He is currently working on a theological aesthetics, Theology in the Mode of Monk: Barth and Cone on Revelation and Freedom, which combines together his research interests and uses the music of Thelonious Monk as a form of parabolic suggestiveness. Previous publications include "Merton and Barth in Dialogue on Faith and Understanding: A Hermeneutics of Freedom and Ambiguity," *The Merton Annual: Studies in Culture, Spirituality, and Social Concerns *26 (2013), 181-194.

References #

• Long, Charles H. (1980). *The Study of Religion: Its Nature and Its Discourse. *University of Colorado.
• Long, Charles H. (1982). Forward Year by Year: The Story of the Forward Movement. Forward Movement Publications.
• Long, Charles H. (1985). Significations: Experiences and Images in Black American Religion. Seabury Press. ISBN 9780866839563.
• Long, Charles H. (1993).* The Gift of Speech and the Travail of Language.* University of Cape Town. ISBN 9780799215359.
• Long, Charles H. (1983). Alpha: The Myths of Creation. Scholars Press. ISBN 9780891306047.
• Long, Charles H. (1999). Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Davies Group. ISBN 9781888570519.
• Reid, Jennifer. (2003). Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long. Lexington, 2003.
• Long, Charles H. (2018). Charles H. Long (ed.).* Ellipsis: The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long*. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350032651.
• Reid, Jennifer, and David Carrasco. (2020) With This Root about My Person: Charles H. Long and New Directions in the Study of Religion. Religions of the Americas Series. University of New Mexico Press,9780826361622

Citation #

Philip P. Arnold and Sandra Bigtree, "S06E08: Remembering The Teacher: Charles H. Long (Part 1) with Davíd Carrasco and Raymond Carr" Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery (Podcast), 2026-02-23. https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/season6/episode-08/.