Month: March 2015


Have a Good Spring Break

We don’t know what you’re planning to do during Spring break this week — perhaps you’re working, catching up on homework, or maybe you’ve escaped to a beach somewhere. Whichever it is, we hope you have a good week and that you’re back safely in class next week. As for us, well, we plan on doing some reading and writing and sure, probably watch some Netflix too. […]

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Profiting from a Bankruptcy

Are you looking for a way to think through what it takes for a local idea to spread worldwide and be adopted globally — an idea such as the now taken-for-granted assumption that the world has such things in it as religions, which exist in a variety of (as Wilfred Cantwell Smith once phrased it) major or minor forms that, mostly, end in the suffix -ism? Well, look no further than the marketing campaign for W. W. Norton’s new anthology […]

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What We Claim to Be

Mark Ortiz is a senior double-majoring in Religious Studies and New College with a depth study in Political Ecology. He is especially interested in climate politics and that bundle of things and stuff we call “nature.” Continuing a project I recently blogged about, I decided to make use of the American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) online “Syllabus Project”: a database of syllabi submitted voluntarily by professors and teachers in the field. I was looking for “Introduction to Religious Studies” course […]

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All Systems Normal

Yesterday we had our second annual undergraduate research symposium, which featured the work of four current students — many of whom are double majors — and a grad of our Department. We instituted this event last year and held it at the university club at the same time as our senior seminar took place, inviting those students as the audience. But this year we decided to try holding it in a much larger venue and to advertise it among all […]

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Of Prepositions and Conjunctions

The following is slightly adapted from the REL webpage’s description of the Department motto. Although it may seem to some to be a rather minor thing, and therefore something easily overlooked, our department’s motto — Studying Religion in Culture — italicizes the preposition “in” (not something we’re able to note here in the WordPress blog title, though). We’ve written it this way for close to 15 years, to draw attention to the fact that the conjunction in the more common […]

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