The Department of Religious Studies will have a variety of students graduating in May after earning a Bachelor of Arts as majors in the Department of Religious Studies. Over the last four years, each senior has learned and applied social theory through various research projects, independent studies, and a number of unique REL courses. Taking classes like Religions of the World, Theories of Myth, and Religious Existentialism, students were able to shape a unique study of religion that best fit […]
Tag: Academic Study of Religion
Prof. Touna Prepares for Norway
This summer, Prof. Vaia Touna will travel to Trondheim, Norway to participate in a Religious Studies Conference hosted by NAASR and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The lectures will focus on critiquing the work of Prof. Jonathan Z. Smith, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago who passed away in December 2017. His expansive work in the field frequently complicated classification and description (among other scholarly tools) and provided reform for modern pedagogy. […]
REL Contributes to Wabash Early Career Workshop
Last weekend, Prof. Steven Ramey braved the cold to meet five other scholars of religion at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN, an hour west of Indianapolis. The group bunkered down at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion while they planned a workshop series for professors who teach undergraduates. This isn’t Alabama. pic.twitter.com/KxwPl3QOdL — Steven W. Ramey (@SRameyStudyRel) February 10, 2019 […]
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Culture on the Edge: An Origin Story
Last week, Professors Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna sat down to discuss their involvement with the Culture on the Edge research group and blog, along with their two book series. Though the discussion was intended to focus on Prof. Touna’s recent addition to the published series, it naturally led to a conversation on the implications of fabricating origins and identity. […]
Pssst! Check this Out: School’s in for Summer!
Parker Evans graduated from REL with a BA, in the Spring of 2018, and is currently working on his MA in Gender and Race Studies, here at UA Coming up on a year ago, shortly after the Department’s Honors Research Symposium, I applied for a couple of summer programs in Europe at the suggestion of Dr. Loewen. He and I had a short conversation in which I told him I was planning on taking a tour of Europe following my […]
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The Adventures of Prof. Trost
As the weather gets colder, reminiscing on warm adventures becomes enticing. Last week, Prof. Ted Trost sat down to do just that — Taking a minute to share stories of his European travels from this past summer. After years traversing the country and world for both business and pleasure, Dr. Trost settled in at The University of Alabama. Currently, he works with students in the Department of Religious Studies and New College. Before working in academia though, Trost worked as a flight […]
Revolutionary Love?
A colleague at another school sent me the email that recently went out to all program unit chairs for the American Academy of Religion (AAR), our field’s largest professional association. Because the president sets a theme for the upcoming year’s annual meeting, our incoming president has written the following text to explain her choice of theme for 2016 — one that all program units are then invited to focus on, to whatever extent, in their own calls for papers. […]
Putting the “Religion” in “American Religion”
Craig Prentiss is a professor of religious studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014). On Thursday, June 4, I took a flight from Kansas City, Missouri to Indianapolis to attend the Fourth Biennial Conference on Religion American Culture hosted by the the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IUPUI. Though it was the […]
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What is Cool?
Reading about Steve Quartz, who studies what happens when people experience something “cool,” made me think of our department, not because we are cool (although that is a reasonable connection), but because the label “cool” has no set definition, much like the category “religion”. People assume that they know it when they see it, but no consistent definition is possible. […]
Reason to Be
“As professors in the Department of Religion, we are often asked by prospective students (and their parents) about the ‘Christian’ in Texas Christian University, or the ‘C,’ as they more often put it, in TCU…” So opens an interesting blog post that I think is well worth the read; for it tries to elaborate on the role of the study of religion at private denomination college — specifically, one affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. […]