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.


The Messy Ephemera of Day-to-Day Life

By Melanie Williams Melanie printed her diploma on sheepskin using an HP OfficeJet 6500, the beast of home printers. The diploma states that she graduated in 2006, with a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies. Since then she has been a cook, server, deckhand, goat milker, office assistant, and general itinerant laborer. Tomorrow she will mend the fence (it makes the neighbors better.) I don’t know what it’s like to be a college freshman today but I still like to […]

Read More from The Messy Ephemera of Day-to-Day Life

Racial or Religious Humor as Means of Negotiation

By Zach Price Zach Price is a Religious Studies major; a Black Belt in Isshin Ryu; a student of Shen Lung Kung Fu; and a guitar, banjo, and tin whistle enthusiast. This post originally appeared on the blog Monks and Nones, the class blog for REL 371. So if you missed the “joke” that Rick Warren posted on Facebook and the proceeding backlash then you can catch up on all of it here. Basically Rick Warren, a famous mega-church pastor, […]

Read More from Racial or Religious Humor as Means of Negotiation

Curios and Classrooms

By Kim Davis Kim Davis 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. I’m a collector. The picture above is of Kenner Star Wars action figures that I have kept until I had a house to […]

Read More from Curios and Classrooms

Mind the Gap

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She currently works as a staff member in the Department as a Student Liaison and filmmaker. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. While scrolling through Facebook the other day, I came across this video that discussed the benefit of performing Shakespeare’s plays in their “Original Pronunciation,” or “OP.” Take a look… […]

Read More from Mind the Gap

Race and Displacement

Race and Displacement, co-edited by our own Prof. Simmons and Prof. Marouan (formerly of REL and now of Gender & Race Studies), has just been published. It is based on a conference held at UA several years ago. As the University of Alabama Press’s site describes it: “it captures a timely set of discussions about the roles of race in displacement, forced migrations, nation and nationhood, and the way continuous movements of people challenge fixed racial definitions. The multifaceted approach […]

Read More from Race and Displacement

“The Same…, But Different”

 [This post is reblogged from Culture on the Edge] In 2008 I took a small group of undergraduate students from our Department at the University of Alabama to Thessaloniki, Greece (that’s us above, with a famous philosopher, who has a shiny toe, likely from tourists rubbing it), where I had been for a conference a couple years before, and at which I first met my Culture on the Edge colleague, Vaia Touna. I’ve returned several times since that first trip, […]

Read More from “The Same…, But Different”