Philosophy of Religion – Studying Religion in Culture

Podcast Series: Teaching Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

February 7, 2022 by Nathan Loewen

Can philosophy of religion enter the globalized, 21st-century world? If so, how might the field be taught? Prof. Loewen interviewed participants from a recently-concluded project funded by the Wabash Center, “Teaching Philosophy of Religion Inclusively to Diverse Students”: Jin Y. Park, Kevin Schilbrack, Eric Dickman, Louis Komjathy, and Gereon Kopf. You can listen to the episodes as a series on REL Podcasts or find them on the media page of the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion website. […]

All ToC and No Action: Feminism in Philosophy of Religion Textbooks

November 29, 2021 by Nathan Loewen

Feminist theory is all but absent from contemporary research in philosophy of religion. Open a textbook from the field and peruse the table of contents (ToC), and you might see “feminism” listed as a chapter or sub-heading. The contents of that chapter will very likely include references to works published squarely within the 1990s by self-identified “feminist philosophers of religion.” * After reading that section of the textbook, readers will ask: “If even one feminist critique is even partly correct, […]

Mining Futures for the Philosophy of Religion: What to Do with 80,000 or so Journal Articles

March 2, 2020 by Nathan Loewen

vizualization of the topics generated by latent dirichlet analysis

By Nathan Loewen and Jackson Foster We have some questions. Given its conventional focus on topics and problems specific to Western Christianity, how might the philosophy of religion enter the 21st century, globalized world? How may researchers build bridges from those conventional approaches towards other topics and problems? Steven Dawson’s essay reviews some conventional approaches to answering these questions. Were it useful to find complimentary research from other (sub)fields, however, how might this be done across thousands of other, specialized […]

The Book Event – As Told in Pictures

November 15, 2018 by Morgan Frick

Last Thursday, the Religious Studies Department hosted its second annual book event at Ernest & Hadley Booksellers in downtown Tuscaloosa. The refreshments and cozy ambiance created the perfect atmosphere for any book lover to mingle and browse the store. Professors, students, and even Tuscaloosa locals joined us to discuss Prof. Ramey‘s and Prof. Loewen‘s recently published books. […]

Damned if You Zoo, Damned if You Don’t: Mignolo and the Philosophy of Religion

September 6, 2017 by Nathan Loewen

While the future and composition of the philosophy of religion is being challenged by several authors, I’ll wager that few are daring to teach its topics differently in their 100-level courses. For Labor Day weekend (2017), I was at Drake University for a meeting of the seminar on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion. Where mainstream philosophers of religion mostly concern themselves with topics culled from Abrahamic religions, a primary objective is to create teaching resources based on a wider […]

Theses on a Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion: Part 1

December 3, 2015 by Nathan Loewen

I made a promise during the inaugural seminar on the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion that met last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion: to apply Bruce Lincoln’s theses on method to the philosophy of religion. The seminar itself has the objective of producing a new philosophy of religion textbook that”thoroughly integrates non theistic religious philosophies and critically engages the methodological and theoretical issues of religious studies.” Why? As I have written elsewhere, a review of the TOCs of […]

Have You Met Prof. Bagger?

September 22, 2015 by admin

The Department recently hired Dr. Matt Bagger as an Instructor. So, as you probably guessed, a video was on the way. And so, here it is. If you see him around Manly Hall give him a warm Roll Tide welcome! He’ll appreciate it. An Interview with Dr. Bagger from UA Religious Studies. […]

Studying Religion in Culture

Ongoing Discussions at the University of Alabama

Tag: Philosophy of Religion