“As professors in the Department of Religion, we are often asked by prospective students (and their parents) about the ‘Christian’ in Texas Christian University, or the ‘C,’ as they more often put it, in TCU…” So opens an interesting blog post that I think is well worth the read; for it tries to elaborate on the role of the study of religion at private denomination college — specifically, one affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. […]
On the flight home from a visit to Lehigh University this past week I started reading Steven Johnson’s engaging How We Got to Now (2014) — a popularly-written book on the conditions and unanticipated connections that helped to make possible the innovations that many of us now take for granted (e.g., public sanitation or refrigeration). […]
I’ve got a review essay coming out in 2015 in Numen (issue 62/1) that I just proofed. It’s on recent works concerned with the category religion. It was interesting to write, since it’s been twenty years since I wrote a similar essay on the category religion in scholarship. […]
Matt Groening, B.A. (Evergreen State College, 1977) D’oh! […]
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and former Classics major (Brown University, expelled when on suspension and found to be living with his girlfriend). Ever read the famous letter his father wrote to him when he was 18? Click the opening, below, to read it all. […]
Emma Watson, B.A. (Brown University, 2014) This is part of an ongoing series on people who seem to succeed despite having a degree in the Humanities. (If you had a degree in the Humanities you’d know whether that was irony or sarcasm.) […]
This blog was started in our Department back in May 2012, anticipating the 2012-13 academic year’s lecture series that had four different guests all focus on the relevance of the Humanities — a national debate here in the US for decades but one that was obviously heightened in the face of the 2008 economic collapse both here and abroad. The Department, under then Chair Ted Trost, decided to tackle this head on. And so I started posting periodically on why […]
Now there’s a rag-tag group of undergraduate liberal arts majors, if ever I saw one. Samuel Alito, B.A. in Public & International Affairs (Princeton University 1972) Stephen Breyer, B.A. in Philosophy (Stanford University, 1959) Ruth Bader Ginzburg, B.A. in Government (Cornell University, 1954) Elena Kagan, B.A. in History (Princeton University, 1981) Anthony Kennedy, B.A. in Political Science (Stanford University, 1958) John Roberts, A.B. in History (Harvard College, 1976) Antonin Scalia, B.A. in History (Georgetown University, 1957) Sonia Sotomayor, B.A. in […]
Ever wonder why textbooks for classes are now so expensive? See this story and see what you think. […]
I’ve been putting quotation marks around the word religion for a long time now — some people dismiss them as affectations, others call them scare quotes. […]