Jonathan Z. Smith – Page 2 – Studying Religion in Culture

Coming Attractions: REL 490 Capstone Senior Seminar

October 29, 2017 by admin

REL 490 is the Department’s senior seminar, that’s offered each Spring. Required of all majors, its topic regularly changes as does the professor who offers it. The goal of the course is to offer some sort of test case or example that can provide an opportunity for students with wide interests to mull over the skills that were gained throughout the degree. This Spring it’s Prof. McCutcheon who is teaching the course and the topic is the work of Jonathan […]

Agency, Structure, and the Myth of the Immaculate Perception

April 30, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

National Public Radio on the weekend played a story (an interview with Neal Gabler, the author of an Atlantic article on the same topic) about how hard many in the US have it economically. […]

Our Highest Ideals

July 8, 2015 by Russell McCutcheon

I recall a close friend, almost 30 years ago, to whom I asked the following often-heard question, when they’d just had their first child: Is he a good baby? His reply? We don’t believe in making moral judgments about our child. I admit that the answer came as a bit of a surprise, since I was simply interested in knowing if the baby was sleeping the whole night through and eating ok; but, sure, after I thought about it for […]

The Eternal Return All Over Again

February 28, 2015 by Russell McCutcheon

I wrote a post recently in which I critiqued a new book by Brent Plate, saying it (along with other developments in the field, such as the turn toward so-called embodied or lived religion) was evidence that the work of Eliade was still representative of the field, no matter how much distance some may claim separates us today from when he first wrote many of his now famous studies in the history of religions (that is, back in the 1950s). […]

Classifying Classification in the Study of Religion

February 17, 2015 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: […]

“Well I Guess the Biggest Question Would Be Why…”

December 6, 2014 by Russell McCutcheon

“It is the fact that we have been preoccupied for a long time with finding in this seamless web of human activities the capacity to break one out and say ‘When they’re doing that one they’re doing religion’…” Watch the video here: This interview with Prof. Smith was conducted by Prof. Alfred F. Benney, of Fairfield University, while attending the annual AAR/SBL in Boston, MA, on November 21, 1999. […]

The Difficult Art

July 18, 2014 by Russell McCutcheon

“What we labor at together in college is the production of individuals who know not only that the world is far more complex than it first appears, but also that, therefore, interpretative decisions must be made, decisions of judgment which entail real consequences for which one must take responsibility, from which one may not flee by the dodge of disclaiming expertise. This ultimately political quest for paradigms, for the acquisition of the powers and skills of informed judgment, for the […]

No Chili Peppers

May 30, 2014 by Russell McCutcheon

There’s a bit of a controversy brewing in social media over a new review essay published in the our field’s main peer review periodical, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, on the book, On Teaching Religion, edited by Chris Lehrich and containing some of the writings on pedagogy by Jonathan Z. Smith. The reviewer, a onetime student of Smith’s, reflects on her own experience in his classes, as an undergrad at the University of Chicago in the late-1990s, in […]

A New Blog for a New Job

May 14, 2014 by admin

Prof. Altman, who worked as an Instructor in our department in 2013-14 and who begins as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2014, has revamped his blog. Check it out. […]

The Messy Ephemera of Day-to-Day Life

October 2, 2013 by admin

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 […]

Studying Religion in Culture

Ongoing Discussions at the University of Alabama

Tag: Jonathan Z. Smith