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The Third Annual Day Lecture: Buddhist Lust and Consumerism

On September 24, 2015, Dr. Jolyon Thomas gave the third annual Day Lecture with his talk “The Buddhist Virtues of Raging Lust and Crass Materialism.” The Day Lecture was generously established by friends and family of the late Zach Day, a graduate of our Department, to honor his memory, and is now an annual event thanks to the memorial fund named in his honor. If you missed out on the lecture, the video of the event is now here! The […]

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A Good Book with Prof. Jacobs

The latest episode in our A Good Book series has just been uploaded to Vimeo! This video features Prof. Steve Jacobs and his discussion of a particular Torah scroll that was recovered from Nazi collections and has now been brought to Tuscaloosa’s Temple Emanu-El. You can read more about the story in this Tuscaloosa News article. A Good Book with Prof. Jacobs from UA Religious Studies. […]

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Justifying Actions

By Ashley Crawford Ashley Crawford is from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is a junior majoring in Marketing with a minor in Psychology. Have you ever played the game telephone when you were younger? Someone starts out whispering a sentence in someone’s ear and they whisper it in someone else’s until it gets to the last person and by then it is completely different from the original sentence. This game was fun because it was always interesting to hear how different everyone […]

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REL 360 Showing Kumare: The True Story of a False Prophet

In this fourth and final installment of REL 360‘s semester-long movie screenings, we’ll be following American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi as he enacts a social experiment in the hopes of revealing the irrationality of blind faith. Impersonating an Indian guru, he travels through Arizona gathering followers from all walks of life. Though designed to exhibit the absurdity of blind faith, his experiment may reveal greater spiritual truths than he had set out to unearth. In order to learn what he discovers about human nature, you’ll […]

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An Interview with Dr. Jolyon Thomas Part 2

The conclusion to our interview with Dr. Jolyon Thomas, our third Day Lecturer, is now ready! Don’t miss this final installment, where he discusses his current projects and gives insight on where he feels the field of religious studies in pop. culture is going. A Few Moments with Jolyon Thomas Part 2 from UA Religious Studies. If you missed the first part of the interview, you can catch it here. Stay tuned for Dr. Thomas’ Day Lecture, coming soon! […]

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An Interview with Dr. Jolyon Thomas Part 1

Last month the REL film crew met up for a quick chat with Dr. Jolyon Thomas, the third speaker in our annual Day Lecture. The video from this interview is now up and ready to go, so be sure to check it out and learn more about Dr. Thomas’s background, his career, and how his interest in Japanese pop culture began! A Few Moments with Jolyon Thomas from UA Religious Studies. Ready for Part 2? You can find it here. Stay tuned for […]

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Grad Tales are Back Again!

The REL Department is heading into November with the startup of A Grad’s Tale: There and Back Again! This series welcomes back UA graduates who have majored in Religious Studies to learn how the major has benefited them in post-graduate life. This year’s first installment begins this Thursday with Khara Cole, so be sure to join us in Smith Hall Room 205 at 6:30 pm! Khara earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and Public Relations in 2013 at the University of Alabama. Since graduating, Khara […]

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Why Good Looks Matter

Veikko Anttonen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the University of Turku, Finland. He was elected Vice-President of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) for the period 2015-2020 at the conference in Erfurt last August. He was the Professor and Chair of Comparative Religion at the University of Turku between 1997-2015. The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, stated in an interview that a successor to his post can be a woman if she is good looking, […]

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3 Things You Should Do During #RELWeek

The College of Arts and Sciences is all about REL this week. That’s right, it’s #RELWeek. What does that mean? It means that A&S will be featuring REL on its social media accounts all week as part of its All About A&S campaign. So, here are three things you can do to celebrate #RELWeek 1. Follow us on Instagram. Just think about it. #RELWeek #AllAboutAS A photo posted by UA Dept. of Religious Studies (@studyreligion) on Oct 6, 2015 at 7:20am […]

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