Season 4 episode 15 of the TV show Futurama, entitled “The Farnsworth Parabox,” has a great illustration of a principle that Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. […]
Month: May 2015
Congratulations Are in Order
REL loves to recognize award winners (have you seen our recent Honors Day post?), and so congratulations are in order for our own Prof. Theodore Trost, who was recently named as a College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Teaching Fellow. Ted is only the second REL professor to be given this honor since the award was established in 1986. […]
What is Cool?
Reading about Steve Quartz, who studies what happens when people experience something “cool,” made me think of our department, not because we are cool (although that is a reasonable connection), but because the label “cool” has no set definition, much like the category “religion”. People assume that they know it when they see it, but no consistent definition is possible. […]
Out in the Open: What Now?
Sarah Griswold is a junior double majoring in Mathematics and Religious Studies. She spends her “free time” analyzing her favorite shows on Netflix, which of course winds up ruining them. She is currently enrolled in an independent study with Dr. Simmons where she is analyzing the popular HBO series “True Detective.” “Look, as sentient meat, however illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgments: everybody judges, all the time.” – Rust Cohle Earlier, in the third […]
This Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Either
Yesterday, I read an interesting report from Educause about “The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment.” The report starts by criticizing the now-conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are deployed with ubiquity by higher education institutions. Some see LMSs as essential to education and LMS services are projected to be a $7.83 billion dollar industry in 2018. […]
Read More from This Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Either
Putting Us in Our Place
There’s an interesting story now making the rounds of the internet, in which Congressman Jeff Duncan (Republican, South Carolina, pictured above) is quoted as saying the following about the Roman Catholic Church’s recent recognition of Palestine as a state: Of course the deep irony is the speed with which a variety of politicians in the US cite their own religious beliefs as evidence for their political positions or how frequently they decry the so-called separation of church and state — […]
Out in the Open: Certainty is Power
Sarah Griswold is a junior double majoring in Mathematics and Religious Studies. She spends her “free time” analyzing her favorite shows on Netflix, which of course winds up ruining them. She is currently enrolled in an independent study with Dr. Simmons where she is analyzing the popular HBO series “True Detective.” “Transference of fear and self-loathing is an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective at proportion to the amount of […]
In the Limelight
To view an enlarged pdf file of the pictured article about Dr. Ramey, click here. Did you catch this article featuring Dr. Ramey and his research in the recent College of Arts and Sciences newsletter “Celebrating Excellence” (Vol. 5, No. 1)? If not, you can pick up a hard copy in our office, or click the link above to read it online. […]
The Department is Winning the Internet Today
https://twitter.com/TMichaelLaw/status/598114826548846592 The Department has taken over the Marginalia Review of Books today. The popular site for reviews of work in religious studies is currently featuring interviews with both Prof. Merinda Simmons and me, Prof. Mike Altman. […]
How Not to Be a Senior Scholar
I remember almost two years ago when American historian Edmund Morgan died. I had read Morgan’s Visible Saints as part of my doctoral exams but, not being a historian by training or researching the colonial period, I hadn’t read much else of his work. But after his death I read a lot about Morgan. I read stories from his graduate students, from his colleagues, and from scholars who had come into contact with the man one way or another. It seemed […]