Month: September 2014


Did You Miss Last Night’s “A Grad’s Tale” with Samantha Bush? Here’s All the Wisdom in One Blog Post

Last night we had the pleasure of hearing from Samantha Bush, an REL grad, about her life after the Capstone and how her REL degree has helped her get her career started. If you missed it last night, here are the highlights thanks to our intrepid team of live tweeters. […]

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The Dialectics of Identification

Yes, our Department is housed on the second floor of Manly Hall. It’s named after the second president of the University of Alabama, Basil Manly Sr (who held the office between 1837 and 1855). In fact, the president’s office was once in this building, on the ground floor (before the Greek Revival-styled President’s Mansion was built in 1841 and then first occupied by Manly himself), as well as dorms for students. And the other day the building got a new […]

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“I Smell the Vapors of Hell on You…”

There’s a new joint British-US TV series airing over here, “Outlander,” in which a WWII English nurse finds herself mysteriously taken backward in time, from the mid-1940s to the fiercely independent Scottish highlands two hundred years earlier. (That the independence vote takes place today in Scotland makes this series airing now kind of curious.) From the point of view of the academic study of religion, the relationship between the science of the lead character and, at least in episode three, […]

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A Grad’s Tale Tonight: Ask Questions & Follow the Conversation with #GradTales

We are happy to welcome another Religious Studies graduate back to talk about life after college. Samantha Bush will be joining us to reflect on her time in REL and the skills she learned in our department that have translated to her career after graduation. Follow @StudyReligion // Also, follow the conversation tonight and tweet us your questions for Samantha throughout the day today and tonight at @StudyReligion using #GradTales. See you tonight at 6:30 in the Anderson Room (205) […]

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Making the Familiar Strange

A theme I’ve written on a time or two before is the inability (or unwillingness) of many scholars to entertain that, being themselves members of a particular social group, they tend to draw upon folk concepts popular among their own group and then project them outward (in space and time), as if they are universals that name and describe stable self-evidencies in the world at large. While we probably have no choice but to know the new by means of […]

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