Russell T. McCutcheon
Professor and
Department Chair

Sociology of Religion, Theories of Myth & Ritual, Politics of Classification, History of the Cateory "Religion" and the History of the Study of Religion

email:
rmccutch@bama.ua.edu
office number:
(205) 348-8512
office: Manly Hall 211

Prof. McCutcheon is advisor to the local chapter of Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honors society in the study of religion.

In May 2008, Prof. McCutcheon took four REL majors to Greece. The program is for majors and minors in REL and will run again in May 2009.
Learn more.

Click the covers to visit each publisher's website for books by Prof. McCutcheon

Religious Experience: A Reader (forthcoming in 2009 from Equinox Press)

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Read a review (PDF)

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Critics Not Caretakers
The following PDFs are placed on one of the Department's password-protected, secure servers, for Prof. Sutcliffe's Spring 2006 students at the University of Edinburgh.

Introduction, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, Afterword, References, Index

The essays in this co-edited volume were originally presented in Mexico City in 1995, at the World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR)

Russell T. McCutcheon, who began at the University of Alabama's Department of Religious Studies in the summer of 2001, was trained at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) and the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D. in the academic study of religion in 1995. He came to the U.S. from Canada in 1993, to teach full time as an Instructor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1993-96); from 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Southwest Missouri State University (Springfield; now known as Missouri State University). Although a Canadian citizen, in early 2001 he obtained Permanent Residency status in the U.S.

His areas of interest include the history of scholarship on myths and rituals, the history of the publicly-funded academic study of religion as practiced in the U.S., secularism, as well as the relations between the classification "religion" itself and the rise of the nation-state.

From 1990-2001, McCutcheon served as one of the editors of the quarterly periodical, published by Brill of the Netherlands, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion; from 1997-2001 he also edited the Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion. In the Fall of 2007 he stepped down after having served three years as the Executive Secretary, Treasurer, and webmaster for the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR)--the U.S. affiliate of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). McCutcheon is also the webmaster for his Department's website.

In November of 2005, McCutcheon was elected to a three year term as the President of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (CSSR), headquartered at Rice University.

Apart from works on theory of religion, he has also published widely on teaching and edited classroom and references resources. He was the founder and series editor for "Controversies in the Study of Religion" (discontinued by Continuum Press in 2004), a class anthology series.

He is also the founder and series editor for Equinox Publishing's anthology series, "Critical Categories in the Study of Religion." His most recent editing project is a new monograph series, also with Equinox Press, UK, entitled "Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction." See the following PDF for the series description.

A recent copy of his cv can be found here (PDF).

Classes Taught

McCutcheon regularly teaches such courses as REL 100, REL 105, REL 213, REL 237, REL 341, REL 360, REL 419, REL 480, REL 482, REL 490, and UH 120.

Current Projects

Studying Religion: An Introduction was published late Fall of 2007 by Equinox Publishers of the UK. A shorter version of the book is available on the web: Studying Religion; the book has been translated into Bulgarian and Greek and German editions are also possible. Along with Leslie Smith, McCutcheon is currently preparing an anthology on religious experience and a new multi-author collection of essays, Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith--co-edited with his good friend Willi Braun--has just been published.

McCutcheon is beginning work on assembling a new collection of his own essays.

If you are interested in reading samples of McCutcheon's recent work available online, then please see any of the following...

An essay on secularism published in the Fall of 2007 in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.

A review essay on handbooks in religious studies published in the Fall of 2007 in Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

"Theses on Professioanlization"

"The Costs of Discipleship: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion" (PDF)--a lecture presented at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Virgina, and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion (Toronto).

"The Problem of Religion and the Lust for Dogmatic Rule" (PDF)--lecture, based on chapter one of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent, presented at the University of Regina, the University of Edmonton, the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Rice University.

The uncorrected final proof of a review essay (PDF) on Jonathan Z. Smith's recent book, Relating Religion, published in 2006 in The Journal of Religion.

The uncorrected proof of an essay (PDF), published in Religious Studies Review, in response to a collection of articles reviewing recent world religion textbooks.

An essay (PDF) published in Temenos, originally delivered at the Tokyo Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in March 2005.

An article (PDF) from MTSR (2005), originally presented at a regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion (2003), on Bruce Lincoln's recent work.

A reply (PDF) to Robert Segal, on the category "religion," published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2005)

"The Resiliency of Conceptual Anachronisms" (PDF), a forthcoming review essay in Religion on Daniel Dubuisson's The Western Construction of Religion

Chapter 12 from The Discipline of Religion (Routledge, 2003), "'Religion' and the Governable Self" (PDF)

A brief handout (PDF) on the politics of discourses on religious pluralism

A lecture (PDF) delivered at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Chicago (both in the Spring of 2004), and which is a chapter of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent.

A lecture (PDF) delivered at Syracuse University (February 2005), the University of Regina and the University of Alberta, Canada (Fall of 2004) and at Arizona State University (Spring of 2004), and which is also a chapter of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent.

Comments delivered at the University of Alabama, January 18, 2003: "Some Introductory Comments on the Academic Study of Islam" (PDF)

An excerpt from Introduction to an edited anthology (see the book cover, below left): The Insider / Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion

An essay (PDF) on the Cold War setting of the publicly funded study of religion's re-establishment in the US--published in the Spring of 2004 issue of the British journal, Culture & Religion

An earlier version of a chapter in The Discipline of Religion (Routledge, UK, 2003) appears in the on-line Journal of Mundane Behavior; see: "Like Small Bumps on the Neck...": The Problem of Evil as Something Ordinary

An article on the history of work carried out by members of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR): "'The Common Ground On Which Students of Religion Meet": Methodology and Theory Within the IAHR"

An article co-written with Christina Lapel (Immigration Tax Specialist, Southwest Missouri State University), "Canadian Scholars Working in the US: An Unofficial Primer on the INS"

An essay that represents some of his recent work on the politics of classification: "The Category 'Religion' and the Politics of Tolerance" (PDF), published in the multi-authored book, Defining Religion: Investigating the Boundaries Between the Sacred and Secular

A 2004 essay (PDF) in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion on controversies over recent research on the category "religion"

A 2004 essay (PDF) on recent trends in the study of religion in the US, from the edited book, New Approaches to the Study of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter)