The latest episode of Broadcast Seeding is up! Dr. Susan Asbury (Middle Georgia State University) joined me to discuss her new book, Family Game Night: From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties (University Press of Kentucky). You can listen to it on iTunes, SoundCloud, or here on the site.

The REL Strategy Group newsletter went out this morning! If you are a religious studies professor interested building more resilient, 21st century programs at US colleges and universities, you need to be up on this. Monthly Zoom Meetings Resources to help you promote your program Unhidden Handbook on how to lead Exchanges with colleagues that get it. A whole lot more…. If you want to learn more, join the ListServ by reaching out to me, Richard Newton, rwnewton@ua.edu, and checkout the REL Toolbox.

Back in the studio recording another podcast.

A little bit from what I’m reading before the school year ramps up. “Computational cultural critics are incorporating rapidly developing methods of prompt-based and multimodal modeling while increasing their attentions to imagistic, videographic, and sonic analysis. Meanwhile, concepts of form and formalism continue to evolve across the broader humanities.” Tess McNulty and Laura Alice Chapot,“Computation and Form, Reconsidered,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 10.3,

Here we go! Back to a new school year. So far so good, especially for a Monday.

I have a love-hate relationship with games. I love having a common recreational activity to do with people that involves wits, brains, and a fun theme. I absolutely HATE learning the rules. I am not the kind of person who can just start playing and figure out as they go. I want to understand the rules and have adequate to think and ask questions.

Off-Script back with Fall ‘26 gatherings. Grab your calendars and save the date!

Reading around about “scriptures,” “ritual,” and why the twain meet less in scholarship than one would think.

I had no intention of color-coordinating outfits with my reading. But if ever there were a topic …

One of the things I love about the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama is our culture of student research. I have the pleasure of advising Sierra Ruden in our Religion in Culture MA program. Sierra has been using discourse analysis to examine the social function of award shows. Sierra's been experimenting with text coding, metadata management, and media production to think through what's going on when artists accept awards. Over on the Study Religion blog, Sierra shares a dispatch from her research. While undergoing this work, she noticed how awards shows buck against the subjectivty of art by creating a veneer of empirical measure.

it was a real treat to be on Dr. Smiti Nathan's amazing anthropology YouTube show, Curiosity Meets the Past. This is a go-to spot to learn about currents in anthropology and archaeology. Dr. Nathan interviewed me about my work and my latest project, Decoding Diaspora: Signifying J. A. Rogers' Mythic Africa.

This Monday, June 15 from Noon EST/11am Central, I’m talking about teaching tactics, pedagogical challenges, and more with the good folks of NAASR. It’s going down on here on Zoom for free courtesy of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. Thanks to my colleague, Dr. Merinda Simmons for the invite and for facilitating this workshop conversation. Hope to see some friendly faces and to make new connections to fellow Religious Studies teachers.

Going into the new month with some not-so-light reading. One of my students asked me how I read, and this picture encapsulates my process pretty well. I scan a work, its arguments and its structure. Then I write in the margins questions of clarification and questions of substance (shoutout Dr. Charles Wood). Then I use sticky notes to label things I want to remember, use, or look at further. Then at some point, I insert the notes into various projects electronically. It’s a lot of fast and repeated iterations of this.

Why is some criticism vital and other, deadly?

ICYMI, I Recently Wrote… Currently Studying I’m reading David Dault’s The Accessorized Bible (Yale University Press, 2026) and thinking about people’s parasocial relationships with cultural texts. I learned a bit about this earlier in the year at Off-Script: Conversations on Scriptures, Scholarship, and Our Subfield. You can listen to that on Broadcast Seeding. Currently Reading Earlier this year, I got into audio books for non-fiction. I’ve been listening to Brené Brown’s Rising Strong. I’m also reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. That’s the print read. Listening to… Ben Howard’s 2014 album, I Forgot Where We Were.

I haven't seen Michael yet, but I have spent some time thinking with James Howard Hill Jr. insightful words on the film. It sounds like this film is most eventful when it asks much of the audience. As Hill said, how exactly does one watch horror?

David Dault (Loyola University Chicago) spoke about his new book at Off-Script. We bring his presentation to you on the podcast, Broadcast Seeding.

San Francisco Airport has an amazing museum that made me pause in the hustle and bustle of travel. Currently up is an exhibit, “Women of Afrofuturism.” It kicks off with Nettice Gaskins’ piece, “mOTHERboard.” I could not have thought of a better way to end a conference on biblical studies, pedagogy, and AI. If you’re flying through, make the trip to @sfomuseum.

San Francisco Airport has an amazing museum that made me pause in the hustle and bustle of travel. Currently up is an exhibit, “Women of Afrofuturism.” It kicks off with Nettice Gaskins’ piece, “mOTHERboard.” I could not have thought of a better way to end a conference on biblical studies, pedagogy, and AI. If you’re flying through, make the trip to @sfomuseum.

Waiting for the reddest of eyes. It’s not Presidents Hall, but it’ll have to do. The semester is almost a wrap, and I’m working on video scripts for my Sociology of Religion course. Looking forward to taking out my new camera for a spin too.

Checking out Berkeley before an SBL and Wabash workshop on AI and biblical studies. It’s nice to be back in Cali for a bit.

Now up on Broadcast Seeding, "'The Law of the Land': The Hermeneutics of Continued Mormon Polygamy after 1890” with Dr. Hannah Jung (Unviersity of Alabama). Jung recently presented at Off-Script: Conversations on Scriptures, Scholarship, and Our Subfield. Take a listen to EP25 at sowingtheseed.org/podcast or on Apple Podcasts.

Are you coming to the REL Strategy Group tomorrow? Friday at Noon Central, Dr. Leslie Dorrough Smith of Avila University compares the state of the field from the view of HigherEd administation and the professorate. Join other program leaders to learn how to better document the impact we make on students.

Dr. Jennifer Barry (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at University of Mary Washington) discusses her latest book, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagina…

In Dare to Lead , there is a story about a center director at a research university who was facing a confidence problem. He had apirations of completing his doctorate, but his life went another direction. Grad school din't pan out. His family fell apart. He moved back home and had to restart his life. Brick by bring, he rebuilt his sense of self--new family, new career, new institution.

I submitted an article last week, so I'm back on the grind for my next book. Yesterday, one of my students was saying how hard it was to disabuse oneself of scholarship as finished work. We all know (and hope for) that finality to be an illusion if we want our work to actually be engaged. I want to write things that will give people something to talk about.

Strategy group meeting and REL Toolbox to help departments remain strong in a challenging time

Off-Script Newsletter I had no idea ListServ could produce HTML newsletters. Who knew? If you haven't signed up for the Off-Script Newsletter, drop your email in the form below so you can stay up on all the news happening in the critical comparative study of scriptures.

I have never had the type of hobbies that are shared by the masses. I have played golf once. I've never been confident enought to play pickup basketball. (I'm not whether the flesh is willing and the sprit is weak or the other way around.) I played one disastrous season of league softball, but that's a story for another time. 😉 …

Off-Script is a monthly Zoom conversation for graduate students and scholars interested in the critical comparative study of scriptures. Think of it as a get-together for our subfield to conne…

Throughout 2025, we hosted Off-Script, a monthly conversation on scriptures, scholarship, and our subfield. Sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, and the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts, these Zoom discussions have been a great place to both develop and showcase a critical comparative approach to the study of scriptures.

I’m not anti-tech. I’m just wantonly old school.

The Institute for Signifying Scriptures is launching a monthly, online seminar. The theme for this Fall 2025 is Memory and we'll be reading Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." The meetings will take place on the first Friday of each month at 10am Pacific. ISS asks that you register at signifiyingscriptures.org. While you're there, check out previous episodes of their podcast…

Last semester at Off-Script, Dr. David Lambert shared how he was reconceptualizing his understanding of "scripture" in light of assemblage theory. Happy to share that you can find his thoughts on this in print!

The story of my writing career in one scene. Please convert your footnotes to in-text citation? Fine, I'll make the switch. Can you meet me halfway with chapter endnotes? Book endnotes! Isn't that a lot of work for the reader, sifting back through the bibliography to find the endnote section? ...not if there isn't a bibliogrpahy. You gotta be kidding me.

The medium isn’t the only the adapted in the film to musical prodcution of Anastasia.