Last week, Khara Cole, who graduated from UA with a degree in Public Relations and Religious Studies in 2013, lead current students in a career workshop. The casual meeting launched last year as an RSSA initiative and continued this year (organized by Prof. Vaia Touna). The presentation covered everything from resume structure to LinkedIn formatting, and even nonverbal communication during interviews. […]
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.
6th Annual Undergrad Research Symposium
REL is again hosting its undergrad research symposium, held this year in Gorgas Library 205, so there’s plenty of room to join us and hear some of the research that our students have been doing. It starts at 9:00 am Friday, February 22. There will be two panels (9-10 and 10:15-11:15), both of which are chaired by M.A. students in the Departments. And Prof. Crews is our host. Pictured above: the 5th annual event, held at the University Club in […]
Culture on the Edge: An Origin Story
Last week, Professors Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna sat down to discuss their involvement with the Culture on the Edge research group and blog, along with their two book series. Though the discussion was intended to focus on Prof. Touna’s recent addition to the published series, it naturally led to a conversation on the implications of fabricating origins and identity. […]
New Hire in REL at UA
The Department of Religious Studies, in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama, is very pleased to announce the hire of Dr. Edith Szanto. She begins at UA in the Fall semester of 2019, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, with expertise in the area of social theory of Islam. Dr. Szanto has been teaching in the Social Sciences Department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, since 2011. She received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies […]
Honors Day 2019 Recipients Announced
Letters went out a week ago so it’s time to make some public announcements concerning those students receiving awards at our Honors Day celebrations this coming April. So we’re very pleased to announce that 16 REL majors and/or Judaic Studies minors are receiving this year’s Silverstein Scholars award, recognizing their accomplishment in our classes. Find their names at the award link. Three B.A. students will share the award for the Outstanding Student in the Academic Study of Religion, recognizing their […]
The Sympathetic Magic of Advertising
There was a time, a hundred or more years ago, when scholars regularly used this term “sympathetic magic” to name the process by which one thing was thought to affect something else — but doing so not by means of the cause/effect relationships we usually take for granted. If, for example, I rub this stone in just this way then something will happen over there to that mountain, or if I treat this lock of hair in some fashion then […]
Majors Fair
REL faculty and students will again be attending UA’s annual Majors Fair — this year on Valentines Day. If you’ve got questions about the study of religion or Judaic Studies, drop by — and if you’re a current student we’d love to see you stay for a while and help answer some questions. Where and when is it, you ask…? […]
In Need of a Little More Precision
In a post the other day I discussed some of the problems with the recent Pew study on the apparent correlation between religiosity (understood as church attendance) and happiness. Read that post here. Well, as a brief follow-up, consider this Feb 8 post by one of the researcher’s involved in this work. Here we find, in the opening graphic (reproduced above), a voice that makes plain that the research subjects reported feeling happy; yet this voice changes considerably in the […]
This Week in the First Amendment
Have you been following the story of the La Lomita Chapel, in Mission, Texas? It was built in 1865 and today is at the center of a fight over land — more specifically, the Federal government trying to acquire this private land for the purposes of the border wall that some want built there. The local Roman Catholic diocese doesn’t agree. […]
It’s in the Mail
Yes, it’s already time to start thinking about Honors Day 2019 — we’ve come a long way since our first ceremony, back in 2002 (above). Sure, it’s still on the balcony but the food’s a lot better now. And we’re able to recognize quite a few more of our excellent students. This year the Department has its annual event — to which all majors and minors are invited — beginning around noon on Friday, April 5, but the A&S grad […]