We’re ready for the Fall semester — are you? If you’re not, then here’s last year’s welcome back video, to get you in the mood for the world premiere of the REL’s new welcome back video — tune in this Friday at 6:00 am (eastern time)…, or whenever you wake up. Welcome Back 2013! from UA Religious Studies. […]
Month: August 2014
The Rising Tide of Theory
Iliff School of Theology is looking for a new colleague in what they term Religion and Social Justice (find the ad here). Two words in that ad stood out for me: […]
Apparently, It’s Everywhere
The curious thing about the discourse on religion is that the category purports to be a completely totalized notion, all-inclusive of everything, inasmuch as it is often used as if it names some deeply human yearning or sentiment/experience, making it synonymous with “the human condition” or maybe even “culture” itself. Thus, the category has to be applicable to everything it is that we do or produce — after all, if baseball can be religion, then what can’t? […]
The Countdown is On …
The countdown to REL’s new welcome back video — starring our newest Assistant Professor, in some of his most challenging dramatic work to date — is now on. The world premiere is set for this Friday at 6:00 a.m. (eastern time). In the meantime, we provide, free of charge, this retrospective…, starting with 2012’s old school entry. Welcome Back! from UA Religious Studies. […]
Caution: Technical Terminology Ahead
I see posts like this on social media all the time (click it if you’re dying to find out what those 22 words are); what I think drives them is a general failure on the part of many to understand language as a tool used by groups to achieve a variety of social ends and not a universal medium in which we all just naturally swim. For only if we assume the latter would we be shocked to find out […]
The Annual Return of the Faculty
Smartly dressed people in tweed jackets and elbow patches have been spotted on the balcony of Manly Hall, swapping stories of books read and written over the summer, madly typing in their offices, and making photocopies at an alarming rate — all of which can mean only one thing… […]
Owed to Murphy
John Parrish graduated from the Department of Religious Studies in 2004. He went on to pursue graduate study in Christian Origins at the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, and Brown University, while maintaining his interests in 19th & 20th C religious thought. In the following, John reflects on the role played in his own undergraduate education by the late Dr. Tim Murphy, pictured above as he looked when he arrived in the Department in the Fall of 2002. […]
On Not Knowing Where to Look
Those who sustain this idealized image of culture do so … by mistaking the dominant fraction … of a given group for the group or “culture” itself. At the same time, they mistake the ideological positions favored and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of the group as a whole…. Scholarly misrecognitions of this sort replicate the misrecognitions and misrepresentations of those the scholars privilege as their informants. (Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study […]
Identifying Funny
Those interested in studying identity as a historical, and thus changeable, creation, should watch the recent documentary “When Jews Were Funny,” paying particular attention to the relationship between the off-camera interviewer and filmmaker, Alan Zweig, and his interviewees — especially the older comedians, such as Shelly Berman, pictured above (b. 1925; known more recently to some as Larry David’s father on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), whose appearances frame the film. […]