Tag: special


The Ordinary as Exotic

Lately I’ve been paying some attention to studies of the so-called paranormal or the non-ordinary — this recent podcast for example. For these seem to be fairly recent categories that are growing in popularity among scholars of religion; given the critiques that have been leveled at the category religion over the past few decades, it appears that what many of us might have once called religion or religious experience is now just being classed among an even larger group of […]

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… All Across Culture

About ten years ago the Department came up with a motto: Studying Religion in Culture. The “in” was italicized to stress the point that, unlike the common “religion and culture” construction that we see all across the field, at the University of Alabama we did not conceive of these two as separate domains that, like billiard balls, sometimes bump into each other (and thus the task of the scholar is to tract the collisions). Instead, the domain we know as […]

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