We have some news: Associate Professor Daniel Levine, a faculty member in UA’s Department of Political Science, has just been appointed by the University of Alabama Board of Trustees as the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies. He will now have a co-appointment to both Political Science and the Department of Religious Studies, teaching equally for both units — with his first REL course (a Core course on religion and politics) coming in the Spring 2020 semester. Dr. Levine […]
Category: Relevance of Humanities
Posts in this category discuss the wider relevance of those tools, methods, and disciplines often grouped together and called the Humanities.
Family Resemblance and the Social Risks of Guess Who
Years ago, before I had kids, I was chitchatting with an acquaintance. I cannot recall what we were actually talking about. The memory is remarkable to me because these days I am rarely alone enough to enjoy a leisurely adult conversation. I can’t believe now how much I took such moments for granted back then. Anyway, in the midst of the conversation, the acquaintance’s young daughter came out of a building to meet her mother. They can’t have been apart […]
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Getting the Party Started on Syllabus Day
The first day of class can be a bit nerve-racking, even for profs. One might think that profs have it easy at the start of the semester, but we all know the importance of first impressions. And for myself, there can be a lot of anxiety around those initial activities. How much of the syllabus should we read? I don’t want to bore anyone, but I don’t want students starting out lost. Do we dive right into content? The semester […]
Welcome Back!
It’s been another busy summer around Manly Hall, but we’re as excited as ever to begin the Fall semester. So…, welcome back, students and faculty! Welcome Back 2019 from UA Religious Studies on Vimeo. […]
It’s Only A Day Away….
The Fall semester commences tomorrow?! Leading up to our annual welcome back video, we are reminiscing on some of our favorite videos from previous years! […]
School Starts Soon…
Are you anticipating this year’s new welcome back video?! We’ll post it on the first day of classes — but until then: do you remember the welcome back video from 2014? […]
“The Personal Faith of Each Individual”
Recently, my friend, Jack Llewellyn, sent me the following email, with some very useful observations on just how widely used the rhetorical of personal faith has been. With his permission, I copy it below: Continuing to research Partition, I ran into a quote — speaking as the President of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, in what was really his inaugural address to the new nation, Mohammed Ali Jinnah said (among other things): “Now I think we […]
Épater les Bourgeoise…?
I do no speak or read French. Many years ago, however, in undergraduate school, I had a professor of English literature who was inordinately fond of the French phrase épater les bourgeoise—as he would translate it on a regular basis, “to shock the ordinary human being out of his [or her] lethargy.” That is, there are those works, persons, events to which ordinary human beings, most of us, can only react in shock, sometimes in dismay; other times in paralysis. […]
7 Things I Learned at HILT for the Digital Study of Religion
Prof. Nathan Loewen specializes in the philosophy of religion and digital humanities among other things. This summer his research interests are taking him in a new direction at their intersection. Last week, I travelled to the 2019 Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching event to learn about text analysis from Katie Rawson. Here are just a few outcomes from those five days. […]
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Power and Perfect Pictures
This post is part of a series that originated out of a photo essay assignment in Dr. Simmons’s Interim “Religion and Pop Culture” course that asked students to apply discussion themes to everyday objects or experiences. When I was younger and more naive, I thought the future would have flying cars, cured diseases, and immortal people. Today popular culture more often utilizes trends of a dystopian future, such as the ones in The Hunger Games and Divergent. In these stories, […]