Tag: Steven Ramey


When Religion and Artistic License Clash

Jackson Nock is a senior from Denver, Colorado. He is a double major in International Studies and Religious Studies with a minor in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.This post was written as part of Prof. Ramey’s REL 322: Tales from Asia course. When we think of art, we think of a world in which creativity and expression know no bounds. However, when certain stories are labeled as “religious” or “sacred” as opposed to “non-religious,” we seem to look at art differently. In […]

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Classroom to Conference: REL Majors Presenting Their Research

REL is very happy to announce that two of our students have been accepted to present their research at the Southeastern regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion in March. Jared Powell will be presenting a paper titled “And the Beat Goes On: Imaginings and Retellings of Han Shan by Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac.” The conference paper began as a project in Dr. Ramey‘s REL 419: Tales From Asia course. In the paper, he analyzes the ways in which […]

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Marketing and the Academic Study of Religion

What connects red lipstick, racecars, and health care? The study of religion, of course! (Well, sort of.) Khara Cole, a 2013 graduate with a double major in Religious Studies and Public Relations, has found the skills that she developed in Religious Studies particularly important, as she designs products and their implementation for a health insurance company. She returned to campus last week to talk about her experiences working in the corporate world. The tasks of writing persuasive business proposals and […]

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The Critical Study of Religion at the University of Alabama

Have you ever been to one of our Aronov Lectures? Well, Dr. Steven Ramey, Associate Professor in REL and Director of UA’s Asian Studies program, has just a published an edited collection of the first decades’ worth of these annual guest lectures (established in 2002), entitled Writing Religion (University of Alabama Press). We recently asked him a few questions about the volume.  […]

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What’s the Point?

As discussions about the relevance of what we do in religious studies, and academia in general, have become more common lately, my own emphases have coalesced around the skills that the humanities help scholars (whether students or faculty or interested blog readers) develop. And that emphasis on skills is not limited to our work in the classroom. […]

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