The depiction of Southern Christianity is limited somewhat on Nashville (see previous entry). It also makes a small but significant appearance on another popular prime time TV show: Scandal. Part The West Wing, part Homeland, Scandal develops in two locations, primarily: the Oval Office of the White House and the Office of Pope and Associates. The main characters of the show are Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), a manager of political crises, and Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III (Tony Goldwyn), the President of […]
Tag: Religion
The Relevance of “Church”
In our classrooms, we often discuss the challenge of defining categories like religion or the sacred. While those questions sometimes appear quite abstract, separated from the issues that intersect with daily life, the relevance of such analyses can be particularly relevant. An NPR story last night on Daystar, a “religious TV network”, focused on questions of categories and their practical implications. In short, since Daystar classifies itself as a church, a classification that the IRS accepts, the TV network does […]
Probing the Problematic Polls
A few days ago I posted on Facebook and asked when someone was going to tackle a dissertation on the Pew Charitable Trust or its research wing, and the way in which their seemingly objective polling is actually constituting a very particular sort of social world into which it is trying to fit the entire population of the globe. And voila, here’s a piece of data for that hypothetical dissertation: an article from the New York Review of Books on […]
Getting Our Hands on an Ungraspable Totality
Have you read Craig Martin‘s new interview with Talal Asad, just published in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion? […]
Making Cents
Every now and then you hear about a really large, anonymous tip that’s been left for a server — here’s a story (including video) from the other day on this very topic, from nearby Knoxville, TN. Of course, it’s hard for a scholar of religion not to hear things we commonly call religious scattered all throughout this story, like the Jesus has blessed us and we were led to give it to you. God Bless! note that accompanied the tip, […]
It Sticks With You
M.G. Proaps graduated from REL in 2013 and then landed in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is currently in the application process for graduate school. It’s pretty safe to say President Obama gets most things he does scrutinized and what he buys at Christmas time would be no exception. Indeed, among many an article analyzing whether it was Obama’s worst year ever or just worst year as president, what he bought at a bookstore seems like a rather modest topic to […]
Finding or Fabricating?
Michael Pye, the onetime General Secretary of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), and respected specialist in the study of Japanese religions, recently presented a keynote lecture — “Digging for Theory” — at a conference at the University of Göttingen, Germany. […]
What is the Academic Study of Religion?: A Graduate’s Perspective
Tim Davis earned his B.A. in Religious Studies and Spanish in 2006. He went on to earn his J.D. at UA’s School of Law. He is now practices law, with an emphasis in civil litigation, in St. Clair County, AL. Tim wrote this piece for new REL students shortly before graduating. As an entering freshman at The University of Alabama I knew that my older sister, a junior at the time, was a Religious Studies major but I had no […]
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Hocus Pocus
Have you seen this clip making the rounds on the internet? Despite it being an ad for a movie (sigh — everything’s an ad for something, no?) and assuming that the unassuming people depicted in it really were unassuming, then their reactions raise a curious question for those who rather confidently distinguish between domains we call religion and science based on the latter being rational and modern and the former not. […]