For the few — surely, extremely few — REL students who won’t be in the library all of next week, knee-deep in books, catching up on readings, and getting ahead on final assignments, we hope that you have a nice spring break. And don’t forget to cover up. You can never be too safe against the sun’s harmful UV rays. […]
Some years ago I met a grad student at the U.S.’s main national scholarly conference in our field — “the big show” is what we’d call it if we were baseball players — who knew some of my friends in the profession and who bumped into me while walking through the book display. Being new to the conference-scene, he asked me a question: So how do I present a paper here next year? […]
I recall a conversation I once had, some years ago, about the possibility that our department might try to hire someone who worked on Asia, i.e., that we had submitted a proposal for such a position, but, of course, who knows if we’ll get it. The person with whom I spoke, who did his own work on Asia, replied, a little incredulously, that of course we’d get the position, no? After all, consider how important Asia is to understanding world […]
Whereas an earlier generation of scholars of religion — say, those in the 1960s — argued that the relevance of our field was to be found in its uniqueness and autonomy from all other disciplines, we here at the University of Alabama think that our field’s contribution is in its ability to contribute to our understanding of culture-wide processes and effects. […]
While working on a Masters degree, I recall an early-career professor in whose office a friend and I would regularly meet for one of our classes. As I recall, he was still working on finishing his own Ph.D. at the time and on his wall he had nicely mounted a large piece of interesting-looking driftwood, all gnarly and weathered, which had been signed by a bunch of people. One day we asked what it was. He replied with a story […]
The other day Inside Higher Ed posted an article that has now been re-posted at Slate. It’s one among many recent blogs that chronicles the longstanding difficulties of the academic job market, making evident the personal, social, and economic prices many people pay while trying to find work after earning their Ph.D. A much quoted line when friends post links to it on Facebook, from its second paragraph, reads as follows: Yet of all the machines that humanity has created, […]
If you’re reading this blog then you may know that we’re a small undergraduate degree-granting Department that has a number of things going on — from a couple of longstanding lecture series to a newly invented annual undergrad research symposium, from an active student association and Facebook page, to some faculty who actively collaborate with one another on their own research. We bring grads back to talk about their post-B.A. lives and careers, we have this blog with posts from […]
I’ve seen a lot of early career people teaching — of course, I was once one of them, like us all, back when, at the University of Tennessee in the early 1990s, I would write out entire lectures the day or night before and then read them each class, sticking closely to my text — and they unfortunately share a trait with some of their older, supposedly experienced colleagues: they’re proclaimers. Sitting at the back of a classroom, during the […]
In an article today, entitled “No Right to Preach,” Inside Higher Ed reports: While the First Amendment provides faculty members at public colleges and universities with considerable latitude about what they may say, a federal judge has ruled it does not restrict a state university from cautioning professors against making statements that favor one religion or another, and that may seem to insult the religious views of some students. […]
THIMPHU, Bhutan (RNS) For centuries, Buddhists in this tiny landlocked Himalayan kingdom have had a special devotion to the most unusual of objects: the phallus. Painted on the walls of their homes, hanging from the eaves of their houses and seen in vehicles and on rooftops, images of the phallus are an essential part of Bhutan’s traditional ceremonies…. So opens a recent Huffington Post article, ripped straight from the 19th century’s headlines. For if you want to see how very […]