From its founding in 1871, Birmingham, Alabama, grew like “magic” at the junction of two railroads. In terms of religion, Birmingham is best known as a center of the Bible Belt and for its role in the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. The city’s airport is even named for a Baptist preacher, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a Baptist preacher and civil rights leader.

But Birmigham’s religious life is about more than evangelicalism and civil rights. Its world famous leaders include not only Martin Luther King Jr., but also Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network. Today its religious citizens include Catholics as well as Protestants, Buddhists as well as Muslims, the unaffiliated as well as churchgoers.

From fall 2019 to spring 2024, 180 Samford University students have authored 120 essays for this site and an annotated map of seventy-seven religious sites in the Avondale neighborhood. From its inception Dr. David R. Bains has served as the creator and editor this project. Students have contributed to the project as part of the requirements in several courses.

Worship: In a course on the history and theology of Christian worship, spring 2021 students used online recordings to explore how Christians worshiped amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years later, students again examined worship in Birmingham.

Neighborhoods: In Magic City Religion‘s first semester (fall 2019), senior religion majors explored the greater Avondale neighborhood. Three years later, students in a course on race, religion, and ethnicity in America, examined Woodlawn, the neighborhood just to the west.

Images and Memorials In fall 2020, when in-person observations were also restricted, students in a first-year seminar studied nineteen religious images in Birmingham. They built upon the work of spring 2020 students who examined prominent Birmingham images of Jesus Christ in dialogue with The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America by Edward Blum and Paul Harvey. First-year students focused on images of Christian heroes again in fall 2023. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on religion, in spring 2024, fifteen students examined memorials in Birmingham and what they encourage for the future.

Religious Diversity: Students in Introduction to World Religions examined eleven communities in fall 2019 and ten more in fall 2021 throughout the metropolitan area representing Birmingham’s contemporary diversity.

For more information on the pedagogical development of Magic City Religion see David R. Bains, “Magic City Religion: A Student-Authored Digital Humanities Project on Birmingham, Alabama,” Fides et Historia 53, no. 2 (summer 2021): 34-46.