New Terms for the Universe: A Visual, Archival, Ecological Lexicon grows out of A Universe of Terms, a digital-first project published in 2019–20 on The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s platform on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. That earlier project invited scholars across the social sciences and humanities to reflect on familiar terms such as “modernity,” “belief,” and “human,” offering non-specialists multiple entry points into the study of religion. An illustrated book based on the project, A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor, was coauthored by Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme and published by Indiana University Press in 2022. The book provides the conceptual framing for the next digital phase of the project.

Supported by a Henry Luce Foundation grant to Howard University and launched in October 2025, New Terms for the Universe brings together scholars from Howard, University of California, Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Minnesota. The project is led by Mona Oraby, with Katharine Gerbner, Naveeda Khan, and Lisa Sideris as co-principal investigators. Their work and the work of their collaborators extends A Universe of Terms into a new phase focused on social inequality, climate change, and the entanglements of human and nonhuman life.

The project begins from a simple premise: Words do more than describe worlds; they help bring them to life. But the terms gathered here are not the familiar keywords that already organize religious studies or humanistic inquiry more broadly. They emerge from particular archives, ethnographic encounters, ecological classifications, and struggles over land, labor, justice, freedom, and belonging across the Global South and the Global North. They ask how language names divine presence, carries ancestral memory, registers capitalist encroachment, classifies nonhuman life, and makes collective futures imaginable.

Critical terms and keywords volumes have long offered scholars and students a way into the central debates of a field. Their format is familiar: a set of accessible essays, usually written by established scholars, each organized around a concept that has shaped a discipline’s methods, arguments, and questions. The predictability of the form is part of its value. Readers know what they are entering, and instructors know how such volumes can be used. Calling New Terms for the Universe a lexicon is therefore deliberate, though the project stretches the form beyond its usual limits. The project  borrows the promise of a lexicon—a gathering of terms that can orient readers—while resisting the assumption that concepts become useful only when their meanings are fixed. It treats terms not as settled concepts to be explained, nor as disciplinary markers to be updated, but as openings into worlds still being contested, recovered, and made. Its digital form allows those worlds to unfold through essays, images, sound recordings, archival materials, and interactive features rather than through text alone.

The project’s collaborative form is central to its method. Across its three featured terms, New Terms for the Universe brings together eighteen contributors working across religious studies, history, politics, anthropology, linguistics, ecology, art, and digital humanities. Recent undergraduates and graduate students worked alongside established scholars, making the project not only an interdisciplinary experiment in public scholarship but also a model of inclusive intellectual collaboration. The result is a site whose terms are approached from multiple angles.

FEATURED TERMS

To see how this approach works, visitors are invited to explore the three terms featured on the current site: adga tome, householding, and red list. Each begins in a specific archive, practice, or ecological relation, then opens outward onto larger questions about religion, history, power, and collective life.

Adga tome begins with Damma, a formerly enslaved African woman on St. Thomas who used the term in a 1739 petition to the queen of Denmark. Written in both Dutch Creole and Gbe, her letter offers a rare entry into the language, religious life, and political imagination of an eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean woman. This section approaches adga tome not as a term with one stable translation, but as a word whose possible meanings unsettle familiar categories of nation, God, and race. In Damma’s Gbe text, adga tome names her homeland; in Dutch Creole, it becomes “Popo in Africa.” That shift allows visitors to query how Damma understood place, peoplehood, divinity, foreignness, and diasporic identity beyond colonial categories.

Householding rethinks the household not as a bounded domestic unit, but as an ongoing practice of making and sustaining life with others. Drawing on ethnographic work in India and South Korea, this section follows how people household amid rupture: through provisioning, ancestral placation, pilgrimage, memory work, and the management of traumatic pasts. Householding names the ordinary and extraordinary labor by which people create livable worlds under conditions shaped by partition, colonial violence, environmental change, Cold War legacies, and postcolonial uncertainty. Used as a verb, the terms invites visitors to see the household as neither private nor self-contained, but as a charged site where religion, kinship, economy, history, and state power meet.

Red list turns to the El Segundo Blue butterfly, a tiny, near-sedentary species whose survival depends on the same industries that endanger it. Protected in the shadow of one of the world’s busiest airports and one of California’s largest oil refineries, the butterfly exposes a strange tension of scale: a hyperlocal creature is a symbol of care, progress, flight, and renewal. The section asks how endangered life is classified, represented, and made usable by an extractive economy. It follows the butterfly from ecologists tracking the invasive ice plant that overtakes coastal buckwheat, to artists who feature it in murals of transportation, outer space, and progress, to corporations that amplify its symbolism while minimizing their environmental harms.

HOW TO EXPLORE THE SITE

Visitors are invited to enter the project through any featured term. The terms are not arranged in a fixed order; each one opens onto a guided path through essays, images, archival materials, sound recordings, and interactive features. We suggest beginning with the introductory essay for a term, then following the arrows to the next contribution, whether another essay or an immersive activity. However visitors move through the site, the aim is the same: to dwell with each term long enough to see the worlds it gathers, unsettles, and makes available to thought.

Acknowledgments

The project team gratefully acknowledges the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which generously hosted launch events for A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor in 2023 and New Terms for the Universe in 2025.