Summer is here, and it’s time for a little rest, relaxation, and #RELResearch. And while we won’t be posting too much new content here on the blog, be on the look out each Tuesday and Thursday for some blasts from the past. We’ll be featuring some of your favorite throwback posts on social media, so be sure to follow us on Facebook (@RELatUA), Twitter (@StudyReligion), and Instagram (@StudyReligion).
I got an email the other day from a student elsewhere in the US who was working on a paper on religion and film. I’m not sure how the paper will turn out, but when we later connected by phone I tried to prompt the student to think about this common genre — religion and film — not in terms of the data but in terms of something else. Continue reading
I remarked over on Twitter the other day that there’s a curious correspondence between two shows that are now streaming online. For both “Happy” and “American Gods” are about non-obvious beings who exist solely because people believe in them — cease believing in them, whether a child’s imaginary friend or a god, and they are no more.
While the former is about a fallen police detective who discovers he not only has a daughter who has been kidnapped but that she has an imaginary friend — a flying blue unicorn — who has come to find him to help her out, the latter is about a man named Shadow Moon, newly released from prison, who is drawn into the middle of an impending battle between the old gods (e.g., Mr. Wednesday, Mr. Ibis, and Bilquis, etc.) and the new gods (e.g., Mr. World, Technical Boy, and Media, etc.). And in both cases the existence of the immortals hinges on the beliefs of the mortals. After all, when the child grows up, Happy fades away… Continue reading
Ellie Cochran is a senior at UA, majoring in Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies with a depth study in Environmental Management. She will be graduating this May and plans to pursue a Master of Science in Family Financial Planning & Counseling. She’s been blogging her reflections on her time in the Department of Religious Studies. You can read parts 1, 2, and 3 in this series here.
Mere days before I am to graduate from the University of Alabama, I find myself considering the changes that have occurred since I first began school here in August of 2015. There are, of course, the obvious changes, such as no longer living in a dorm or the fact that I will soon have a double-major bachelor’s degree listed on my resume instead of none. But much like with any phase of one’s life, college being no different, there are subtle changes that take place over time and which typically go undetected until further scrutinized.
We’re very pleased to announce that, at the year-end A&S chairs event over the weekend, Dean Robert Olin presented the annual Jim Salem Chair Award to REL’s own Prof. Russell McCutcheon.
Instituted by the Dean after the death, in July of 2012, of the longtime American Studies Department Chair, Jim Salem, the award recognizes “outstanding leadership to students, faculty, and the College.” Salem, who chaired the search committee that brought Dean Olin to UA, was known for his enthusiasm, dry wit, and use of American pop culture as a way into understanding 20th century American culture and politics.
Prof. McCutcheon came to Tuscaloosa in the Fall of 2001, to chair REL at a time when the Department was on the brink of reinvention; while serving three terms as chair (2001-2009; 20013-present) he has also had a productive research and teaching career at UA, being named to one of the campus’s few University Research Professor positions in February of 2018.
Given annually, the Jim Salem award is selected by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and, with Dean Olin’s upcoming retirement in September, this marks his last selection for this award.
Congratulations, Prof. McCutcheon!
In the Department of Religious Studies, we train students in the nuance of comparison and sophisticated understandings of classification. What better test could we offer at the end of the semester than the 11th Annual Manly Cup Competitive UNO Tournament.
Ellie Cochran is a senior at UA, majoring in Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies with a depth study in Environmental Management. She will be graduating this May and plans to pursue a Master of Science in Family Financial Planning & Counseling.
As I sat in Professor Crews’ class on a Tuesday in early February, I found myself wondering about each of the students who chose to add her REL 105 course to their schedule when they registered for classes a few months back. Many of them, in fact, most of them were looking for a Core course that was both interesting and would fulfill some portion of their vast degree requirements. I too was in that position just three years ago and, without ever considering that I would obtain an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, I signed up for the introductory course.
At the time that I registered for my intro course, I was considering a change in degrees, but I had not officially decided on anything. Throughout my freshman year of college, my major was Business, largely because that is what I had hesitantly declared while attending Bama Bound the June before I came to UA. During the fall and spring semesters of my first year, I took a couple of general business courses which were required of any major within the College of Business. In addition to taking the business requirements, I, like most students in their first two years of undergrad, focused on also taking a variety of courses that would fulfill the general Core requirements for the University as a whole. These included History, Literature, Art, Humanities, Natural Science, and social/behavioral science classes. When I decided to forgo my general business degree just two weeks before I began my sophomore year, I suddenly needed to modify my entire fall schedule. As a result, I loaded up on a mix of lower-level core courses, taking an online Anthropology class, large-enrollment History and Literature classes, one Natural Science, and you guessed it, a Religious Studies course. Continue reading
Dr. Steven L. Jacobs is Professor and Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at The University of Alabama. His primary research foci are in Biblical Studies, translation and interpretation, including the Dead Sea Scrolls; as well as Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
In the December 14, 2018 issue of The Chronicle Review, Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago penned a piece entitled “Go Ahead, Cite the Nazi” (B2).* His unnecessarily provocative argument as summarized by his disingenuous solution— “cite work that is relevant regardlessof the author’s [sic] misdeeds—was made even more disturbing by his conclusion, “you should not—under any circumstances—adjust your citation practices to punish scholars for [sic] bad behavior” (emphases added). Even more problematic was his total failure to address any notion of historical contextualization regarding the work of the philosophers he cites, Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)—the former an avowed antisemite and the latter an unrepentant Nazi, both of whom he rather cavalierly dismisses, choosing only to celebrate their “contributions” to philosophy. In my own field of religious studies, a “softer” but nonetheless equally problematic case would be that of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a formerly avowed Christian nationalist and supporter of the Romanian Iron Guard during World War II.
Tanner (far left) and Kyle (far right) with Nick and Joe of Knuckle Puck. Taken July 1, 2018.
Kyle Ashley is a junior from Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Majoring in Religious Studies, his main interests include loitering in libraries, copious amounts of coffee, and
keeping it emo in 2019.
“Knuckle Puck is awesome, but they can be a little screamo,” my stepbrother Tanner states, responding to my recommendation for which band he should play next.
“Ya… I guess.” I respond. We were fresh off attending the “Last cross-country Warped Tour” (Vans Warped Tour, for those who may not know, is a punk-centric music festival) and had a wealth of bands we wanted to push on others. Knuckle Puck, a band out of Chicago, was amongst our favorites.
Prof. William Doty (1939-2017) was a professor in the Department of Religious Studies, at the University of Alabama, from 1981 until his retirement in 2001, though he continued teaching courses on campus for many years after that — often, though not always, on the study of myth — for either the Honors College or A&S’s Blount Scholars Program. Yesterday afternoon, a small group of current M.A. students were invited to William’s now mostly empty house, here in Tuscaloosa, where an estate sale had recently taken place, but where a large number of books still remained. “Who knew that the academic books wouldn’t go?” said Doty’s longtime friend and neighbor, Charles Day, with a wink, when he let them into the house to browse the shelves.
It’s fitting that a fairly large number of his books and his detailed notes, written on thick stacks of paper folded into each book, their pages bulging with paperclips and Post-it notes — on everything from postmodernism and New Testament studies to books on myth, material religion, film, literary studies, philosophy, and semiotics — will now populate the shelves of students in the Department; even the faculty will each get a chance to claim a few that, for the time being, reside in boxes in the Chair’s office, as a memento of one of Manly Hall’s former residents.