My father used to tell me that we were made up of stories, our and stories of those who came before us. He told me that, “You don’t exist if you don’t know your stories.” For most, the term “humanities” relates to the study of how “people process and document the human experience.” (http://shc.stanford.edu/what-are-the-humanities) For […]
continue readingSimulation 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 […]
continue readingAll ToC and No Action: Feminism in Philosophy of Religion Textbooks
Feminist theory is all but absent from contemporary research in philosophy of religion. Open a textbook from the field and peruse the table of contents (ToC), and you might see “feminism” listed as a chapter or sub-heading. The contents of that chapter will very likely include references to works published squarely within the 1990s by […]
continue readingRELdl’s Tools Facilitate Better Conversations Virtual Guests: Perhaps “OWL” Being See You at REL?
What is this? Have you tried using a basic computer web camera to capture conversations with a classroom? Prof. Loewen has experimented with dozens of ultimately unsatisfactory methods since 2009. With the arrival of the REL digital lab in 2021, things have changed.
continue readingCan We Analyze Trumpism as a Millenarian Movement?
Elizabeth Tagg is a graduating senior in the Department of Religious Studies, writing a thesis on apocalyptic rhetoric in the age of Trump. Donald Trump built his reputation as a political outsider who could “drain the swamp,” fix a broken system, and make America great again. Indeed, in his 2016 RNC speech, he declared that […]
continue readingOur Pre- & Inter- Pandemic Teaching was Never “Normal” (p.s. nor our post-pandemic teaching, too!)
Two Perspectives I wish to talk about specific methods I and my colleagues adopted for pre-, inter and post-pandemic teaching.* I come at this with two perspectives: Teaching – As a freshly-tenured professor of religious studies at a public, R1 university (University of Alabama). My current research coordinates and publishes research with the Global-Critical Philosophy […]
continue readingCivil Religion or Christian Nationalism?
How scholars use categories to name things, and thereby identify those things that deserve our critical attention, has long interested me. And among the things that have caught my attention over the years is the once prominent category “civil religion” — one made famous by the late U.S. sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s […]
continue readingYour Sun Bread, Yourself
Every year my kids and I make Sun Bread to commemorate the winter solstice. I got this idea from the place where modern momming dwells: Instagram. My kids (by chance) went to a Waldorf preschool which focuses, among other things, on reinforcing the children’s identification with nature and spending the majority of time outside regardless […]
continue readingThe Relevance of Religious Studies is Not that We Study Religion
Jacob Barrett is a first year M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. From Colorado Springs, he earned his B.A. from Nebraska Wesleyan University in Philosophy & Religion and Biology. In the Spring he will present his research at the southeast regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion. […]
continue readingCourse Prep and Summer Projects
It was indeed an odd summer, for everyone. That we all know. What you might not know is that the REL faculty, despite being home since mid-March — minimizing trips out of the house, shopping carefully, and, in some cases, spending lots of their time either homeschooling children or packing up and moving houses (whether […]
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