The next video in our A Good Book series has been uploaded! The fifth episode of our second season features Prof. Steven Ramey and his discussion of Gyanendra Pandey’s book The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. A Good Book with Prof. Ramey from UA Religious Studies. […]
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.
What Would I Ever Do with a Humanities Degree?
Catie Stewart is a sophomore at the University of Alabama from Madison, Mississippi. She is double majoring in English and Religious Studies. Entering into my first year at the University of Alabama, I declared a chemical engineering major. I had always excelled in science and math in high school and had seemingly enjoyed the two catch-all chemistry classes I took my sophomore and senior years, so, to me and everyone advising me, it only made sense that I go into the field […]
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Wonder If Anna’s Awake to Read This?
Each Monday a new episode from the adventures of the Praxis Squad will be posted. […]
Is This Really a College Town?
The label “college town” can produce a variety of expectations. Having spent several years attending UNC Chapel Hill, my expectations of a college town derive from some specific observations. When I traveled to Ithaca, New York, at the end of September to participate in Cornell University’s South Asia Program Seminar, the plane trip heightened my expectations for a thriving college town, with a professor sitting beside me and another seated in front of me, and someone reading a journal article […]
ar·ti·facts with Prof. Finnegan
The third video in our second season of ar·ti·facts has just hit the big screen! This video features Dr. Finnegan and her not-so-foreign and not-so-functional clock. ar·ti·facts: A Different Place and Time with Prof. Eleanor Finnegan from UA Religious Studies. […]
The Category Religion — Twenty Years Later
I’ve got a review essay coming out in 2015 in Numen (issue 62/1) that I just proofed. It’s on recent works concerned with the category religion. It was interesting to write, since it’s been twenty years since I wrote a similar essay on the category religion in scholarship. […]
Create Your Own Identity
On Oct. 23, a “hatchet-wielding” man attacked and wounded several police officers in New York City (Queens). Naturally, media outlets immediately started speculating about what could have prompted this man to carry out such a horrific attack. According to several accounts, the man was a recent convert to Islam who had “self-radicalized.” The New York Times headline reads: The article goes on to paint a portrait of this lone wolf who was “self-directed in his activities”: […]
“Nobody’s Gonna Go Out With Me…”
This blog was started in our Department back in May 2012, anticipating the 2012-13 academic year’s lecture series that had four different guests all focus on the relevance of the Humanities — a national debate here in the US for decades but one that was obviously heightened in the face of the 2008 economic collapse both here and abroad. The Department, under then Chair Ted Trost, decided to tackle this head on. And so I started posting periodically on why […]
A Good Book with Prof. Rollens
The next video in our A Good Book series has been uploaded and is ready for viewing! The fourth episode of our newest series features Prof. Sarah Rollens and her discussion of James C. Scott’s book Domination and the Arts of Resistance. A Good Book with Prof. Rollens from UA Religious Studies. […]
The Imagined Kashmir
Anna Davis is a junior from Prattville, Alabama who is majoring in Geography and Religious Studies. She wrote this post as part of Dr. Steven Ramey’s course, REL 321: Religion & Identity in South Asia The geographic area of South Asia has experienced a catastrophic series of floods in recent weeks. The region of Kashmir in particular has had a difficult time recovering from the floods in part because of the aid that was provided. People died during the floods […]