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Posts by Russell McCutcheon

New Staff Soon Joining REL

With Betty and Donna’s upcoming retirement (effective April 1 — did you see the announcement?), it’s time to announce who we’ve hired to keep both our main office and the Department as a whole on the right track. LeCretia Crumpton will be our new full-time Administrative Secretary; she’s currently working on campus in the Department of Chemistry, where, apart from general clerical duties and working with a variety of UA systems, she’s focused on assisting their efforts to recruit and […]

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It Cuts Both Ways

If you were paying attention to US news this past week it was probably tough not to know that the Senate trial of President Trump concluded with him being acquitted by a vote that pretty much went along straight party lines. I say pretty much because a lone Republican Senator, Mitt Romney, from Utah, voted to convict. The reason Romney’s vote stood out for some scholars of religion on social media was likely the manner in which he couched his […]

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“Happy Arbitrary New Year”

A friend on social media wished everyone a “happy arbitrary new year” last night. And it got me thinking. We all know — right? — that there’s a variety of dating systems that have existed historically, let alone today (case in point: see the January 25th Chinese new year on that image up above…?). So, at some level, most of us surely understand that it isn’t really the start of a new year today. Instead, should we grant the Gregorian […]

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Have You Met Emily Crews?

Emily Crews is in the second year of teaching full-time in REL (while finishing her dissertation at the University of Chicago), devoting her time mostly to Honors intro courses but also teaching our monthly evening film class. If you’ve not had a class with her then this is your chance to get to know a little more about her work. Thanks to REL students Kyle Ashley and Savannah Aldridge for the movie magic. […]

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Playing Favorites

A couple weeks ago I was at a session of the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference where the topic of experiential learning came up, mentioned in the context of classes that do such things as invite students to meditate so that they can experience for themselves a taste of the mindfulness that they’re reading about in the course. […]

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“Dr. Green Rocks!”

There was a memorial service on campus yesterday for Patrick E. Green, who passed away on October 20, 2019. He came to the University of Alabama, from the University of Texas, back in 1969. That’s back when the field that some of us today take for granted was just getting going and the UA Department that we nowcelebrate as being over 50 years old was in its infancy, with its few faculty housed in ten Hoor Hall. For that was […]

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