Tag: Immigration


None is Too Many*

Cover art for Ken Burns' documentary "The U.S. and the Holocaust"

Bar none, Ken Burns (b. 1953) is decidedly America’s most important documentary filmmaker, notable as well for his multi-episode contributions exploring facets of this nation’s history and story His latest contribution—The U.S. and the Holocaust [2022; 3]—is no exception, and, as he himself has acknowledged in more than one interview, builds upon his 2014 The Roosevelts where the Holocaust/Shoah played only a relatively minor role, but one which he readily has also acknowledged may yet prove to be the “most […]

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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.  […]

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Prof. Crews — Outside the Classroom

Prof. Emily Crews, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, recently joined us as an instructor in the Department of Religious Studies.  After serving two years as a volunteer in Namibia, she carried out fieldwork in Chicago Pentecostal churches. Currently, she teaches REL 105 Honors Introduction to the Study of Religion and REL 360 Religion in Pop Culture while she finishes her Ph.D. dissertation. […]

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Road Trip

Early Monday morning my advisor, Russell McCutcheon, and I traveled down the road and across the state line to visit Mississippi State University. Since my acceptance into the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama’s new M.A. program a few months ago, Russell and I have been discussing the possibility of having Dr. Mary Rebecca Read-Wahidi serve on my advisory committee. Dr. Read-Wahidi attended the University of Alabama for her Ph.D. in Anthropology and was advised under Dr. Bill […]

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On Immigration, Identity, and White Privilege

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She is currently 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. Hi, I’m Andie, and I’m an immigrant. But we’ll get to that. As I wrote this on Election Day in the U.S., I, like many of you I suspect, got very little work done. Instead, I was tuning in on […]

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