Month: June 2015


Young Southern Historians

Warner Thompson is a senior at the University of Alabama, who wrote the following for REL 490. He is a History major and a Religious Studies minor with future plans of Law School at the University. He was born and raised in Homewood, Alabama, and he is the oldest of three children. When I was young, playing with sets of toy soldiers was a favorite pastime of mine. I had entire tiny armies, from different time periods and different wars, […]

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“You don’t know what that means!”

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012 and is working on her MA in Religious Studies at CU Boulder. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. Several weeks back, I came across College Humor’s “If Gandhi Took A Yoga Class” video. In the clip, they have Gandhi challenging “western” yoga practices and understandings. Take a look… (Warning, there is some foul language) […]

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Mulholland Drive: Extremely Enigmatic or Surprisingly Simple?

Vincent M. Hills is a senior at the University of Alabama majoring in History and minoring in Religious Studies. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Mulholland Drive begins with a woman named Rita who’s suffering from amnesia after a violent car crash. She roams the streets of Los Angeles in a daze before retreating to an apartment where she is discovered by a woman named Betty, a blonde who has come to […]

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Classification or Confusion?

Catie Stewart is a junior at the University of Alabama from Madison, Mississippi. She is double majoring in English and Religious Studies and minoring in Psychology. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Recently I found myself sitting in a dark room staring at a projector trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was our fourth and final REL 360 meeting, and there were only thirty minutes left in the movie that […]

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What to Do When David Lynch Starts Making Sense (Don’t Panic!)

Now a sophomore at UA, Maggie Patterson was raised in the graveyards and Southern Baptist churches of Nashville, Tennessee. Although she may mumble her way through the second half of the Lord’s Prayer, Maggie remains captivated by spirituality in the South and is majoring in Religious Studies. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. When I sat down for Mulholland Drive, I was anticipating a good dose of Lynch-induced bewilderment. And I was not disappointed. […]

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Putting the “Religion” in “American Religion”

Craig Prentiss is a professor of religious studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014).   On Thursday, June 4, I took a flight from Kansas City, Missouri to Indianapolis to attend the Fourth Biennial Conference on Religion American Culture hosted by the the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IUPUI. Though it was the […]

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Classification matters — at least to G.O.B.

You a fan of “Arrested Development”? If so, you may remember the pilot episode where, during his retirement party, agents from the Securities and Exchange Commission raid the yacht to arrest George Sr. — but his son, G.O.B., the ungifted but enthusiastic amateur magician, hides him in the Aztec Tomb. Moral of the story? Classification matters. Oh, and don’t defraud investors in your real estate development company. […]

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