News – Studying Religion in Culture

Announcing the 2019 American Examples Participants

October 18, 2018 by Michael Altman

Earlier this fall we announced a new working group for early career scholars of religion in America, American Examples. Thanks to funding from REL and the College of Arts and Sciences we will be hosting 6 participants on campus for a workshop that will produce an anthology of new papers taking a new approach to the study of religion in America. We are happy and excited to announce the participants in the inaugural year of the working group: For more […]

The “News” Askew

April 22, 2016 by admin

Image from Creative Commons: Public Domain The following is cross-posted from RELephantUA, the class blog for the REL Captsone Seminar. Be sure to check their blog for more great posts studying religion in culture. By Chris Beacham Yesterday afternoon, a swarm of protesters marched to the steps of the United States capitol to protest the undue influence of money in politics and corporate lobbying. The group peacefully approached the capitol building, and many were quickly arrested, including a journalist for the popular show “The Young […]

REL Announces a New Hire

December 27, 2014 by admin

The Department of Religious Studies is very pleased to announce that it has now finalized another new hire: Vaia Touna, who works on ancient and modern Greek identity, as examples of wider issues in identity studies, will begin as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, in August 2015. Vaia is currently completing her dissertation in the academic study of religion at the University of Alberta, entitled “The Politics of ‘Greek Identity’: Discourses on the Religious Self and Tradition”; she has also earned […]

The World Religions Discourse in Practice

June 2, 2014 by Russell McCutcheon

How does the discourse on world religions work? Well, consider news stories like this one. […]

Membership Has Its Privileges

April 26, 2014 by Russell McCutcheon

My first book, Manufacturing Religion, was a critique of what I called the discourse on sui generis religion — that is, the approach to studying religion that presumes its object of study is somehow unique, self-caused, original, one of a kind, can’t be fully explained, etc. To rephrase it, it was a critique of those who think that, when it comes to studying religion, a special set of interpretive tools must be used, to get at the deep meaning of […]