Welcome Back Fall 2023

We are glad to have students returning to classes this week after a busy summer for everyone. We have a new department chair and an exciting group of incoming MA students. Check out our Welcome Back video to see some of the changes that we have made to get ready for Fall 2023. We have had a productive summer beyond those changes. As a faculty, we have finished 6 books, more than 20 book chapters, 4 journal articles, and international […]

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Taylor Swift, Gameday, and Church

Taylor Swift’s concert tour has generated significant attention with heartwarming stories of supportive parents, marriage proposals, and the like, along with lots of memes. One author compared the experience with group singing in worship settings, calling the concert “The Church of Taylor Swift”. The post certainly touches on an important element within both Taylor Swift concerts and congregational worship, the experience of group singing. However, thinking critically about who creates the comparison, based on what assumptions, and for what ends […]

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The Possibilities of Graduate Education

Why pursue an MA in the humanities when the chances of securing a tenure track position with a PhD are so low? That is a common question that students and faculty grapple with in the current university context. Helping students prepare for both their future and the myriad ways that they can contribute to society needs to be emphasized, which is something that we take seriously in the MA in Religion in Culture program at Alabama. Last Monday in Denver, […]

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Who Believes in Conspiracy Theories?

  As a scholar in religious studies, my interest was piqued when a recent “The Daily” episode from the New York Times discussed community formation in Birds Aren’t Real, a movement / conspiracy theory that claims the government has replaced birds with drones to conduct widespread surveillance. The analysis of people who connect with others through Birds Aren’t Real had similarities to the ways that we discuss religions. Of course, connecting conspiracy theories and religion is not unique to me, […]

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Something New From the “Nones” with the Pew Research Center’s Online Survey Results

The Nones are causing “trouble” again, with sensationalized headlines about the decline of Christianity. These takes can easily reinforce the anxiety among some about changes in society and activate nostalgia for some mythic 1950’s America (which was certainly not experienced as peaceful or comfortable by many marginalized groups in the 1950s, or even today). Based on survey data that the Pew Research Center released this week, those who represent themselves as unaffiliated with religion have grown to almost 30% of […]

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Good Riddance 2020, But Wait . . .

2020 has been a strange and rough year in so many ways, but, speaking as REL’s Graduate Director, our Department still has much to celebrate among our M.A. students and the program’s alums. They did not simply survive the shift to online learning and the challenge of moving to a new city in a pandemic; they have thrived in so many ways. In May, in the middle of the first wave of the pandemic, we graduated 4 M.A. students, our […]

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Navigating a Diverse World Critically

The World Religions course is a fabulous opportunity to teach students to think critically about the various representations of the world’s religious traditions. With the critique of the world religions paradigm and its colonial roots (see Masuzawa’s Invention fo World Religions), as well as problematic assumptions contained in any singular description of world religions (see, for example, my Culture on the Edge post The Harm of World Religions), it is vital to challenge singular narratives and to help our students […]

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