REL 101-7-20 First-Year College Seminar: Learning Spaces, Learned Bodies
(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.
REL 101-7-21 First-Year College Seminar: Queer Religion
(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.
(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.
(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.
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.
(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.
REL 316-20 Religion and the Body in China (RSG, RHM)
(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.
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.
REL 360-20 The Study of Black Religion & the Digital Humanities (RLP)
(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.
(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.
REL 379-20 / BLK_ST_315-20 Religion and Culture in the Caribbean (RLP)
(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.
REL 471-20 Graduate Seminar: Sin, Salvation & Racialization
(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.
