Jackson Foster is a freshman at UA, majoring in Religious Studies and History and minoring in the Blount Undergraduate Initiative and Randall Research Scholars Program. He is currently studying the intersections between law, politics, and religion in Dr. Altman’s REL130 course. This piece was originally published in High School SCOTUS, a national Supreme Court blog […]
continue readingUsing Sports to Understand Social Perspectives
Ally Manel is a sophomore from Holbrook, New York. She is a dual degree candidate in Biology and Religious Studies, as well as a member of the University of Alabama Equestrian Team. With the Final Four just around the corner, millions of people will tune in to watch their favorite college teams compete for the […]
continue readingA Return to the Nacirema
Ryland Hunstad, a student in Prof. Simmons’s REL 100 this past semester, is a sophomore from Denver, Colorado majoring in finance & management information systems, with interests in politics, philosophy, & religion. In the following post he offers some further reflections on a group of people who were originally studied, in the mid-1950s, by the […]
continue readingPublic Service Announcement
The day I meet postmodernists whose relativism does not disappear the minute they start talking about salaries and workloads is the day I will take relativism seriously. That’s a quotation I saw posted on social media yesterday, from Steve Bruce‘s new book Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science. My comment on the site? I […]
continue readingI, Robot… I, Ethical
On my morning drive into work, I heard a news report on autonomous and intelligent road vehicles, or self-driving automobiles. The story explained that as these vehicles are optimized for road safety, designers must determine programming imperatives such as whether a vehicle should prioritize the safety of the human “driver” or a pedestrian in a […]
continue readingTaco Insights on Faculty Service
With the start of another school year right around the corner I’m thinking about service — one of those three main areas into which scholars usually divide up their work (the others being research and teaching, of course — and the order in which they’re written is not insignificant). It’s not hard to find faculty […]
continue readingCar, Jesus, and Punk Rock
Kendrick Jacobs is a senior from Jupiter, Florida majoring in Religious Studies. The following blog post was written for REL 360: Popular Culture/Humanities. Repo Man at first glance comes off as being another cult classic film. It captures a moment in American history you can’t read in a book or put your finger on, but […]
continue readingA Different Kind of Bible
Katy Glime is a junior Chemical Engineering major and Religious Studies minor from Sacramento, California. The following blog post was written for REL 360: Popular Culture/Humanities.
continue readingUnderstanding Our Present Moment
My colleague tweeted the following the other day: If only there was an academic discipline that studied myth, history, and meaning-making that could say something about these monuments. — Michael J. Altman (@MichaelJAltman) August 17, 2017 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js It was a bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but it made a good point, I think, as he […]
continue readingHow to Be Curious
Among my courses this Fall semester — starting in a little over a week — is one on theories of religion; in one way or another I’ve taught elements of a course like this many times (in fact, my intro course even touches on some of these topics), but rarely in a seminar devoted to […]
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