Honors Day, last week, is an annual opportunity not just to celebrate student successes but also to recognize REL faculty and staff accomplishments. But, given our continued concern for hosting in-person events, we again relied on a video, created once again by Prof. Richard Newton (with the help of a variety of faculty), to celebrate another year — one full of challenges, to be sure, but one in which we saw the members of the Department going above and beyond […]
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.
Honors Day 2021
Equivalent Categories and Where to Find Them
Jeremee Nute is a graduating M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He is originally from Missouri, where he earned his B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Missouri Western State University. Scholars who research cultures outside of Europe and North America often try to find categories that correspond to “religion,” such as those who study Ancient China. For example, one analog that is sometimes proposed by these scholars is Zōngjiào (宗教), said to be […]
We Really Can’t Afford to Go Back to Normal
A few weeks ago, after emailing a representative of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), it became apparent to me that the Fall conference-going season in our field will be moving forward as the usual in-person meetings instead of the hybrid format that, in the light of a year living with COVID-19, I had assumed would be offered. It’s now becoming apparent to others as well, with an online petition now circulating, addressed to the leadership of the Society of […]
Careers with Khara — An Annual REL Workshop
REL alum, Khara Cole (2013, with a double major in REL and Public Relations), now the Marketing Director at American Exchange (pictured above, left, at our February 2018 workshop) is once again offering a careers workshop for REL students (all majors and minors in the Department as well as grad students) — but it’s virtual this time. We’ll be talking about preparing a resume and tips on doing a job search & interviewing. Wednesday, March 24 @ 7:00 p.m. And […]
Announcing the 2021 Day Virtual Lecture: Sporting the Sacred
We invite you to join us on March 10th at 7pm (central) for our annual Day Lecture — which will be a virtual event this year, hosted by Prof. Richard Newton. Dr. Zachary T. Smith will discuss the academic study of religion and sports, beginning with the question: how can we think beyond the common scholarly (and popular) characterization of sport as some kind of new quasi-religious phenomena of secularized society? Zach is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Kinesiology, in […]
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New Titles in REL: Second Virtual Book Event (Zoom)
Join us for another evening of conversation, this time hosted by REL’s own Dr. K. Merinda Simmons and celebrating the recent publication of another new title in REL, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures, by Dr. Richard Newton. Due to pandemic protocols, our book events for Spring 2021 are virtual and open to guests both on and off campus. We invite you to join us virtually, via Zoom, on February 23, 2021, at 7 p.m. (US central time). […]
Read More from New Titles in REL: Second Virtual Book Event (Zoom)
Civil Religion or Christian Nationalism?
How scholars use categories to name things, and thereby identify those things that deserve our critical attention, has long interested me. And among the things that have caught my attention over the years is the once prominent category “civil religion” — one made famous by the late U.S. sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s much earlier use of the term in his 1762 book, The Social Contract (for e.g., see book 4, chpt. 8; read Bellah’s influential 1967 essay.) […]
New Titles in REL: Upcoming Zoom Event
Join us for an evening of conversation hosted by REL’s own Dr. Richard Newton to celebrate the publication of a new title in REL, Race and New Modernisms, co-authored by Dr. K. Merinda Simmons and Dr. James A. Crank (Department of English, University of Alabama) — a book that was a finalist for a 2020 PROSE book award (in the category of Literature). In past semesters we would have gathered in person at the local bookstore, Ernest & Hadley Booksellers, […]
Your Sun Bread, Yourself
Every year my kids and I make Sun Bread to commemorate the winter solstice. I got this idea from the place where modern momming dwells: Instagram. My kids (by chance) went to a Waldorf preschool which focuses, among other things, on reinforcing the children’s identification with nature and spending the majority of time outside regardless of weather (born in Germany, Waldorf schools take seriously the German saying “there is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing”). The year is built around […]