Tag: American Academy of Religion


And I nominate…

It’s not news that, over the years, I’ve critiqued our main professional organization on various occasions. I’ve been a member for a while now, and it seems to me that having a stake in the profession, and in an association that one’s membership dues helps to fund, means that one is free to offer commentary where one thinks things could (and should) be otherwise. Maybe we could even go so far as say it’s an engaged member’s duty. […]

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“I belong to no religion. My religion is love”: Sufism, Religious Studies, and Love

By now you’ve probably heard about the theme for next year’s American Academy of Religion (AAR) annual meeting, revolutionary love, and the controversy surrounding it.  Some of my colleagues, Russell McCutcheon and Merinda Simmons, have written about it, and the Bulletin for the Study of Religion is posting a series of responses. Revolutionary love, or any kind of love, has not been considered the purview or state of being of all people.  Scholars have played an important role in using […]

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A Glimpse into Academia: My Conference Experience in Atlanta, Georgia

Savannah Finver is currently a senior at St. Thomas Aquinas College. She is double-majoring in English and Philosophy/Religious Studies. In the future, she hopes to pursue a graduate degree in Religious Studies. Her interests lie in discourse and ideology studies, with emphasis on religions in the Americas. She enjoys reading, writing, and engaging her friends in philosophical debate. From November 19 to November 23, 2015, I had the privilege of traveling to Atlanta, Georgia with my advisor, Dr. Craig Martin, […]

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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. […]

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Welcome to Atlanta…

Many of the faculty in REL are soon hitting the road, heading east to Atlanta, to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) — our main professional association here in the US. While our southeast region also meets in Atlanta (in the Spring), this is the national meeting, which takes place each November, and attracts thousands of scholars from around the world.REL A lot of things happen at these meetings — some of the faculty are […]

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See You There

Are you chairing a Department of Religious Studies at a public university? If so, this group at our annual conference (taking place in a couple weeks in Atlanta) might be for you. It’s an informal group and this year I’ve been invited to lead a discussion on contingent faculty. But I hope that in our brief time we can also discuss shared interests and, even better, ways to systematize future meetings. For we’ve all got to have certain challenges in […]

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The Tremendous Irony of it All

Last week there was some chatter online about the nominations put forward for the leadership of our field’s main professional association. (Question: why does the nominating committee exercise a monopoly on determining the organization’s leadership?) Apart from a variety of posts on Facebook and Twitter, the blogs I saw were those by Mike Altman, Aaron Hughes, Finbarr Curtis, and Elesha Coffman. They’re all well worth reading. The issue, for some, seems to be that the VP nominees are both Christian […]

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