Tag: Critical Thinking


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 […]

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Ritual Fail

Several of our students and faculty members were at the College of Arts & Sciences’ tent this past Saturday for Homecoming, when Departments are invited to staff a table or two for a few hours and do something creative for fans and alumni attending the football game. There’s face painting and beanbag games, lots of candy and performances by students from the School of Music. While we can’t compete with the huge snakes that the Department of Biology always brings, […]

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The Messy Ephemera of Day-to-Day Life

By Melanie Williams Melanie printed her diploma on sheepskin using an HP OfficeJet 6500, the beast of home printers. The diploma states that she graduated in 2006, with a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies. Since then she has been a cook, server, deckhand, goat milker, office assistant, and general itinerant laborer. Tomorrow she will mend the fence (it makes the neighbors better.) I don’t know what it’s like to be a college freshman today but I still like to […]

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Who Gets to Think?

Think New Thoughts! A recent tagline promoting the Department of Religious Studies is not simply highlighting our desire to challenge student preconceptions but emphasizing our department’s effort to develop important intellectual skills. While public discourse often emphasizes education as the means to gain economically and overcome poverty, some evidence suggests that economic privilege breeds economic success and that education for the children of the 1% may differ from education for children of the lower rungs of society. […]

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“The Stories of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated…”

Seen this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education? Give it a read and ask yourself why — if this is what the public actually thinks — we all seem to assume that there’s a crisis in the liberal arts? That is, if the skills taught all across the liberal arts are so essential (read the results [PDF] of the study for yourself) then why do we all seem to agree so easily that they are so non-essential — i.e., […]

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Who Needs the Business School!

 Ben Simmons, an REL major, graduated in 2009. Since then, he has started his own online business. This originally appeared as an article in the Department’s 2011-12 Newsletter. View the Newsletter here (PDF). I came to the University of Alabama in the fall of 2007 with an eye toward a degree in History because I enjoyed it, without considering how useful that degree would be out in the “real world.”  So, I signed up for other classes that I thought would be “easy […]

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So Madison Avenue Made a Farmer…

It’s not news to anyone to hear about the decline of the family-owned farm in the U.S. For example, consider this chart, from a 2007 article (click the graphic to go to the article), which tracks the dramatic increase in farm size, over the past 50 years, coupled with the equally dramatic decline in the total number of farms: […]

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