Victoria Truitt is a Senior at the University of Alabama studying Political Science and Spanish. She spends her free time binge-watching her favorite shows on Netflix and questioning every little thing about today’s culture. She aspires to work in politics after graduation. When I think of identity, I think of a constantly developing definition that is open to interpretation. A person’s identity is never complete because it depends not only on that person’s image of themselves, but also on the […]
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 Wonderment of This Taxonomy
I’ve been putting quotation marks around the word religion for a long time now — some people dismiss them as affectations, others call them scare quotes. […]
ar·ti·facts with Prof. Altman
The next episode in our ar·ti·facts series has been uploaded! This installment features Prof. Altman and his “filtered” photograph of the Quad. Is it Instagram or is it just old? ar·ti·facts: The Filtered Past with Prof. Mike Altman from UA Religious Studies. […]
REL 360 presents: Lage Raho Munna Bhai (another movie night!)
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest developments in the REL department, you probably know that we have a brand new one-credit course this year: REL 360. REL 360 screens a select group of movies throughout the semester, and the next one is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Everyone’s invited, not just those enrolled in the course! We’ll be watching Lage Raho Munna Bhai. We’re hoping for a good turnout from students involved in Asian Studies, too. Dr. […]
Read More from REL 360 presents: Lage Raho Munna Bhai (another movie night!)
Making an Awesome Leap of Faith, Part 2
Each Monday a new episode from the adventures of the Praxis Squad will be posted. […]
Eudora Welty’s Jitney Jungle
By Jared Powell Jared Powell is a junior from Canton, Mississippi majoring in English and Religious Studies. I recently attended the first Hidden Humanities lecture, hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences, featuring Dr. William Ferris and his talk “Standing at the Crossroads: The Humanities and the American South.” The lecture struck a few chords with me–and not just because he also played a couple blues classics on a steel string guitar during the lecture–and got me thinking about […]
A Good Book with Prof. Altman
The next video in our A Good Book series has been uploaded and is ready for viewing! The third installment of our newest series features Prof. Mike Altman as he discusses Richard King’s book Orientalism and Religion, including the experience of meeting the author himself, who gave our annual Aronov Lecture last year. Enjoy! A Good Book with Prof. Altman from UA Religious Studies. […]
What Makes A Terrorist?
Katie Fortin, a native of northern Vermont, is in her senior year of undergrad at the University of Alabama. She is currently working towards a degree in English with a minor in Religious Studies. When you hear the word “terrorist” what do you think? You probably imagine a dark skinned Middle Eastern man. But why is that? Why don’t we picture someone like Timothy McVeigh, a white American, who was responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombings of 1995, the largest […]
Making an Awesome Leap of Faith, Part 1
Each Monday a new episode from the adventures of the Praxis Squad will be posted. […]
A Word from the Balcony
A yesterday a colleague posted a blog with three hypotheses on the topic of studying a thing called American Religious History — concerning how it may very well be a nationalist project, from start to finish (no matter how it is done), and that it is a discourse that may have historical continuities with (and practical effects akin to) the world religious discourse that so many in our field now claim to critique. His point, as I read him, was […]