I have never wanted to go to law school or to become a lawyer, though interestingly enough, at least for me, as a scholar of both the Holocaust/Shoah and historical and contemporary genocides, I find myself addressing so-called “legal questions” in both.
continue readingPublic Scholarship MANIFESTO
In order to have a conversation about what Public Scholarship is and why we’re doing it, we’ll have to dodge the elephant in the room – what’s scholarship? What are we talking about when we call ourselves scholars? What had to happen for this thing we call “scholarship” to come into existence? To indulge in […]
continue readingWhat is Public Scholarship?
The term “public scholarship” is problematic for me. By using this term, it seems as though we are implying that there exist a scholar who has no public/audience. What would it mean for a scholar to not have a public? Even if the scholar wrote/created material, not for the “average Joe,” publishers, administrators, or students, […]
continue readingMaking Sense of Debates on Harry Style’s Fashion with Religious Studies: Authority, Legitimation, and Authenticity
Callie Mastin graduated this August with a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and International Studies with a minor in French. Callie was a student in REL 105 with Professor Griffin in Spring 2022. It’s no secret that Harry Style’s use of gender non-conforming fashion is a hotly debated topic. When Styles, wearing a custom […]
continue readingWho Believes in Conspiracy Theories?
As a scholar in religious studies, my interest was piqued when a recent “The Daily” episode from the New York Times discussed community formation in Birds Aren’t Real, a movement / conspiracy theory that claims the government has replaced birds with drones to conduct widespread surveillance. The analysis of people who connect with others […]
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 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 readingWhat is the Country’s Reality?
Allison Isidore is a second-year M.A. student in the Department of Religious Studies. Have you seen the new HBO show “Lovecraft Country”? In the series premiere, set in 1950s America, we follow Atticus Freeman (played by Jonathan Majors), Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), and George Freeman (Courtney B. Vance) as they travel to “Ardham,” Massachusetts, […]
continue readingTeaching the Bible in Culture: Identifying Room for Questions Unanswered
Prof. Newton reflects on his approach to teaching the Bible in a public university. Study religion and find out about the Bible in Culture here, part 1, and in future posts. One of my aims in my Introduction to New Testament course is to lead students in thinking carefully about the actors and drama represented in the […]
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