Seen this article? Students in our Department read anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, philosophers, along with scholars of religion, to name just a few of the other fields that we regularly draw on in carrying out our work. So what do you think the implications of this cross-disciplinary work are for our field — is it interdisciplinary at its core? Are we valued by those in other fields? Or maybe the better question is: What fields are not interdisciplinary […]
Category: Religion in Culture
Posts in this category discuss how those aspects of culture known as religion can be studied in a way comparable to all other cultural practices.
“Are You Irish?”
By Kim Davis Kim Davis (pictured on the right) earned her B.A. in French and Religious Studies from the University of Alabama in 2003. She went on to get her Masters in French Linguistics and Literature in 2007 and a Masters in Secondary Language Pedagogy in 2010, both from UA. Kim now teaches French and Mythology at Tuscaloosa County High School. It’s a question I have heard a lot in the ten years I have been a performer and teacher of […]
Can Anything be a Ritual?
By Mary Rebecca Read-Wahidi Becky is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and will graduate just as soon as she finishes writing her dissertation on the Virgin of Guadalupe. She joined the Department of Religious Studies as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Fall of 2012, and was immediately enamored by the charming atmosphere, lofty office space, and pencils with “religion in culture” printed on them. Recently in Dr. Ramey’s “Introduction to Religions of the World” class he was […]
Hannah Goes to India, Part 1
By Hannah Etchison Hannah Etchison, a graduating senior majoring in Religious Studies with a minor in Asian Studies, is spending six weeks of this fall in India, staying primarily at a monastery where she will learn from the women and help them with their English. This is her first post about that experience. I became enraptured with the study of Buddhism through a variety of experiences during my time in the Religious Studies department of the University of Alabama, but […]
Rearview Mirror, Episode One
Have you seen our new series, of interviews with grads…? Rearview Mirror with Jennifer Nelson from UA Religious Studies. […]
Hocus Pocus
Have you seen this clip making the rounds on the internet? Despite it being an ad for a movie (sigh — everything’s an ad for something, no?) and assuming that the unassuming people depicted in it really were unassuming, then their reactions raise a curious question for those who rather confidently distinguish between domains we call religion and science based on the latter being rational and modern and the former not. […]
Isn’t That Special
Did you see the post from last year at The Chronicle‘s site, on widespread dissatisfaction of mid-career profs? I’d not, so thanks to a Facebook friend for re-posting it the other day. The researcher who conducted the survey of over 13,510 faculty comments: […]
Ar-ti-facts on Vimeo
Have you checked out some of the REL faculty on Vimeo in the latest series ar·ti·facts, which has them talking about things in their offices…? There’s more episodes to come… […]
Bargain Experiences
Like many scholars of religion in the US (or North American, or maybe even the world?), I got a personalized mass email this morning (you’d think that would be a contradiction in terms, no?), about one of (if not the, as an editor for one of the large publishers once phrased it to me) bestselling world religions textbooks that’s been on the market for the past decades: the 9th edition of the $135.20 (SRP*) Living Religions (now with the Oxy-boost […]
We’re All Rugged Individualists
A friend a Mizzou just sent me the link to this article today, in which Culture Studies is blamed for some of the problems currently confronting the Humanities — that we’re now all plodding through “jargon-infested jungles of heavy theory,” as this author puts it, while wielding his critical thinking machete. […]