Check out the department’s Vimeo page for our latest video. In the spirit of learning from our mistakes, we put together the bloopers from our recent projects and made a how-to guide to REL stardom! Julliard-trained, more like Manly-trained. 5 Tips for Being an REL Movie Star 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.
Identifying for the Jokes
By Jared Powell Jared Powell is a junior from Canton, Mississippi majoring in English and Religious Studies. He enjoys watching Seinfeld, his favorite TV show, and is always disappointed when somebody does not understand a reference to the famed sitcom. He one day hopes to become an architect, or maybe an importer-exporter of latex products. What are the various identities, religious or nonreligious, that an individual can assume? Why do individuals choose to identify with certain categories? How do individuals exhibit or prove […]
“It’s Andie, with an ‘ie'”
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, and will begin working on her M.A. this fall 2014 at CU Boulder. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. I go by “Andie.” I say “go by” not to distinguish my name from my legal name “Amanda” but to draw attention […]
REL, the Buzzfeed version
The Vimeo page has been pretty active so far this summer, and the REL movie crew has produced yet another hit! We took a cue from Buzzfeed for our newest video, “5 Things You Always Wanted to Know About REL Majors.” Watch to hear how our majors answer such questions as, “Why did you major in REL?”, “What do you like about the department?”, as well as a few fun ones too. 5 Things to Know About REL Majors from […]
The Pragmatics of Ritual
Did you happen to catch this story about too many “love locks” on Paris’s famous Pont des Arts bridge, which carries foot traffic over the Seine river? A portion of it collapsed under the weight of the locks. […]
Ain’t Nothin’ Local About the Study of Religion
Do you ever wonder where our majors come from? Well, then, do we have a show for you! The department’s latest video shows that our students come to Alabama from all corners of the country, studying religion in culture from sea to shining sea. Stay tuned for more videos of our majors talking about their experiences in the department… Ain’t Nothin’ Local About the Study of Religion from UA Religious Studies. […]
Read More from Ain’t Nothin’ Local About the Study of Religion
The World Religions Discourse in Practice
How does the discourse on world religions work? Well, consider news stories like this one. […]
There’s Still Room
Registered for your Fall 2014 classes yet? There’s still room in some of the upper-level seminars…. Follow us on Twitter @StudyReligion […]
No Chili Peppers
There’s a bit of a controversy brewing in social media over a new review essay published in the our field’s main peer review periodical, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, on the book, On Teaching Religion, edited by Chris Lehrich and containing some of the writings on pedagogy by Jonathan Z. Smith. The reviewer, a onetime student of Smith’s, reflects on her own experience in his classes, as an undergrad at the University of Chicago in the late-1990s, in […]
Gotcha
Note to self: if you’re going to spin tales of origin in the service of contemporary interests then be careful, for someone with different interests can always tweak what you’re trying to do, to suit their own purposes. Case in point: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent effort to use an origins narrative to spin a tale of similarity quickly cut toward difference when the Pope corrected him on a detail, requiring some hasty fine tuning to get back to the […]