The Messy Ephemera of Day-to-Day Life

By Melanie Williams Melanie printed her diploma on sheepskin using an HP OfficeJet 6500, the beast of home printers. The diploma states that she graduated in 2006, with a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies. Since then she has been a cook, server, deckhand, goat milker, office assistant, and general itinerant laborer. Tomorrow she will mend the fence (it makes the neighbors better.) I don’t know what it’s like to be a college freshman today but I still like to […]

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Curios and Classrooms

By Kim Davis Kim Davis earned her B.A. in French and Religious Studies from the University of Alabama in 2003. She went on to get her Masters in French Linguistics and Literature in 2007 and a Masters in Secondary Language Pedagogy in 2010, both from UA. Kim now teaches French and Mythology at Tuscaloosa County High School. I’m a collector. The picture above is of Kenner Star Wars action figures that I have kept until I had a house to […]

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Race and Displacement

Race and Displacement, co-edited by our own Prof. Simmons and Prof. Marouan (formerly of REL and now of Gender & Race Studies), has just been published. It is based on a conference held at UA several years ago. As the University of Alabama Press’s site describes it: “it captures a timely set of discussions about the roles of race in displacement, forced migrations, nation and nationhood, and the way continuous movements of people challenge fixed racial definitions. The multifaceted approach […]

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Who Needs the Business School!

 Ben Simmons, an REL major, graduated in 2009. Since then, he has started his own online business. This originally appeared as an article in the Department’s 2011-12 Newsletter. View the Newsletter here (PDF). I came to the University of Alabama in the fall of 2007 with an eye toward a degree in History because I enjoyed it, without considering how useful that degree would be out in the “real world.”  So, I signed up for other classes that I thought would be “easy […]

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Biblical Literates

The following post by Russell McCutcheon, reflecting on the role of scholars in Religious Studies, is reposted from the Culture on the Edge blog. That was the headline of a Huffington Post article yesterday, referring to an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register, co-authored by three Iowa scholars of religion, all with specialties in biblical studies. The newspaper article they wrote opened by stating: […]

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“The Art of Living Well”: Comments on Gregg Lambert’s Lecture

[This post was written by Prof. George McClure of the Department of History, University of Alabama.] Kudos to the Religious Studies Department for launching this timely and important lecture series! Some thoughts on the first lecture follow. To my mind, Lambert’s talk demonstrated or exemplified the crisis in the Humanities, rather than analyzing it. He spoke of human capital, rather than human meaning; economic value, rather than moral values; commodification of self, rather than communion with ideas . Although promising […]

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