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The Critical Study of Religion at the University of Alabama

Have you ever been to one of our Aronov Lectures? Well, Dr. Steven Ramey, Associate Professor in REL and Director of UA’s Asian Studies program, has just a published an edited collection of the first decades’ worth of these annual guest lectures (established in 2002), entitled Writing Religion (University of Alabama Press). We recently asked him a few questions about the volume.  […]

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Young Southern Historians

Warner Thompson is a senior at the University of Alabama, who wrote the following for REL 490. He is a History major and a Religious Studies minor with future plans of Law School at the University. He was born and raised in Homewood, Alabama, and he is the oldest of three children. When I was young, playing with sets of toy soldiers was a favorite pastime of mine. I had entire tiny armies, from different time periods and different wars, […]

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Mulholland Drive: Extremely Enigmatic or Surprisingly Simple?

Vincent M. Hills is a senior at the University of Alabama majoring in History and minoring in Religious Studies. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Mulholland Drive begins with a woman named Rita who’s suffering from amnesia after a violent car crash. She roams the streets of Los Angeles in a daze before retreating to an apartment where she is discovered by a woman named Betty, a blonde who has come to […]

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Classification or Confusion?

Catie Stewart is a junior at the University of Alabama from Madison, Mississippi. She is double majoring in English and Religious Studies and minoring in Psychology. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Recently I found myself sitting in a dark room staring at a projector trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was our fourth and final REL 360 meeting, and there were only thirty minutes left in the movie that […]

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What to Do When David Lynch Starts Making Sense (Don’t Panic!)

Now a sophomore at UA, Maggie Patterson was raised in the graveyards and Southern Baptist churches of Nashville, Tennessee. Although she may mumble her way through the second half of the Lord’s Prayer, Maggie remains captivated by spirituality in the South and is majoring in Religious Studies. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. When I sat down for Mulholland Drive, I was anticipating a good dose of Lynch-induced bewilderment. And I was not disappointed. […]

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Putting the “Religion” in “American Religion”

Craig Prentiss is a professor of religious studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014).   On Thursday, June 4, I took a flight from Kansas City, Missouri to Indianapolis to attend the Fourth Biennial Conference on Religion American Culture hosted by the the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IUPUI. Though it was the […]

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What Do You Call a Group of Squirrels Anyway?

You might think that Manly Hall gets pretty quiet during the summer now that the majority of our students are on vacation. Well, think again! We’ve got quite the rowdy peanut gallery that hangs around the second floor balcony, and we set out the GoPro to film them in action. So if you’ve ever wanted to see a 20 minute video of squirrels eating peanuts, then have we got a show for you! That’s 20 minutes well spent if you ask […]

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Not That Different

Liz Long is a junior from Colorado who is double-majoring in Psychology and Religious Studies. She is interested in the effects of religion and culture on behavior. This post was originally written for Dr. Rollens’ course, REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Persepolis, a film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, looks at a number of oft-discussed issues in the study of Islam. Though the story takes place post-Iranian revolution, many of the problems Marjane faces are […]

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The 13th Annual Aronov Lecture

Back in April, Dr. Shaul Magid, the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, delivered his “After Multiculturalism: Postethnicity and the Future of Judaism in America” as the Department of Religious Studies’ 13th Annual Aronov Lecture. The lecture series is named after the late Aaron Aronov — the founder of Aronov Realty and the person for whom the Department’s endowed chair in Judaic Studies is also named.  Did you miss the […]

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