If you were watching CNN midday today then you might have heard LZ Granderson‘s interview, commenting on several days of nation-wide protests in the US that have resulted from yet another African American man dying at the hands of the police — this time a man named George Floyd, in Minneapolis. What Granderson said caught my ear, for it’s just the sort of thing that I’d hope that the students trained in our Department would not just understand but be […]
Tag: Classification
“Happy Arbitrary New Year”
A friend on social media wished everyone a “happy arbitrary new year” last night. And it got me thinking. We all know — right? — that there’s a variety of dating systems that have existed historically, let alone today (case in point: see the January 25th Chinese new year on that image up above…?). So, at some level, most of us surely understand that it isn’t really the start of a new year today. Instead, should we grant the Gregorian […]
True or False or a Mix of Both? The Dissonance of the Gospels presented in Galatia
Rebekah Pearson ’22 is a Religious Studies-Dance Performance double major. In Prof. Newton’s Introduction to the New Testament course, she examined Paul’s Letter to the Galatians as an artifact of competing social definitions. This essay was part of her group’s Bible in Culture zine. Learn more in the first, second, third, and fourth posts of the series. Imagine this: You have been running for over an hour and you finally make it to what you think is the finish line of your first […]
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We Can’t Leave Tesla Alone
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 […]
The Sacred is the Profane
The other day I was looking at UVA’s podcast, now with several episodes (give it a listen), and couldn’t help but notice a nice example of a theoretical and methodological fracture point in the field, one which likely prompts people to pick a side when doing their work. For although I agree that “the sacred is the profane,” Bill Arnal and I didn’t quite have this sense of the phrase in mind when picking a title for a set of […]
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. […]
The Incongruity Is What It’s All About
I got an email the other day from a student elsewhere in the US who was working on a paper on religion and film. I’m not sure how the paper will turn out, but when we later connected by phone I tried to prompt the student to think about this common genre — religion and film — not in terms of the data but in terms of something else. […]
The One Game to Rule Them All: The 2019 Manly Cup Recap
In the Department of Religious Studies, we train students in the nuance of comparison and sophisticated understandings of classification. What better test could we offer at the end of the semester than the 11th Annual Manly Cup Competitive UNO Tournament. […]
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What’s Screamo? How the Same Term Can Mean Different Things
Kyle Ashley is a junior from Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Majoring in Religious Studies, his main interests include loitering in libraries, copious amounts of coffee, and keeping it emo in 2019. “Knuckle Puck is awesome, but they can be a little screamo,” my stepbrother Tanner states, responding to my recommendation for which band he should play next. “Ya… I guess.” I respond. We were fresh off attending the “Last cross-country Warped Tour” (Vans Warped Tour, for those who may not know, […]
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Argument Analysis: Legion v. American Humanist Association
Jackson Foster is a freshman at UA, majoring in Religious Studies and History and minoring in the Blount Undergraduate Initiative and Randall Research Scholars Program. He is currently studying the intersections between law, politics, and religion in Dr. Altman’s REL130 course. This piece was originally published in High School SCOTUS, a national Supreme Court blog comprised of young students like Jackson. The Supreme Court heard arguments last month in American Legion v. American Humanist Association, a case involving a 40-foot […]
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