Tag: popular culture


Making Sense of Debates on Harry Style’s Fashion with Religious Studies: Authority, Legitimation, and Authenticity

Callie Mastin graduated this August with a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and International Studies with a minor in French. Callie was a student in REL 105 with Professor Griffin in Spring 2022. It’s no secret that Harry Style’s use of gender non-conforming fashion is a hotly debated topic. When Styles, wearing a custom Gucci dress, appeared on the front cover of Vogue as the first solo male cover in Vogue’s history, both fans’ and critics’ reactions were mixed. […]

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Simulation Theory: How is ‘Religion’ Part of It?

Tyler Dettmar developed this post from a presentation originally created for Prof. Lauren Horn Griffin’s REL 245, American Religious History. Special thanks for editorial assistance from REL’s graduate student Jacob Barrett. In recent years, something called simulation theory has begun appearing more frequently in public discourse. Public figures such as Elon Musk have called attention to this ideology, spreading quickly over social media. With the latest movie in The Matrix franchise coming out a few weeks ago, conversation about simulation […]

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Sneaker Culture: An Item-Based Religious Movement?

Drew Whinery, from Tuscaloosa, AL, is a senior majoring in Music, with a minor in Criminal Justice. The following post developed from a presentation originally created for an REL class with Prof. Lauren Horn Griffin. As a college student, I tend to stay up with trends. One that has been popular for years is known as “Sneaker Culture.” The idea behind Sneaker Culture is that certain shoes, or sneakers, are released in a limited supply and many people seek them […]

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A Religious Studies Guide to WrestleMania

On the first page of Imagining Religion, historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith writes: For the self-conscious student of religion, no datum possess intrinsic interest. It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratis of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion. For Smith, and I agree with him, scholars should choose particular examples as data that suit particular questions that they want to answer. In this way, the scholar of religion is not bound by […]

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Identity at the Crossroads of अवतार and Avatar: What’s Real about Hatsune Miku?

As a young lad in the 1984, I listened to the song by Rez Band that asked “Who’s Real Anymore?” Wendy Kaiser’s answer implicitly raises Holden Caulfield’s indictment of “phony” against the evangelists of her time. According to Kaiser, their televised personalities were not really Christian because their bottom line was money rather than real evangelism. Intellectual discussions about real versus not-real begin long before the 1980s. These discussions track along different lines, too. Questions concerning claims about reality have been […]

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Ghost in The Shell and the Shadow of World Powers

Ting GUO received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh and has worked for the European Studies Centre, University of Oxford and the Center on Religion and Chinese Society, Purdue University. She is interested in questions of human autonomy and political freedom within the conjunctions of religion, culture, and society, and how the structure of world powers is manifested in the intellectual interpretations of critical social theory and philosophy. She writes bilingually and contributes for outlets including Los […]

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REL 360 presents: Lage Raho Munna Bhai (another movie night!)

If you’ve been keeping up with the latest developments in the REL department, you probably know that we have a brand new one-credit course this year: REL 360. REL 360 screens a select group of movies throughout the semester, and the next one is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Everyone’s invited, not just those enrolled in the course! We’ll be watching Lage Raho Munna Bhai. We’re hoping for a good turnout from students involved in Asian Studies, too. Dr. […]

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Top Ten Tips for Academic Blogging

REL 360 is our brand new, one-credit course entitled “Popular Culture/Public Humanities,” and organized by Prof. Rollens. Students who take this course watch a series of movies, attend a public lecture, and then have the opportunity to discuss the material together with faculty. They write short responses to their favorite events, one of which will eventually be published on our department’s blog. To introduce the students to the phenomenon of academic blogging, their first assignment was to examine other posts on the department […]

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Zombie Live Tweets Are Not a Contradiction in Terms

See you at tomorrow’s #Day2014 lecture on religion in popular culture (in Gorgas Library 205)? If not, then we’ll be live tweeting @StudyReligion, starting around 7 pm (central time). Tune in and see what the zombie apocalypse is all about. Follow @StudyReligion Tweet #DAY2014 […]

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