DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(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.

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, 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.

(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.

(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.

(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.