Our own Dr. Merinda Simmons recently published a book, titled Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora. In this post, she sat down for an interview to discuss the book, her work, and its relations to the academic study of religion. […]
Tag: Authenticity
On Not Knowing Where to Look
Those who sustain this idealized image of culture do so … by mistaking the dominant fraction … of a given group for the group or “culture” itself. At the same time, they mistake the ideological positions favored and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of the group as a whole…. Scholarly misrecognitions of this sort replicate the misrecognitions and misrepresentations of those the scholars privilege as their informants. (Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study […]
Religion on the Television (Part 1)
A recent article in the online journal Religious Dispatches discusses the Southern Christian presence, or lack thereof, on the hit television show Nashville. In an intriguing analysis, writer Carrie Allen Tipton points to the popular “spirituality” the show displays instead of the evangelical piety one would expect to find in a program situated in the Bible Belt and devoted to the culture of country of music. Perhaps the a-religiosity of the show can be attributed to the presumed proliferation of the […]
Competing Representations
T. Nicole Goulet is a Sessional Instructor at the University of Manitoba and Brandon University. Having completed her Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba on textual representations of Sarada Devi, Dr. Goulet continues her research on the intersection of colonial politics and religious practice in India, with special reference to gender. After an online conversation about the recent Doniger/Penguin affair it was evident that she had something new to say about this episode and so we invited this post. In […]
Relative Authenticity
By Micah Davis Micah Davis is a nineteen year-old sophomore majoring in philosophy at the University of Alabama. He is also a Religious Studies minor. Attack on Titan is a current production anime that began airing in 2013 in Japan based on a manga created in 2009. There is a new live action movie adaptation which is set to release in 2015. If you YouTube “Attack on Titan live action movie,” you will find a couple of different versions of the advertisement […]
Grand Theft Auto Anyone?
By Seth Cox Seth Cox is double majoring in Religious Studies and Philosophy. He is interested in the interactions between practitioners of historically Asian religions and the rest of the world. This post originally appeared at Monks and Nones, the blog of REL 371. Controversy. It doesn’t matter which side of a controversy you are on, if the controversy is big enough it will catch public attention. Grand Theft Auto V (or GTAV) is the fastest game to reach 1 […]
Mind the Gap
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. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. While scrolling through Facebook the other day, I came across this video that discussed the benefit of performing Shakespeare’s plays in their “Original Pronunciation,” or “OP.” Take a look… […]
Stars Upon Thars
“This so-called real world is the same place we’ve always been, of course….” So said Greg Johnson, in the close to his public lecture the other day (read the conclusion to his paper here). This is an exceedingly important point, I think; the university as a whole, and of course the Humanities in particular, are often accused of being disengaged from this real world; the privileged, “ivory tower” (a phrase we get from the Song of Solomon–hardly a working class […]
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Those familiar with the online comic, PhD Comics may be familiar with the following strip (originally posted on September 3, 2007): […]