This October, we began our soft launch of Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations on Religion, Culture, and Teaching. You’ve encouraged our team to keep this thing going. We’re with you! We hope you’ll stay with us for our grand launch in January. Thanks to a grant from Elizabethtown College, we are able to hire a … Continue reading Calling All Students and Scholars
I’m going to throw this out there: there’s no natural-fit position for the religious studies major. And that’s not a bad thing.
Have you ever asked yourself what you need to read to join an academic conversation? The American Academy of Religion has compiled a recommended reading list. The suggestions come from chairs of the guild's program units (i.e. sub-fields). They have recommended two to five books which they consider influential, pivotal, seminal, or otherwise important publications in … Continue reading Religious Studies LLC and The Question of Canon
What if the study of religion started with the African American experience? Instead of privileging a specific tradition, this course examines the history of a people who came to a new world compelled to quickly learn the significance of "religion" itself. We will follow along by plumbing the depths of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, listening to … Continue reading REL 101 (WCH): Signifying Religion: An African American Worldview
To be clear, I'm not against statistics. We can qualify "religion." We can quantify "religion." But words and numbers represent human relationships (and thus, politics). Religious studies is about striving to see them more clearly. The discipline doesn't have a monopoly on this. But it is our intellectual burden, and we take it seriously.
