Tag: governance


A Feature of the System of Governance

A folk healer like Agnis trod a fine line between being someone people called upon when they needed help and someone they blamed when misfortune struck (21:30) So says Lucy Worsley, the joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces in the UK and also the host of a variety of recent TV shows on British history. The above quotation is twenty minutes into a recent episode on the late sixteenth century Scottish witch trials, specifically focusing on that of Agnis […]

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What is the Country’s Reality?

Allison Isidore is a second-year M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies. Have you seen the new HBO show “Lovecraft Country”? In the series premiere, set in 1950s America, we follow Atticus Freeman (played by Jonathan Majors), Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), and George Freeman (Courtney B. Vance) as they travel to “Ardham,” Massachusetts, in hopes of finding Atticus’s father, Montrose Freeman (Michael K. Williams). He went missing while searching for the family’s history. The trio drives through town […]

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The Implications of Designations

A lot of people in our field now advocate approaches that find religion either in unexpected or overlooked places. What once might have been called the implicit religion movement, at least as once associated with the work of the late Ed Bailey, has now been joined by the more-or-less related lived religion, material religion, religion on the ground, as well as the embodied religion approaches, all of which aim to identify religion in places where scholars, who have long been […]

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We Are the Beneficiaries

As I sit here making the Spring 2017 class schedule for our department I recall the many times that I’ve heard academics lament being involved in administration. (That they equally complain about no longer being much involved in the governance of their institutions is an irony too rich to overlook.) “My condolences” is the witty reply many offer when learning that a colleague has fallen on the dagger (yes, that’s how it is portrayed) of becoming a department chair, coupled […]

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Got, Got, Got, Got No Time…

Yesterday, I participated in a faculty panel as part of my university’s recruiting day, for high school students, and their parents, interested in attending our school–a panel in which a few of us answered questions about what we wish we knew then that we know now, what our favorite courses were to teach, etc. Message sent? Faculty are approachable. Not a bad one to transmit. […]

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Is Bigger More Efficient?

In discussions about efficiency, different conceptions of the nature of education become significant. If education is about transferring pieces of knowledge from a learned person to a student, then the difference between a 400 student lecture course, a 30 person classrooms, a 15 student seminar, or an unlimited enrollment in an online course may be limited (although more personal interaction, in my experience, can enhance the acquisition of knowledge). However, if education is about more than becoming a walking encyclopedia, […]

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The Benefits of Inefficiency

The murky imbroglio that engulfed the University of Virginia contributed to significant reflection on the relevance of academic institutions and various approaches for the future, including cuts, a corporate model of governance, and the financial benefits of online content delivery. Despite the current resolution with the reinstatement of President Sullivan, these particular issues are part of the conversation about the relevance of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Despite emphasizing examples of scientific discoveries and innovations that developed at research universities, […]

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