Kim Davis is a 2003 graduate of REL. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2020 and became an avid explorer, hiker, and trail runner much to the surprise of everyone who knows her. She invites everyone to come experience the Land of Enchantment. When I moved from Alabama to New Mexico, I became an aficionado of New Mexican chile. New Mexican chile is not the meat and beans stew that is prepared in the Southeast, but rather it is the pepper grown from Capsicum annuum ‘New Mexico Group.’ Green chiles are prepared by roasting and then chopping them to use as a topping and the ripened red chiles ..read more

Taylor Swift’s concert tour has generated significant attention with heartwarming stories of supportive parents, marriage proposals, and the like, along with lots of memes. One author compared the experience with group singing in worship settings, calling the concert “The Church of Taylor Swift”. The post certainly touches on an important element within both Taylor Swift concerts and congregational worship, the experience of group singing. However, thinking critically about who creates the comparison, based on what assumptions, and for what ends (which my students hear a lot). In this case, t ..read more

Photo from Eva Rinaldi on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Madeline Brodbeck, who is a junior majoring in Religious Studies and Political Science. While participating in an icebreaker last semester, we were asked to share our major with a small group of classmates. When it came to be my turn, I informed the group that I was double majoring in political science and religious studies. My classmates were very interested to learn more about my religious studies major. One classmate responded, “You don’t look like a religious studies major.” She seemed genuinely confused. I did not fit her idea of what one ..read more

In his announcements last week that he is running for President of the United States, Vivek Ramaswamy employed the language of religion to make his case. Both in his various tweets, interviews, and Wall Street Journal op-ed, the successful businessman coined names for multiple “secular religions” (his term, not mine), including wokism, climateism, and Covidism. He asserted that those ideologies, movements, political positions, or however you want to label them reflect misplaced attempts to find meaning and purpose. Thus, his solution, at least from a rhetorical view, is to replace those “secu ..read more

By Daniel Levine. Anyone who’s taken REL 371 with me over the past three years – or has taken my Israel-Palestine course – will recall a persistent interest in fear: what it does to us, and the various means by which it is channeled to political ends.  Some of this work appeared in print for the first time last summer. One aspect of such ‘channeling’ comprises the use of ‘private languages’ to mark off particular fearful experiences: by soldiers and police; civilians in war zones, post-conflict environments, or otherwise minoritized; survivors of torture.  Such languages serve both ..read more

From Wikimedia Commons Kadence D. Jackson is a freshman majoring in Political Science and Religious Studies, along with a minor in Judaic Studies. “Evil, animals…,” “Devils, monsters, equivalent to Satan himself…”—these are expressions commonly used when we reference those who belonged to the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party during the Second World War. This language is usually voiced casually, perhaps as a means of rationalization; but ironically, I believe it’s actually disassociating Nazis from mankind. People tend to avoid criticizing those on the ‘right side’ of history, th ..read more

Still from a performance of Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Shimer College in Chicago in November 2009. Shown are characters Nagg and Nell, portrayed by Thomas Matysik and Raya Carr. In a short essay for the AJS Review, I consider how claims of justice work when teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict – a topic which figures centrally in my teaching both for Religious Studies (REL 371, offered every spring) and Political Science (PSC 344 – the Israel-Palestine Conflict). One common way to approach this question is through classical notions of tragedy: one is ..read more

Ellie Dilworth is a sophomore double majoring in Business Management and Religious Studies. This past summer, I had the privilege of serving as a camp counselor. For 9 weeks straight, I was pummeled with at least 200 questions a day (no joke), most of which along the lines of:  What time is it?  Where are we going? Can I go to the bathroom? There were, of course, some silly questions too. Among my favorites were:  Where do you get your hair cut?  Would your perfect boyfriend like Frito’s?  What would happen if I brought a can of gas to camp? Weeks of training prep ..read more

REL returns to its longtime tradition of an in-person Honors Day ceremony on the second floor balcony on Friday, April 7, 2023, beginning at 11:00 am (light refreshments provided). With no A&S Undergraduate Honors Day Convocation planned for this year, we’ll begin a little earlier than in the past, so that families and friends can get away for lunch downtown. We’ll be marking all of our students’ hard work this academic year but also honoring those who the scholarships committee have just selected for our various annual awards — and, as usual, there’s bound to be a few surprises. All of t ..read more

Photo by James Allen on Unsplash Classes begin this week, and REL’s faculty are looking forward to seeing who’s there. Read more The on-campus undergraduate courses in REL this semester include introductions to religious studies by Profs. Altman and Szanto. Other 100-level, introductory courses are being offered by Profs. Ramey, Loewen, and Kyselov. The 200-level courses have a variety of topical foci, with Prof. Jacobs teaching on Judaism, Prof. Newton on African Diaspora Religions, and Prof. Szanto on Islam. Prof. Jacobs also teaches a 300-level course on Jewish-Christian Rela ..read more