Family Reflections in A River Runs Through It

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Jared Stewart is a Religious Studies Major and Creative Writing Minor. The following blog post was written for REL 360: Popular Culture/Humanities.

A River Runs Through It was screened in REL 360, a one credit hour course that one may take up to three semesters. The 1992 film about a family living in early twentieth century Montana portrays the lives of two brothers, Norman and Paul Maclean. Norman, the more educated, older brother, moves from his hometown, while Paul, the younger brother,  just can’t seem to ever leave. The one thing that the two brothers do seem to share a bond over is fly-fishing. This is mainly due to the fact that Norman understands how important fly-fishing is to his younger brother Paul. Continue reading →

Summer Plans: Prof. Ramey

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

Prof. Steven Ramey has a busy summer ahead tackling a few pieces of a larger overall project considering how we describe and narrate. One project involves experimenting with alternative approaches to ethnographic description using his own fieldwork, and the other is looking at historical narratives and the ways that critical theory should influence our narrative choices. These projects require reviewing a variety of sources, including contested accounts of Indian history, and working through some contrasting approaches. In addition to these projects, he will be preparing, as always, for teaching both undergraduate and M.A. courses in the fall semester.

Summer Plans: Prof. Altman

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

Prof. Altman will be spending the summer doing a lot of reading in primary and secondary sources for two projects. Indeed he has stacks of books piled high in his office. First, he is working on a journal article tentatively titled “Evangelical, Evangelicals, Evangelicalism” that re-describes what so many American religious historians have categorized as “evangelicalism” in America. Second, he is in the very early stages of a large research project that seeks to understand religion in America by putting it into the broader context of European political philosophy after the Reformation. He is wondering if both of these projects might end up being the same project in the end. Prof. Altman is also teaching REL 100 during the summer term and revising his REL 502: Religious Studies and Public Humanities Foundations course and REL 241: American Religious History courses for the coming fall.

Summer Plans: Prof. Simmons

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

Prof. Simmons was recently selected by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences for a funded residency at the National Humanities Center during the month of June. The center provides office space and library support to assist scholars in their research and writing. While there, she will spend her time working on two book projects. The first is Race and New Modernism (co-authored with James A. Crank), the manuscript of which will be submitted to Bloomsbury Academic in August. The volume will be included in the press’s New Modernisms series. She will also be continuing work on her second monograph, tentatively entitled Sourcing Slave Religion: Theorizing Experience in the American South. This summer will also see some revisions to the Graduate Handbook as Prof. Simmons prepares to greet the incoming and returning MA students in her role as Graduate Director.

An Experimental Case Study

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There’s a timely project — happening now, right before our eyes — that someone in the study of religion could (should?) tackle, concerning the strategic use of origins tales in the present — not just that, but the self-beneficial way in which groups choose to use and sanction them (or simply ignore them). Continue reading →

Summer Plans: Prof. Newton

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

This summer Prof. Newton — who will be joining us here ay UA in the Fall — will be wrapping up the last of his teaching commitments at Elizabethtown College. In addition, he’ll be working on the final edits for his first book, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox 2019) as well as working on an essay for NAASR on religion, race, and ethnicity. He’ll also be getting his ducks in a row to to launch some new research (i.e., his second book, based around talks he’s given to the department) and teaching projects (i.e. his Islam class in the Fall) once he gets to Tuscaloosa.

Summer Plans: Prof. Loewen

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

The first item on Prof. Loewen’s summer 2018 agenda is to present at the 2018 Derrida Today conference at Concordia University in Montreal (May 23-26). The presentation, “Historicizing the Orthodox, Anglophone Philosophy of Religion,” is based on his recently-published book. There are two projects on the docket for June: one week will be dedicated to revising a journal article about teaching, “The Data Is in the Details: Designing a Critical Online Introduction to Studying Religion” (which is based on what he learned while designing the online course REL 104 “Religion in Pop Culture”) and the remainder of June and all of July will focus on writing a book chapter about “evil” for the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion seminar. The summer will likely be capped off with a week-long intensive course on “digital literacies” at Mary Washington University for the 2018 Digital Pedagogy Lab, and the completion of a an “instructional supplement” page and links on College of Arts and Sciences’ Teaching Hub. In, around and between all of this will be a family vacation to Quebec with a curious four year-old, completing some home renovation projects and building up a new ride!

Summer Plans: Prof. Trost

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We asked the faculty what they were up to this summer; after all, just because the Spring semester is done doesn’t mean they’re all off gardening. And so this is what we learned…

This summer, Prof. Trost will be traveling to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to ponder a possible project on pilgrimage and to meet with a person who is writing a chapter for the volume that he is editing. Then he will be in Thessaloniki, Greece, with Catherine Roach, who will be teaching a course as part of a Fulbright Scholars exchange.  He plans to meet with academics who teach New Testament at Aristotle University with an eye toward future collaboration. Following this trip, he will be in London to meet with one of the co-editors of his book, Love Across the Atlantic.