Month: April 2015


Out in the Open: Everybody’s Nobody

Sarah Griswold is a junior double majoring in Mathematics and Religious Studies. She spends her “free time” analyzing her favorite shows on Netflix, which of course winds up ruining them. She is currently enrolled in an independent study with Dr. Simmons where she is analyzing the popular HBO series “True Detective.” “[People] are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are somebody. When in […]

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Of Good Things and Small Packages

On the weekend I saw the news stories about Columbia University’s bizarre — yes, I’ll just go ahead an label it as such — attempt to ban food services workers from, among other things, speaking Spanish while on the job. The rich irony, at least as posed by one blogger (a Brooklyn College poli sci prof) and then repeated in other online stories, was that while seeking to contain or marginalize lower class workers who might speak Spanish as their […]

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One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

Khara Cole graduated from The University of Alabama in 2013 with a double major in Religious Studies and Public Relations. She currently lives in Chattanooga, TN working as an Associate Product Manager in Marketing/New Product Strategy for BlueCross BlueShield of TN. If you’ve been on social media at all recently, you might have come across the image pictured above originally posted by a far right conservative group that’s been shared countless times across Facebook and other social media sites. When I […]

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Borderlands and Disenchantment: A Case Study of Assumptions

Jamie Bowman is a senior English major at the University of Alabama. She has two minors, Creative Writing and Religious Studies. She is the current President of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society and Editor of Dewpoint, the society’s literary magazine. Beginning in the fall, she will be attending Durham University, England, to work on a Master’s of English in Literary Studies. Attending academic conferences is fun. You get to present papers, explore new places, eat great local food, […]

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#LoungeTweets with Dr. McCutcheon on Wednesday

Our next #LoungeTweets event is coming up, and this time Dr. Russell McCutcheon has answered the call of duty! He’ll be hanging out in the REL lounge on Wednesday, April 22nd from 2:30-3:30 to respond to your questions, give us a play-by-play of lounge activities, and more. Follow him at @McCutcheonSays. Follow @McCutcheonSays // Keep up with the live tweets by searching #LoungeTweets. Tweet #LoungeTweets // […]

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What’s the Point?

As discussions about the relevance of what we do in religious studies, and academia in general, have become more common lately, my own emphases have coalesced around the skills that the humanities help scholars (whether students or faculty or interested blog readers) develop. And that emphasis on skills is not limited to our work in the classroom. […]

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