REL faculty and students will again be attending UA’s annual Majors Fair — this year on Valentines Day. If you’ve got questions about the study of religion or Judaic Studies, drop by — and if you’re a current student we’d love to see you stay for a while and help answer some questions. Where and when is it, you ask…? […]
In a post the other day I discussed some of the problems with the recent Pew study on the apparent correlation between religiosity (understood as church attendance) and happiness. Read that post here. Well, as a brief follow-up, consider this Feb 8 post by one of the researcher’s involved in this work. Here we find, in the opening graphic (reproduced above), a voice that makes plain that the research subjects reported feeling happy; yet this voice changes considerably in the […]
Have you been following the story of the La Lomita Chapel, in Mission, Texas? It was built in 1865 and today is at the center of a fight over land — more specifically, the Federal government trying to acquire this private land for the purposes of the border wall that some want built there. The local Roman Catholic diocese doesn’t agree. […]
Yes, it’s already time to start thinking about Honors Day 2019 — we’ve come a long way since our first ceremony, back in 2002 (above). Sure, it’s still on the balcony but the food’s a lot better now. And we’re able to recognize quite a few more of our excellent students. This year the Department has its annual event — to which all majors and minors are invited — beginning around noon on Friday, April 5, but the A&S grad […]
Did you see the recent study that the Pew Research Center has posted, on the positive correlation between being religious and being happy? It’s worth looking at, especially if you think scholarship on religion ought to be no less rigorous than scholarship on any other aspect of being human. […]
This morning I caught a tweet that struck me as just as curious as the responses from some on Twitter. First off, the tweet: A professor who received his PhD from Harvard was asked to give some advice to potential grad school applicants today: [paraphrased] “Um, the job market was good back then and it was super easy. I have no real insight into the current process. I’m sorry.” — Shane Wagoner (@shanewag1) February 2, 2019 It’s curious to me […]
Yes, I like making my own index. There, I said it. And so should you. Sure, it’s the umpteenth time that you’re read your own text, the one that you (naively) thought was all done when you sent off the final manuscript to your publisher as a file attachment; but then it kept reappearing in your inbox, first with copyediting, which entailed negotiating with the copyeditor over your penchant for em dashes and semi-colons, then for proofing and yet more […]
The above headline comes from a recent online article at Slate, detailing how current court interpretation of the US’s 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) have resulted in a situation in which claims of religious freedom are increasingly enabling people to sidestep laws that yet others have long taken for granted. Most recently it involves the following case (quoting from the article): […]
The statement “I believe in…” is sensible only when there are others who do not; it is an agonistic affirmation…. Thus a statement of belief is a convention appropriate to a specific situation, sanctioned by a history and a community. As Wittgenstein notes, “the expression of belief … is just a sentence; — and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression in a calculus. –Donald Lopez, “Belief” in Critical Terms for […]
The 2019 call for papers has just come out from NAASR — the North American Association for the Study of Religion — asking for respondents to invited papers that will each address one of four aspects of the field in which we do our work (a format the meetings have used for the past 5 years); the association also announced its upcoming workshops for grad students, all of which will take place at its November annual meeting in San Diego. […]