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Tag: Classification

Out in the Open: We All Fit a Certain Category

by admin

Sarah Griswold is a junior double majoring in Mathematics and Religious Studies. She spends her “free time” analyzing her favorite shows on Netflix, which of course winds up ruining them. She is currently enrolled in an independent study with Dr. Simmons where she is analyzing the popular HBO series “True Detective.” “You know I’ve seen all the different types. We all fit a certain category.” – Marty Hart One of the great things about the Religious Studies department here at UA […]

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“Tonight We May be Showmen; Tomorrow We’ll be Servicing Your Cars”

by Russell McCutcheon

A few days ago I was online discussing with a grad of our Department how advertising works in media — i.e., how it is not difficult to understand the content of, say, a newspaper, website, or television as simply serving the role of bringing the eyes of readers or viewers (in fact, let’s just call them consumers) to the ads which finance the medium in the first place. (In this day and age of cable fees and Netflix or Hulu […]

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Profiting from a Bankruptcy

by Russell McCutcheon

Are you looking for a way to think through what it takes for a local idea to spread worldwide and be adopted globally — an idea such as the now taken-for-granted assumption that the world has such things in it as religions, which exist in a variety of (as Wilfred Cantwell Smith once phrased it) major or minor forms that, mostly, end in the suffix -ism? Well, look no further than the marketing campaign for W. W. Norton’s new anthology […]

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Is It Really About the Color?

by Andie Alexander

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She is now working on her M.A. in Religious Studies at CU Boulder. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. Last night, as I was gearing up for TGIT, my friend texted me a link to this Buzzfeed article that started going viral. The article featured a photo of a dress (pictured above), that in particular lighting and […]

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Excuse Me, You Have Something on Your Forehead

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Sarah Griswold is a junior double majoring in Mathematics and Religious Studies. She spends her “free time” analyzing her favorite shows on Netflix, which of course winds up ruining them. To get you started for some Ash Wednesday talk, enjoy some GloZell: Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten Season – the days leading up to Easter, meant to symbolize Jesus’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. By now, you probably have seen people with ashes on their […]

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Our Interpretive Introductory Courses

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Mark Ortiz is a senior double-majoring in Religious Studies and New College with a depth study in Political Ecology. He is especially interested in climate politics and that bundle of things and stuff we call “nature.” As part of an independent study this semester, I’ve been very busy chatting to professors in the department about their approaches to teaching the introductory course in our discipline. I found this assignment especially timely, as I am slated to begin a graduate program […]

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Terrorism or Trauma?

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Alyssa MacDougall, who earned an undergraduate degree in the study of religion and philosophy at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is now a master’s student in media studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. Her thesis research is focused on the effects of framing of Muslims in the western media. If you’re interested in her musings about her two cats, religion, media and graduate life, you can find her on twitter under the handle @alyssamacd. […]

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Classifying Classification in the Study of Religion

by Russell McCutcheon

So ends the late Charles J. Adams‘s classic entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica on the topic of “Classification of Religions.” Or consider the Encyclopedia of Religion‘s own entry on the same topic (not updated in the second edition), this time written by the late Harry B. Partin — which concludes as follows: […]

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“What’s this argument about?”

by Russell McCutcheon

Yesterday we posted about a current US Supreme Court case concerning a local ordinance in Gilbert, Arizona, that curtails displaying certain signs (in the case before the court, a church sign) but not others — a case that, on first glance, might seem rather uninteresting but which, if you look again, turns out to involve principles that many would see as being at the very heart of a liberal democracy. […]

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