DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(Fall 2023, Professor Shira Schwartz)
This is a College Seminar on the relationship between the body, space, and learning. While education and college are often presented as primarily intellectual activities, we will pay attention to the spatial and bodily dynamics that shape how we create, share and access knowledge. Using a range of creative assignments and multi-modal interdisciplinary sources, we will approach the body and space as places where learning happens, and therefore as categories through which we can analyze how learning happens, including in our very own classroom and on campus. Students will learn to ask how the body shapes and is shaped by its learning environment through categories like gender/sex and sexuality, race/ethnicity and religion, ability and access, and how fields like architecture, design, technology and media influence the enterprise of learning. Students will learn to re-examine their most basic assumptions about learning in a variety of expected and unexpected settings, like libraries and maker spaces, rabbinic bathrooms and football fields, science labs and ancient Greek life, in order to prepare for a range of learning experiences that they may encounter at Northwestern, and beyond. The course will guide students to be more attuned to the social and material dynamics that may otherwise go unrecognized in these experiences, teaching critical skills that will prepare them to be more conscious learners. It will appeal to students with a wide-range of academic interests across the humanities, arts and sciences, and to anyone interested in asking big questions about learning through different time periods and fields of study.

(Fall 2023, Dr. Ashley King)
About half of LGBTQ+ Americans identify as religious, though their stories may be less familiar to us than stories of religious oppression and acrimony. Today, conservative religious institutions lead the opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and provide the public framework for discrimination against queer people. Is religion homophobic and transphobic? Does it have to be?

This course explores how queer religious people in America, past and present, have made sense of their lives as queer and religious. We will ask how religion has shaped queer people’s self-understanding as queer, and how queerness has shaped their understanding of faith through their stories of coming out, conversion, transition, diaspora, desire, loss, and healing from spiritual trauma. We will identify the many contributions queer people have made to American religious history—sometimes while hiding their rainbow under a bushel.

Course materials comprise multiple genres of academic writing (history, theory, theology, ethnography, and cultural criticism) and popular media (memoir, fiction, film, podcasts, music, and social media), drawn from Native American religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Haitian Vodou, and New Age spiritualities like tarot and astrology. Instruction will focus on developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through familiarizing first-year students with basic research methods and strategies designed to prepare them for college-level research in any humanities field.

(Winter 2024, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
What does it mean to “pay attention”? What is the history of attention as a concept, and what is at stake when we talk about paying attention? What are the ethical implications of attention and distraction? How have religion, aesthetics, economic conditions, social norms, and technological change helped shape the ways we pay attention and the ways we think about attention? In the age of the “attention economy”—when digital technology is blamed for giving rise to a culture of distraction, and collaborations between neuroscientists and Buddhist meditators are credited with heralding the attentional key to happiness—this seminar provides an opportunity to reflect on attention as a key term in history and contemporary life.

(Winter 2024, Professor Robert Orsi)
This course explores how personal narratives—the stories people (we) tell or write about themselves in different circumstances and addressed to varied interlocutors, real and imaginary—may serve as sources for understanding religious histories. Such narratives may be about encounters with religious authorities or special beings (angels, gods, ancestors, and so on); or about the story-teller’s involvement in religious movements; or his, her, or their religious crises. Pairing personal narratives with adjacent historical sources and critical essays, we open with questions about narrative itself and end with the role of stories—as told by humans and non-humans—in the climate crisis. How do the stories people tell about religion(s) help us understand not only the tellers of these stories but also the religious and social worlds in which these stories arise and to which they refer?

The questions sound straightforward enough! But personal narratives are complex things. There is the matter of the details story-tellers choose to leave in or take out; the relative emphases they place on one aspect or incident over another; even the reasons they tell the story at all, in the first place, which may be conscious or unconscious. There is always an aspect of manipulation about story-telling! Then there are questions about setting, the literal, physical circumstances in which a story is told, from prison, for instance, or in a courtroom, and so on.

Finally, there is the fact that some stories and story-tellers are valued and trusted over others, for reasons having to do with power, race, gender, and social class. Behind the current controversy over public library holdings and access, for example, is the determination that certain stories—about gender transition, for instance, or about the lives of drag performers, or accounts of racial oppression or violence against women—ought not to be told. There are religious dimensions to such stories, often enough, as well as to the campaigns to censor them. In a perverse way, such efforts to prohibit certain stories underscore the unique efficacy and potency of narrative! But we need to ask ourselves what is feared, what is silenced, when a particular story is forbidden? What makes a story dangerous? What makes a religious story especially dangerous?

We will read critical accounts of narrative as practice (by Audre Lorde, Simone Weil, Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and others); personal narratives in various genres (including autobiography, autobiographical fiction, film, creative non-fiction and theater); and history and historical documents.

Critical skills to be emphasized are close reading; critical analysis; seminar participation (creating knowledge intersubjectively); and writing in various genres. Evaluation based on class participation and writing assignments. There is no final exam in this course.

(Spring 2024, Dr. Lily Stewart)

Humans for thousands of years have documented their visions of other worlds and afterlives. Whether informed by religious revelation, collective trauma, or individual creativity, these visions provide important vantage points for assessing cultural values and experiences. In this class we will explore religious models of “The Afterlife” while also analyzing afterlives constructed in fiction, film, art, and other forms of popular media. We will ask how envisioning other worlds can help us to alternately articulate and blur the boundaries between life and death, trauma and healing, past and present, and reality and fiction. We will also explore what it means to “live after” major ruptures in individual and collective experience. For instance, how do we envision life after pandemic? After climate change? Revolution? Immigration? Utopia? Through speculative fiction, how to we envision the afterlives of humanity as we assess the potential for a post-human world?

Sources will include ghost stories from around the world, medieval visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven, videos of dead celebrities resurrected as holograms, episodes of Upload, The Good Place, and Star Trek, contemporary news releases, and short speculative fiction. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, and classroom collaboration.

(Winter 2024, Drt. Ashley King)

This course will guide students through a series of case studies that highlight the practical, ethical, and material dimensions of religions around the world. These case studies dramatize how religions are lived with and against the grain of established doctrine, so that students will gain a richer understanding of the ways religious customs have shaped the world around them. We will focus on three interrelated areas where religion has had a significant impact: (1) sexuality and gender, (2) health and medicine, and (3) law and politics. The course also serves to introduce students to the basic methods scholars employ to study religion, including history, ethnography, textual analysis, ritual theory, phenomenology, and comparison—tools through which students will formulate their own accounts of religious phenomena.

(Summer 2024, Professor Michelle Molina)
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." 

(Spring 2024, Professor Sarah Taylor)
Dive into one of today’s most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship – the intriguing entanglements of religion and media in society and culture. This course draws from an array of sources, such as television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, streaming video, social media, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. Study media while getting to make your own media for course projects!

(Fall 2023, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
This course offers an introduction to Buddhist history, culture, philosophy, and practice. We explore the major doctrinal varieties of Buddhism, from its inception through the rise of the Mahayana and Tantric or Vajrayana traditions. At the same time, we also investigate Buddhist visual, material, and ritual cultures—which offer windows onto aspects of Buddhism as a lived religion not always visible in scriptural sources. In the process we engage themes like the meaning of suffering, the cosmology of cyclical rebirth, the social role of monasticism and its intervention in traditional family structures, the place of women and gender in Buddhism, the relationship between religious ideals and everyday life, the question of self-reliance versus divine assistance, and the power of images and icons. Our readings of primary sources offer close engagement with Buddhist ideas and practices, allowing us to understand how the religion shaped the ways people in pre-modern Asia saw and interacted with their worlds. Readings in secondary scholarship help us set these materials in historical context and connect them to the bigger picture of Buddhism’s spread across Asia.

(Spring 2024, Dr. Darcie {Price-Wallace)
This course provides a rich introduction to the complexity and plurality of Buddhist values, beliefs, practices, institutions and experiences which have flourished in different societies and cultures in the modern era. Our general goal will be to understand Buddhism as not simply an abstract philosophy or doctrine espoused by monastic elites, but as a multifaceted living tradition informing the lives of a wide range of practitioners within any given society. Grounded in anthropological, historical, and philosophical approaches, the course will enable you to both sympathetically understand and critically investigate various Buddhist traditions and their historically specific configurations of cultural values, everyday practices, beliefs, social institutions and personal experiences. Given the limited time available to us, we won't be able to examine the full diversity of contemporary Buddhist societies and cultures in their varying national settings. Instead, we will focus on the Buddhist traditions of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, China, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet. A few of the topics we will cover include syncretism, modernism, popular religion, monasticism, gender, economic development, social movements, political violence and religious revival.

(Summer 2024, Nisheeta Jagtiani)

This course offers an introduction to Buddhist history, philosophy, culture, and ritual practices. We explore texts, beliefs, and practices in all the major Buddhist traditions--Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. As we study how the practice of Buddhism differs in different Buddhist countries and traditions, we will read teachings by Buddhist masters including Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and the Dalai Lama and discuss their implications in the twenty-first century. In this course, we will pay close attention to primary and secondary source texts to learn about how Buddhists describe and teach the meaning of life, death, rebirth, suffering, karma, and enlightenment. Beyond an examination of texts, we will also discuss the contemporary practice of Buddhism in Asia and the West including the place of mindfulness. 

(Fall 2023, Allison Hurst)
This introductory course is an immersive journey into the world of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the "Old Testament" in Christian tradition). Throughout this class, we will explore the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of the Hebrew Bible, examining the diverse genres and themes within the biblical text and discovering how they have influenced and shaped modern views about God, humans, and society. You will have the opportunity to delve deeply into the diverse literatures of the Hebrew Bible and to examine their relevance to contemporary issues and ideas. You will also learn about the various scholarly approaches to the academic study of the Hebrew Bible and how they have contributed to our understanding of this ancient and complex text.

(Fall 2023, Dr. Lily Stewart)

The New Testament has influenced the lives and experiences of individuals and communities across the globe for thousands of years. It has served as a source of structure, meaning, and hope for many while also influencing ideologies and practices of bigotry and violence. But what do we really know about the world in which the New Testament was produced? What was the project of Jesus and his followers and why was it so polarizing? What authors composed the New Testament’s texts and what can we glean about their audiences and motivations? Why were some texts chosen for the canon of the New Testament and others left out?

This course will consider the New Testament from a range of vantage points. We will use historical methodologies to explore the complex networks of religious practices, cultural ideologies, and political actors that influenced its production. We will also consider how the New Testament has been read and reproduced in the past 2000 years. We will discuss a range of theological perspectives, analyze the impact of the New Testament on art and literature, and assess its role in global politics. Students will be exposed to interpretations of the New Testament from the perspectives of eco criticism, queer theory, disability theory, and liberation theology, among other critical lenses.

(Spring 2024, Professor Shira Schwartz)
This section of Introduction to Judaism will serve as an introduction to Jewish textual sources. The course can explore a range of classical and contemporary Jewish textual genres, as well as Jewish textual objects, from Torah scrolls and Jewish type to digital commentary. Students will learn how to engage texts deeply through different hermeneutics, including through close-reading and in partnership with other students. Our approach will also pay attention to the media and materiality of Jewish transmission across different kinds of Jewish sources.

(Summer 2024, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)
This course attempts to answer the questions "What is Judaism?" and "Who is a Jew?" by surveying the broad arc of Jewish history, reviewing the practices and beliefs that have defined and continue to define Judaism as a religion, sampling the vast treasure of Jewish literatures, and analyzing the unique social conditions that have made the cultural experience of Jewishness so significant. The class will employ a historical structure to trace the evolutions of Jewish literature, religion, and culture through the ages.

How many ways are there to be a Christian? What counts as Christianity, what doesn’t, and who ultimately gets to decide? Where and when does Christian practice take place and what does it look like? How has Christianity been shaped by cultures around the world, and how has it shaped those cultures in return?

This class explores Christianity from a perspective of religious diversity. Using case studies from documentaries, podcasts, scriptures, scholarly articles, short stories, music videos, and films, students will encounter a variety of Christian lifeways, practices, beliefs, and identities. They will consider how important concepts in Christianity—like faith, sacrifice, and sanctity—have been variously defined and experienced across Christian communities. We will ask what factors account for the broad range of Christian doctrines and denominations, and analyze the anxieties, conflicts, and points of creativity have arisen out of this diversity.

(Winter 2024, Professor Brannon Ingram)
This course introduces Islam, one of the major religious traditions of world history, developing a framework for understanding how Muslims in varying times and places have engaged with Islamic scripture and the prophetic message of the Prophet Muhammad through diverse sources: theological, philosophical, legal, political, mystical, literary and artistic. While we aim to grasp broad currents and narrative of Islamic history, we will especially concentrate on the origins and development of the religion in its formative period (the prophetic career of the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, Islamic belief and ritual, Islamic law, and popular spirituality) and debates surrounding Islam in the contemporary world (the impact of European colonialism on the Muslim world, the rise of the modern Muslim state, and discourses on gender, politics and violence).

(Spring 2024, Professor KB Dennis Meade)

This course introduces you to the variety of Black religions that developed during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to the present in what is now the United States. The historical contexts surrounding the development of Black religions and the lived experiences of Black Americans are the main topics of our course. The course orients us to these traditions as continuities/changes of West African religious cosmologies. We explore the impact of the Atlantic slave trade, the role of politics, the construction of racial identities, and most importantly, the diversity of Black Religion in the United States and locally in Chicago. We will examine the interplay between religion, and race within various forms of Christianity, Islam, and American expressive cultures.

(Winter 2024, Prof. Christine Helmer)
Examination of Luther's work in the context of his life and times. Introduces basic dimensions of Western thought, showing how theology relates to broader cultural, political, social, and aesthetic issues.

(Fall 2023, Professor Mark McClish)
Although not often recognized, law has played as important a role in the development of Hinduism as it has in Judaism or Islam. One scholar has recently argued that we can understand “Hinduism” best if we see it as a legal tradition. This course will be a survey of the tradition of Hindu law (dharmaśāstra) in India from the 6th c. BCE to its demise in the modern period. We will explore the beginnings of the scholarly legal tradition, its relationship with Hindu statecraft (arthaśāstra), its interaction with other legal systems of South Asia, its role in colonial administration, and its ultimate replacement by modern Indian law. Our investigation will focus on the formal features of Hindu law while placing it in a broader historical and cultural perspective. To this end, we will explore the relationship between the scholarly tradition and law in practice, the relationship between Brahmanism, law, and politics, and the role of caste and gender in the formation of Hindu law. This seminar will also provide us with the opportunity to think about Hindu law in the context of comparative law and legal anthropology. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

(Fall 2023, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
The fragility of the human body, its susceptibility to illness and death, provoked a wide array of responses among religious practitioners in pre-modern China. Some pursued supernatural longevity and even immortality through various regimes of self-cultivation. Others, by contrast, renounced the body in part or whole through dramatic acts of self-immolation. Even in death, however, many aspired to rebirth in heavenly realms where bodies do not grow old and die, but rather live forever in bliss. This course examines these various attempts to overcome death in Chinese religion—including Buddhism, Daoism, and traditions that fall between these large categories—seeking to understand how the mortality of the body was used to authorize particular modes of embodied living. In the process, we will explore how these modes of religious life shaped attitudes toward food, medicine, gender, sexuality, and family. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

(Spring 2024, Dr. Darcie Price-Wallace)
The course broadens the ways of understanding of Buddhism by bringing attention to the much-neglected voices of women. Drawing from women’s writings within and outside the Buddhist canon, film, and art on Buddhist women by women, this course emphasizes women’s experiences on the Buddhist path as they navigate suffering and its alleviation across cultures over 2600 years. This course is reading intensive, incorporating three novels in addition to poetry, film, and art. The first novel retells the life of the Buddha and his awakening through his wife’s perspective; the second describes Japanese teen’s reliance on a Zen nun as she navigates trauma, grief, selfhood, and time; the third explores a Tibetan family’s generational displacement in the face of colonialism, violence, the movement of the Tibetan diaspora, and cultural appropriation. In addition, this course engages with canonical material such as the collection of poems by the earliest nuns who recount their path to awakening in the Pali tradition, explores the first Chinese nuns’ biographies and Zen nuns writing on non-duality and emptiness, and considers biographies of female Tibetan religious professionals on their pursuit for liberation alongside contemporary Tibetan poets’ perspectives on Buddhist thought and the immigrant experience. The class includes exploring Buddhist ideas together with their exposition in literature, film, and art while accounting for canonical doctrinal paradoxes such as: inclusion/exclusion, unity/diversity, ultimate/relative, self/selflessness. *Counts toward the Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

(Winter 2024, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
The Chinese Chan (Japanese Zen) Buddhist tradition is one of the most famous branches of Buddhism in the world, but also one of the most widely misunderstood. This course explores the history, literature, philosophy, visual culture, and monastic practices of Chan/Zen Buddhism in East Asia. We pay special attention to the ways Chan/Zen innovated within the Buddhist tradition to establish a uniquely East Asian school of Buddhism. Along the way we consider the changing place of meditation in Chan/Zen practice, closely read Chan/Zen sermons and kōans, analyze the role of women and gender in Chan and Zen, and conclude by considering the modern reception of Zen in the West.

(Spring 2024, Allison Hurst)
What does the Bible have to say about sex, and why should we care? The Bible has been a source of many things—fantastical stories, ethical principles, hope in the midst of despair—but perhaps none is more personal than when the Bible is used as a source for sexual guidance. In this class, we’ll delve into what the Bible says about who can have sex with whom, what kind of sex they can have, who can (and cannot) consent to sex, and more. Beyond what the texts of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament say explicitly, however, we’ll also consider the contexts in which these texts were written and the ideas about sex and sexuality that would have been present in their respective cultural milieus. Finally, we will discuss how these texts have been deployed in discussions about sex and sexuality into the modern period.

This course is for students who are (or are willing to become) comfortable talking explicitly about sex and sexuality. Together, we will read and analyze both primary and secondary sources and engage in discussion about these sensitive topics. During the course, we will look at several case studies of contemporary issues together, but students will also have the opportunity to investigate the use of a biblical passage of their choice in a context that is relevant to them (for example, legal rulings, public policies, medical standards of care, etc.).
*Counts toward the Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

What kinds of bodies can be saintly? How do saintly people interact with their bodies? What do modern celebrities like Beyonce and Tupac Shakur have in common with the saints? Why is there a patron saint of stomachaches?  

This course explores the complex relationship between saints and their bodies in Christian history. Saints have long represented the extremes of Christian excellence, in large part because their lives and bodies interrogate the boundaries between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, masculine and feminine, holy and transgressive, life and death. Saints facilitate incredible miracles, perform painful and sometimes disgusting acts of asceticism, and experience mystically erotic relationships with the divine. Even as saints live to deny their bodies, their bodies are nevertheless foundational to their sanctity, both before and after death. In this class, we will explore how and why certain exceptional individuals came to be regarded as saints; the ways in which the body was central to living a saintly life and maintaining a connection to the world after death; how religious communities developed around saints and the body; how saints used their bodies to serve their broader communities; and how ideas about sainthood, sanctity, and the body developed in relation to changing cultural movements, social interests, and local ideals. Our class will explore case studies from the ancient to the modern world, with a special focus on the middle ages.  *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

(Winter 2024, Dr. Lily Stewart)

Today, religion and science are often regarded as separate spheres of knowledge and practice, but was this always the case? In this class, we will explore the overlapping uses of medicine, miracles, and magic in premodern healthcare. We will ask what kinds of people were able to practice medicine (priests? physicians? nuns? magicians?), why a person’s barber was also their surgeon, how the dead supported the health of the living, and why rituals like confession could treat stomach aches and other ailments. 

We will learn what a vial of urine could tell a medieval physician about a patient’s habits, consider how an individual’s astrological sign influenced their treatment plan, and discuss what an excess of garlic in a person’s diet might tell us about the moral state of their spirit. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the complex, nuanced systems that medieval people used to theorize the body and its relationship to the soul, and will be able to articulate how physical, spiritual, and even supernatural medicines were often combined to treat both.

As we study the nuances of premodern medicine, we will also work to rethink the relationship between religion and science in our own world, and consider whether and where our modern healthcare practices align with the past as much as they depart from it.

Counts toward Religion, Health, and Medicine (RHM) major concentration.

(Spring 2024, Dr. Lily Stewart)
Whether it causes fear or fascination, blood holds a mysterious sway on the modern imagination. From those who faint at the sight of it, to those who love vampire movies and gory thrillers, to those who study and analyze it in labs, this strange substance serves as a constant source of conflict, anxiety, and ideology. Representations of blood in Christian art, literature, and theology have been just as fraught. Ancient and medieval Christians saw the substance as alternately miraculous and polluting, life-giving and death-bringing, a marker of difference and a symbol of unity. Blood had the capacity to reveal whether a person was sick or healthy, whether they were sexually active, what god they worshipped, and even whether they were guilty of murder. If it was shed on a battlefield it was considered valiant; if it was shed from the bodies of virgins or martyrs it was considered holy; if it was shed during childbirth or menstruation it was considered polluting; and if it was shed in pursuit of love it was considered romantic. The Christian language of blood and blood purity crept into developing ideas about race and sexuality, forging links between morality and embodiment that have in turn informed understandings of biology and human difference.

In this class, we will explore these complex and often contradictory representations of blood and bloodshed in Christian history. By approaching this topic from a range of sources and theoretical perspectives we will use blood as a starting point for exploring broader questions about gender, religion, race, culture, and individuality. Moreover, we will consider how historical assessments of blood value, purity, and pollution continue to shape constructions of identity today.

*Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

(Fall 2023, Professor KB Dennis Meade)
Black and Caribbean Studies are vibrant fields in the digital humanities. The study of religion in the digital humanities, however, remains an emergent field. This course is an ambitious attempt at interdisciplinarity, or more aptly what Tracy Hucks and Dianne Stewart refer to as transdisciplinarity--inquiry driven research that transcends disciplinary silos. This course centers religion as the primary lens to excavate and recover representations of Afro-Caribbean religions and their North American cognates using archival sources, fiction, film, and art. Religion will serve as the framework to interrogate what counts as data, the sources in which we can locate this data, its deployment and (re)presentation. Our aim is to gain a landscape view of Caribbean
religious history through key moments and themes from the period of enslavement and what Rinaldo Walcott refers to as the long emancipation. The course will provide students the opportunity to explore current digital projects and learn digital tools to generate their own inquiries. Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

(Winter 2024, Eda Uca)
What happens when religion goes digital? In this course we examine how religions are adapting to an increasingly digital world and how digital environments are shaping old and new religious practices. Through a series of case studies, we will consider how religious practitioners and the “spiritual but not religious” are using digital media to challenge established religious authority, create community, innovate devotional practices, and theorize their experiences. We will examine, for example, collage and hip hop, virtual pujas, mindfulness apps, user-generated gods, emoji spells, tulpamancy, transhumanism, and Slender Man. Through these case studies we will explore how digital natives and adopters are reimagining religious presence, mediation, community, ethics, and ontology. This class centers BIPOC, queer, and feminist voices, digital arts, memetics, lived religion, and social justice. Students will practice skills for digital humanities research, engage in ethical reflection, and apply course learning to creating their own digital artifacts. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration.

(Spring 2024, Eda Uca)
This course introduces students to the academic study of Asian American religions within a lived religions framework. We will consider the development of Asian American religions through/against Orientalism, colonialism, migration, xenophobia, diaspora, racialization, Islamophobia, and “Americanization”; investigate the role of religion in Asian American identity formation, cultural transmission, institution-building, and social justice activism; explore Asian American experiments in ethnic, Pan-Asian, multiracial, and “culture free” religion; and critically reflect on the gaps between Asian American Studies, the academic study of religion, and the religious lives of Asian Americans. Units on Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and “religiously unaffiliated” Asian Americans provide broad exposure to the field. Student learning will be evaluated through seminar discussions, reading responses, group presentations, and final papers or projects. There are no prerequisites for this course. Enrollment will be limited to 15.

(Spring 2024, Professor James Bielo)
Material culture is integral to the practice of religion, from making an identity public to being socialized into a tradition. While the sacred stuff of religion is often treasured by individuals and communities, it is also often discarded. This course examines the after lives of religious material culture, how things circulate through curated collections, capitalist markets, and donation piles. Diverse materials are divested in diverse ways: unwanted inheritance after death, downsizing, institutional de-accession and closure, donating surplus gifts, and so on. Through closely analyzing sacred waste across cultures and religious traditions, we will ask how the circulation of religious material culture reflects and re-creates issues of identity, culture change, memory, erasure, and power relations. Students will critically engage with professional scholarship in religious studies and related disciplines focused on the study of material culture and waste. And, students will design and conduct original research on a sacred waste topic of their choosing.

(Spring 2024, Dr. Ashley King)
When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Kentucky was one of 13 states to begin enforcing a “trigger law” that effectively bans abortion. That October, three Jewish women brought a lawsuit arguing that Kentucky’s ban violated their religious freedom, writing, “Jews have never believed that life begins at conception.” In Missouri, an interfaith group of Christian and Jewish religious leaders filed a similar suit to block their state’s abortion ban. And in Idaho and Indiana, the Satanic Temple did the same.

These lawsuits illustrate how religious views on abortion are varied and complex. Moreover, religious people’s ethical reflections and medical decisions may run against the grain of official doctrine. This course examines why some religious groups have opposed abortion rights, while others have actively campaigned for them. We will also discuss how some traditions have created space for people who have abortions to receive spiritual care or participate in special rituals, such as funerary rites for aborted fetuses in Japanese Buddhism or full-body immersion (mikveh) in some forms of Judaism.

The legal challenges discussed above also highlight the fraught intersection between religious practice, medical ethics, and abortion law. This course focuses on four case studies to explore these issues: the United States, Ireland, Israel-Palestine, and Japan. Readings comprise historical and legal studies on abortion alongside anthropological, autobiographical, and artistic representations of the women, trans men, and nonbinary people who seek abortions.

Student evaluation is based on participation, short writing assignments, and a final project. Required readings will be made available on Canvas or through links printed in the syllabus.

*Counts towards Religion, Law and Politics (RLP), Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG), and Religion, Health, and Medicine (RHM) major concentrations.

(Fall 2023, Dr. Claire Sufrin)
Whether they are called "scripture," "myth," "history," "parable" or something else, ancient stories play an important role in Judaism and Christianity. In turn, these religions play an important role in some novels and poems. Literature and religion, in short, have a long history of interaction and influence. In this class, we will study biblical stories and the meaning they have taken on for Jews and Christians; literary portrayals and critiques of what it's like to live a religious life; and reflections on theological themes woven into contemporary novels and poetry.

(Spring 2024, Professor KB Dennis Meade)

Pentecostalism is one of the fastest growing religions, globally. We know Pentecostal churches by their spirit-filled services with stirring music, singing, and worship. In this course you’ll learn about the belief systems, history, and the importance of Pentecostalism in the lives of practitioners in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, African-American and Latinx communities in the United States. We will examine how race, gender, and sexuality play a role in the history and practice of the tradition and how it offers a divine framework for believers to imagine social change.

(Fall 2023, Prof. Dennis Meade)
The Caribbean constitutes a unique space to understand the history of resistance and social change in the Black Atlantic world. Going beyond the tropes of reggae, Rastafari, and tourism--this course provides an introduction to the diversity of religious traditions in the region, with a particular focus on Afro-Caribbean religious practices and spiritual technologies. Students will explore the cosmological features and embodied expressions that characterize these traditions. Through presentations, discussions, and writing assignments students will reflect on concepts such as belonging, migration, colonialism, race, class, and gender to understand the political and cultural implications of religion in the region. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

(Winter 2024, Prof. Richard Kieckhefer)

Three ideas can be found widely among world religions:

• that some places are holy and worth visiting because of the historical events that happened there
• that some places are holy and worth visiting because of the miracles that about there
• that all of life is a pilgrimage.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Explore these ideas with an instructor who has twice completed the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. We will discuss Christian pilgrimages, Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimages, and theories of pilgrimage.   

(Spring 2024, Professor Robert Orsi)
Religion(s) is implicated in all aspects of human life, such as sexuality, politics, sickness and healing, and family relations. What does it mean to think about religion as both distinct from and entangled in these various areas of human existence? What sorts of critical tools can we use to assess religion’s impact on the world and, conversely, the world’s impact on religion? Is religion even about human relationships with gods or other special beings? In this course we study how thinkers past and present have considered these questions.

(Winter 2024, Professor Shira E. Schwartz)
This seminar explores theoretical and methodological links between textual and ethnographic research. As an interdisciplinary and topic-motivated field, religious studies pursues research questions that can cross multiple disciplines and periods. This seminar takes up one of those crossings—text and ethnography—as a site of rich potential for methodological innovation and theoretical exchange. Responding to recent calls to decenter “the human” within the (post)humanities and social sciences, we will investigate what gets lost by dividing meaning from materiality, the natural from the cultural, the archival and literary from the ethnographic. Troubling disciplinary boundaries and categorical binaries, students will be encouraged to explore what text and ethnography share as entangled sites of human and nonhuman production and what we stand to gain by linking them. What are the textual practices inscribed by our ethnographic fields and scholarly productions? How do we locate the sites in which textual projects emerge and include the bodies in which they come to live? Students will learn how to expand and deepen their own textual and ethnographic projects by incorporating research practices from both methods. Readings will be drawn from fields like anthropology, textual, literary and media studies, queer and trans studies, lived religion, science and technology studies, antiquity studies, history. The course will be of interest to students across these fields. Assignments will position students to integrate course readings and topics to their own research projects, to develop interdisciplinary research methods across time and modality, and to apply that knowledge toward research proposal development.

(Fall 2023, Professor Michelle Molina)

The vibrant culture of an Indigenous people, the import of African slaves with their varied traditions, and the domination of a European Christian settler class: these are all factors shared by Latin America and the United States. Despite these common factors, racializing practices and the emergence of "race" are quite different in the two regions. Focusing primarily on Mexico, we see how religion and race are intertwined, beginning with the formative colonial period. To understand the complicated permutations of race in Latin America, we study three realms: Spanish law, the institutional Catholic church, and, the devotional lives of historical actors, from the colonial period through the twentieth century.
 

(Spring 2024, Professor Robert Orsi & Professor Christine Helmer)

This seminar addresses the question of what it means to be a scholar in the contemporary academic and social context. The lens through which we examine this topic is the work of the scholar of religion, around which we will raise comparative questions about other disciplines as well in their respective relationships to the university. The question of knowledge production is at the forefront of our explorations. What does scholarship mean as mind (and heart) are oriented to knowledge? What does an embodied approach to scholarship look like? What habits of mind and heart ought/might the scholar cultivate? The seminar will be attentive throughout to planetary climate crisis, considering how to enlarge our vocation in response to it. Readings from Max Weber, Anna Tsing, Friedrich Schleiermacher, bell hooks, and others.

(Winter 2024, Brannon Ingram)
This course will introduce graduate students to a range of approaches to theorizing the category of “religion” in recent interdisciplinary scholarship. In this course, these approaches will revolve primary around theories of secularity – that is, theories of how the category of “religion” is produced, negotiated, maintained, and/or contested in its intersections with other domains of human life against which it is often defined, e.g. “culture,” “society,” and so on. We will also see some of the ways scholars have approached the ways that the category of religion informs, or intersects with, law and politics. We will begin with pioneering work in this subject from Talal Asad, Gauri Viswanathan, Winnifred Sullivan, and Saba Mahmoud. We will then proceed to explore how a second wave of scholars on secularity put these foundational texts in conversation with a range of archives, drawing on scholars such as Elizabeth Hurd, Courtney Bender, and Hussein Agrama. Finally, we turn our attention to the most recent scholarship in this vein from the likes of Joseph Blankholm, Elayne Oliphant, John Modern, and Charles McCrary.

(Spring 2024, Professor McClish)

What is beauty? What experiences does this concept evoke, and what might be the value of such experiences? What related concepts can be found in different cultures, and how have they understood the value of such experiences? What might exploring all of this disclose about conceptions of the human condition? What, in other words, might an engagement with beauty and related concepts tell us about being human and living a meaningful life? Although the idea of beauty has long been exiled from art theory and aesthetic theory, it remains a vital concept in daily life that points to commonly-experienced moments of special significance. For a number of artists, thinkers, religious traditions (e.g., Kashmiri Śaivism, Zen Buddhism) and cultures (e.g., Diné; Yoruba), beauty and related concepts have been central to a general understanding of what gives human life meaning and signficance. This class will explore practices, philosophies, religious traditions and cultures for which the experience of beauty (and closely related concepts) is of particular or greatest importance. What does it mean to put experiences of beauty at (or near) the center of human existence, to consider them to be uniquely and profoundly meaningful? How might this affect our sense of what it means to be human? And how have such dispositions served to connect humans in different times and places to presences, communities, and powers beyond (or within) the everyday? This course will emphasize collaborative, student-led inquiry, challenging participants to develop their own interpretations and innovate their own approaches to subject.