DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Religion: we think we recognize it when we see it, and yet it is always changing. How does one study a moving target? In the first weeks of the course, we look back in time to understand how the ideas about religion that are familiar to us today are rooted in history. The emergence of the concept of “religion” as an object of comparison and study grew out of early modern European sectarian violence and colonial overseas expansion. We then turn to study some thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries who developed theories about the best ways to study religion. These scholars developed and honed the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology by testing their methods on case studies about religion. To know this history is to know our present, as well as to understand the methodologies that shape the university curriculum. What do we do with this legacy? Are these methods adequate to understanding religion today? In the second half of this class, we critically evaluate these methods by putting them to work to analyze religion in the world, both past and present. We will focus on how religion moves people. People are rooted in space and place by their religious practices, while simultaneously being moved by religion. As will have become clear in the first half of the course, religion is a moving target because people themselves do not stay the same. Throughout the course, we track the tension between rootedness and mobility by examining three themes: “conversion,” “borderlands,” and “death/afterlives. (Summer 2021, Professor Michelle Molina)

In 1949, conservationist Aldo Leopold published an essay entitled, “The Land Ethic.” He argued that humans are in community with, and have moral obligations to, soil, water, plants and animals. His call for the development of “ecological consciousness” has since been taken up, expanded, and critiqued by environmentalists. More recently, indigenous peoples have fought for recognition that such ethics have long guided their communities, before and during European colonization and settlement. Around the world, indigenous communities have taken the lead in demanding changes to the ways in which modern societies relate to the land. This course explores the idea of a land ethic, what it must consider and how it can come to be successfully embedded within culture and consciousness. In particular, we will look at how the various cultural formations and personal experiences that are often named “religion” and “spirituality” can reflect and promote various land ethics, particularly inasmuch as the prerogatives of “religion” might provide a context for experiencing and valuing land outside or alongside its aesthetic, economic and political value. Over the term, students will select and connect with a particular piece of land, which will provide both an object of study as well as a context for learning and reflection. Spending time in the field, each student will explore the land’s natural and cultural history, recording its (mis)use and how it has been transformed thereby. Students will use all of this to articulate a land ethic, and the final project will be an effort to embed that ethic in some creative cultural form. (Summer 2021, Professor Mark McClish)