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Month: September 2013

Racial or Religious Humor as Means of Negotiation

by Michael Altman

By Zach Price Zach Price is a Religious Studies major; a Black Belt in Isshin Ryu; a student of Shen Lung Kung Fu; and a guitar, banjo, and tin whistle enthusiast. This post originally appeared on the blog Monks and Nones, the class blog for REL 371. So if you missed the “joke” that Rick Warren posted on Facebook and the proceeding backlash then you can catch up on all of it here. Basically Rick Warren, a famous mega-church pastor, […]

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Curios and Classrooms

by admin

By Kim Davis Kim Davis earned her B.A. in French and Religious Studies from the University of Alabama in 2003. She went on to get her Masters in French Linguistics and Literature in 2007 and a Masters in Secondary Language Pedagogy in 2010, both from UA. Kim now teaches French and Mythology at Tuscaloosa County High School. I’m a collector. The picture above is of Kenner Star Wars action figures that I have kept until I had a house to […]

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Who Gets to Think?

by Steven Ramey

Think New Thoughts! A recent tagline promoting the Department of Religious Studies is not simply highlighting our desire to challenge student preconceptions but emphasizing our department’s effort to develop important intellectual skills. While public discourse often emphasizes education as the means to gain economically and overcome poverty, some evidence suggests that economic privilege breeds economic success and that education for the children of the 1% may differ from education for children of the lower rungs of society. […]

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Mind the Gap

by Andie Alexander

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She currently works as a staff member in the Department as a Student Liaison and filmmaker. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. While scrolling through Facebook the other day, I came across this video that discussed the benefit of performing Shakespeare’s plays in their “Original Pronunciation,” or “OP.” Take a look… […]

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Race and Displacement

by admin

Race and Displacement, co-edited by our own Prof. Simmons and Prof. Marouan (formerly of REL and now of Gender & Race Studies), has just been published. It is based on a conference held at UA several years ago. As the University of Alabama Press’s site describes it: “it captures a timely set of discussions about the roles of race in displacement, forced migrations, nation and nationhood, and the way continuous movements of people challenge fixed racial definitions. The multifaceted approach […]

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“The Stories of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated…”

by Russell McCutcheon

Seen this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education? Give it a read and ask yourself why — if this is what the public actually thinks — we all seem to assume that there’s a crisis in the liberal arts? That is, if the skills taught all across the liberal arts are so essential (read the results [PDF] of the study for yourself) then why do we all seem to agree so easily that they are so non-essential — i.e., […]

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What’s of Value to You?

by Russell McCutcheon

Did you see this article in the New York Times‘ “Common Sense” column? A lot of people now seem to be measuring the worth of their investment in higher education in terms of the possibility of future earnings — their “return on investment.” But what would happen if the return that concerned you was something else that’s empirically measurable and that’s likely pretty relevant to people too, something like, say, life expectancy? After all, earning potential is a speculative generalization […]

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