Posts in this category discuss the wider relevance of those tools, methods, and disciplines often grouped together and called the Humanities.
November is in full swing, and that means it is annual meeting season for scholars of religion. The North American Association for the Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society of Biblical Literature will all conference in San Diego, November 23-26. Many of our REL faculty and graduate students will be on the program. Learn a bit more about what they’ll be up to and where you can find them. […]
Read More from Bringing REL to San Diego–#aarsbl19 #naasr2019
Madeleine Lewis graduated from UA in 2017 with degrees Religious Studies and Applied Mathematics. She is now teaching English and Computer Science in Montenegro with the Fulbright Program. This past September, Elon Musk tweeted, “Finally, we will do Nikola Tesla proud by having his cars in his countries of origin!” This claim about beginnings, coupled with the fact that I have lived in what some people assert to be Tesla’s singular country of origin for over a year, sparked my […]
I posted the above the other day while retweeting a story on Twitter about some of the obstacles that can stand in the way of early career scholars — notably those that are financial, such as annual registration fees at our conferences. Stories like these are not new to social media commentaries on the current state of academia, of course, but they took on even more urgency in the light of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of […]
The tenth episode in our A Good Book series has been posted to Vimeo, featuring Prof. Richard Newton discussing Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s book, What is Scripture? Take a look… Interested in learning more about Prof. Newton? Watch his appearance on our other series, ar·ti·facts […]
It’s that time again, when people are considering applying to graduate programs for the coming academic year. Later in the Fall semester our Graduate Committee will begin making acceptance decisions and will be nominating some of the newly admitted students for competitive, campus-wide fellowships, to help them fund their studies, not to mention making decisions about who will hold the Department’s graduate teaching assistantships. So I thought it was a good time to say a few things about why […]
As the AAR presents its newly drafted Religious Literacy Guidelines, Sierra Lawson (BA ’17, MA ’19) and Prof. Steven Ramey return to their research on the implications of classification to raise important questions about the politics and consequences of such a framing. Religious literacy, which typically refers to knowledge about religions, differences between religions, and diversity within each religion, can reinforce problematic claims about social groups (as evident in the chart reproduced above). Useful knowledge can easily become harmful, especially […]
Dr. Edith Szanto joined REL just this past August, coming to us after working for several years at the American University of Iraq, in Sulaimani. Now partway into her first semester, she’s been teaching an introductory course on Islam and, in the Spring, will be teaching REL 100 Introduction to the Study of Religion along with an upper-level seminar on the way Islam has been conceptualized in Europe and North America. Thanks again to REL grad Andie Alexander and REL […]
The US field’s largest professional association, the American Academy of Religion, recently released a set of guidelines (3 years in the making) on promoting religious literacy in 2 and 4-year US colleges — find it posted here as a PDF. […]
Read More from Religious Literacy and the Definition of Religion
Yes, REL videos are back for some of our ongoing series — such as the artifacts series, in which faculty are invited to talk a bit about something in their office. In this episode, Prof. Richard Newton, who first joined REL last year. See the whole artifacts series here. […]
Our third group of incoming MA students started classes this past August, joining four full-time MA students now in their second year. So we thought it was time to introduce them all to you, and ask them to tell us what they’re studying — from people, places and things to the digital tools useful in doing their work. For more information on REL’s Religion in Culture MA, visit our website and contact Prof. Merinda Simmons, our Graduate Director. Thanks to […]