publications – Studying Religion in Culture

Kayfabe, or, Why a Scholar of Religion Might Be Interested in Pro Wrestling

April 28, 2022 by Michael Altman

As a scholar of religion, I’m interested in the term “belief.” I find it to be a very curious term. For example, why would 75,000 people fill a football stadium for two nights of Wrestlemania earlier this year to watch professional wrestling matches that they didn’t believe were “real”? Because pro wrestling is “fake,” right? No one believes it’s a real sport or a real competition, right? But yet enough people in the spend their time and money on these […]

What’s a Sabbatical?

August 20, 2020 by Michael Altman

I have the good fortune to have been granted a sabbatical this semester. But what does that mean? What should I do? I looked up the word “sabbatical” in the Oxford English Dictionary and found a number of definitions. […]

American Examples: THE BOOK

August 20, 2020 by Michael Altman

American Examples, the program for early-career scholars of religion in America funded by the Luce Foundation, is proud to announce a new publication relationship with the University of Alabama Press. UAP will be publishing an anthology of research essays from each of the American Examples cohorts beginning with the first AE cohort that met in spring of 2019. The first anthology, titled American Examples: A New Conversation About Religion, will be published in the summer of 2021. We are very […]

Making Sense of a Sabbatical

December 6, 2016 by Merinda Simmons

In my Introduction to Religious Studies course, my students think a lot about “making the strange familiar and familiar strange.” With those lessons in mind, I thought I’d make a bit more familiar for students who won’t see me as much in the Spring a practice that happens within the academy—the sabbatical. After being awarded tenure (typically in year 5 or 6), professors can apply for a sabbatical by outlining a specific research project that would benefit from some time […]

#RELResearch: Professors Simmons, Loewen, and Altman Publish Together

August 29, 2016 by admin

If you pick up the most recent issue of the venerable journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion you will find three essays from REL faculty discussing the recently published Norton Anthology of World Religion. Rather than a simple review of the multivolume work, the essays from Merinda Simmons, Nathan Loewen, and Mike Altman consider what the publication of the anthology means for the larger field of religious studies. Each essay puts the anthology into a larger context of how […]

What’s the Point?

April 15, 2015 by Steven Ramey

As discussions about the relevance of what we do in religious studies, and academia in general, have become more common lately, my own emphases have coalesced around the skills that the humanities help scholars (whether students or faculty or interested blog readers) develop. And that emphasis on skills is not limited to our work in the classroom. […]

Second Sabbatical: First Thoughts

January 7, 2015 by Steven Jacobs

For those other than academic colleagues—primarily our students and our non-academic supporters—a sabbatical is a special benefit every seven years, upon application and approval, awarded to those of us who teach, for “time off” to purse sustained research and sustained writing without the additional responsibilities of teaching, grading, committee meetings and the like. In my case, spring, 2015, is my second opportunity to take full advantage of this award to pursue two special projects, the first on my mind for […]