(Fall 2024, Professor Mark McClish)

Ancient India produced two of the world's great epics: the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. The former tells the story of an apocalyptic civil war within a ruling dynasty that comes to engulf all of the peoples of the world. The latter tells the story of the righteous king, Rāma, and the abduction of his beloved wife, Sītā, by the demon-king Rāvaṇa. Both stories have edified audiences, in different versions, for over two-millennia, and both are considered by many to be sacred texts that reveal deep truths about the nature of human existence. In this course, we will read abridged translations of the classical Sanskrit versions of both stories, reflect on their meaning, and explore their continuing significance in different forms to audiences today.

(Fall 2024, 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.

(Winter 2025, Professor Elizabeth Hurd)
This course is a study of American borders, past and present. We read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies. We watch several documentary films, listen to music, and learn from engaging with guest speakers. Central themes include the history of US borders with Mexico, Indigenous communities, protest movements, law and the border, sanctuary and sovereignty, legal exceptionalism, the history of the passport, religious politics of borders, and environmental politics of the borderlands. Border issues are considered from multiple perspectives, including but also going well beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. As a first-year seminar, this course also emphasizes critical research and writing skills to prepare students for college-level research and writing. We will discuss academic integrity and get tips from a librarian on how to make the most of the University Library’s resources during your time at Northwestern.

(Spring 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)
Why are so many horror movies about religion? How does religion help people through experiences of horror? How does religion create and normalize horror in everyday lives? How does horror help us construct and understand the differences between “other people” and “other people’s religions” and our own selves and religious worlds? This class explores these and other questions about the relationship between religion and horror. We will consider how horror as a genre can be a meaningful way for people to think through their experiences of religious trauma, and how religion has likewise been a meaningful way to heal from the horrors of war, loss, and violence. In the first half of the course, will consider how the languages of horror, monstrosity, and the unknown have been used to construct the bodies and ideologies of “other people” from ancient world cultures to modern ones. We will analyze how processes of fear and hate, like racism and xenophobia, draw from (and reproduce) strange and frightening constructions of religious “others.” We will watch movies like the 2019 hit Midommar, read monster theory, and explore the histories of giants, zombies, and vampires. The second half of the class will turn towards the self, and explore how filmmakers, authors, and theorists have used horror to think about their own religions and religious experiences. We will consider why images of violence and bloodshed are often experienced as holy within devotional practices, how love comes to be associated with sacrifice and suffering, and how bodies are marked concurrently as cites of horror, disgust, and transcendence. We will watch the 1973 classic The Exorcist, read medieval visions of hell, explore tales of hungry ghosts, spirits, and revenants, analyze encounters with demons, jinn, and dybbuks, and ask whether frightening fictionalized worlds can help people reflect on and heal from experiences of religious abuse. As a first-year writing seminar, students will be asked to introduce their own areas of interest into course discussions and assignments as they develop analytical writing projects that grapple with questions of religion and horror. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, academic question asking, and classroom collaboration.

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)

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.  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 2025, 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 2025, 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 2024, Professor Mark McClish)

One of the largest and most ancient of all religions, Hinduism comprises a family of related traditions. Over the last 5000 years, the Hindu traditions of South Asia have developed a remarkable diversity of rituals, beliefs, and spiritual practices and a pantheon of hundreds and thousands of gods and goddesses, from the elephant headed Ganeṣa to the fierce goddess Kālī as well as many local deities. This course will examine the breadth of the Hindu traditions as they have developed over time, highlighting the major elements that characterize them collectively, such as ritual sacrifice (yajña), world renunciation (saṃnyāsa), law (dharma), spiritual discipline (yoga), devotion (bhakti), worship (pūjā), and theology. During the course we will explore both the scriptures of Hinduism as well as its practices. We will pay particular attention to how these traditions have contributed to the development of modern Hinduism.

(Fall 2024, 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 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
This course provides an introduction to key aspects of the Buddhist religious traditions of multiple Asian countries and the United States. Through careful examination of a variety of literature produced by these traditions, we will consider the ways in which Buddhists have understood human suffering, life after death, karma, merit, the nature of the world and human's place within it, and the path to enlightenment. Our emphasis will be on attempting to understand the moral values, philosophical insights, ritual practices, and social concerns that have shaped Buddhism over centuries of dynamic change in diverse cultural contexts. We will examine not only the history of Buddhism and its three-fold division into Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, but also facets of the contemporary practice of Buddhism with a focus on the place of mindfulness in America. In addition to textbook readings, course readings privilege primary source readings in order to introduce students directly to the narrative, doctrinal, liturgical, and biographical texts that inform our knowledge of what it has meant to live a Buddhist life over time and across cultures.

(Spring 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)
There is no understating the significance of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in Western Culture. The Bible is a text that has been repeatedly turned to for spiritual guidance, for explanations of mankind's origins and as the basis of both classical art and contemporary cinema. English idiom is peppered with phrases that originate in the Hebrew Bible and many a modern political clash can be understood as a conflict over what the Bible's messages and their implications. This course introduces students to the Hebrew Bible by reading sections of most of the Bible's books. But reading is itself a complicated enterprise. The Bible has been put to many different uses; even within the world of academic scholarship, the Bible is sometimes a source of history, sometimes a religious manual, sometimes a primitive legal code and sometimes a work of classical literature. This course will introduce students to the various challenges that present themselves within the study of the Hebrew Bible and the varied approaches scholars take when reading the Hebrew Bible. This course is a critical introduction to the Hebrew Bible.

(Fall 2024, 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.

(Winter 2025, 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.

(Fall 2024, Professor Usman Hamid)

This course is an introduction to the study of Islam, one of the major religious traditions of world history. It adopts an interdisciplinary framework for understanding Islam as a lived tradition by focusing on the debates and practices that have animated Muslim religious life across time and geography. We will examine religious texts alongside material evidence, historical research, and ethnographic studies. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Muslims have engaged with the Qur’an and the life and legacy of the Prophet Muhammad, the practice of Islamic ritual, piety, and devotion, as the place of Islamic law in everyday life. Through this course, students will develop critical vocabulary necessary for understanding Islamic discourses and practices, as well as facility with the theoretical language in the study of religion.

(Winter 2025, 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 2025, 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.

(Fall 2024, Professor Kevin Buckelew)

Are our actions free or fated? What larger forces shape the choices we make? To what do we owe our successes, and what is to blame for our mistakes? In East Asian religions, such questions have been answered with reference to a variety of different concepts of fate, fortune, and karma. These concepts shape not only how people have viewed the world, but also how they have made their way through life. This class focuses on religious approaches to questions of destiny in premodern East Asia. We begin by studying Indian Buddhist ideas of karma and early Chinese notions of fate and fortune preceding Buddhism's arrival in China, then turn to the ways people in China and Japan negotiated these various concepts over the many centuries following the arrival of Buddhism. In the end, we discover important throughlines amid the diversity of religious responses to the problem of destiny in East Asian history.

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
A binding principle of interrelationship weaves through domains as divergent as ecology, Buddhism, and critical theory, among others. This course takes an expansive look at various permutations of interdependence as imagined across terrains ranging from millennia-old Buddhist texts to modern explorations into Buddhist environmentalism (ecodharma), political ecology, and critical theory. In this process, the elements that comprise our environment—earth, water, air, minerals, trash & treasures—will transform from scenery to agentic forces with whom living beings act.

As we move through this pilgrimage across disciplines, we will ask ourselves: What are the consequences of understanding ourselves as individual agents, acting alone in the universe? In what ways is individualism a sought-after virtue according to some, and part and parcel of humans’ earth destroying tendencies according to others? What alternative ways of being and knowing can we imagine that present human agency in relational terms, co-constituted not just by other organisms, but also by a web of environmental conditions that make life possible? How can we re-envision humans’ interdependent relationship with the more-than-human world in ways that can mitigate climate grief and apathy and support sustainable living practices?

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

(Summer 2025, Dhondup T. Rekjong)

This course aims to provide a transformative learning experience, encouraging participants to engage deeply with the dynamic interplay between Buddhism and the modern developments in science. Participants will deepen their understanding of Buddhism with science and mindfulness, through comprehensive exploration, gaining insights into the intersections of these fields.

(Winter 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz) 
Do rabbis have sex? Is Jewish knowledge erotic? And what is “the Talmud”? This course will explore these questions in relation to the original rabbis of late antiquity (3rd-7th centuries CE) through narratives, myths, and ethnographic accounts about rabbinic sex, gender and sexuality in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. You will learn to expand the definition of what constitutes “sex” or “desire,” “kinship” or “connection,” “body” or “text,” by examining ancient rabbinic forms of gendered, textual, and bodily transmission. Students will learn to become curious about bodily norms that are quite removed from the worlds that we inhabit no matter one’s starting point, and will learn to make connections across the ancient and contemporary. This is a deep-reading, discussion-based course that will provide students with an opportunity to learn how to read rabbinic texts in translation, to generate conversational learning through Jewish textual practices like question-and-response, and partnered study, also known as hevruta, and to deepen your knowledge of contemporary theory in gender/sex and sexuality. We will focus our attention continuously and deeply on a few key rabbinic texts, taking our time to plumb their many layers and the dynamic quality of rabbinic interpretive possibilities. No previous knowledge of Talmud or other Jewish texts required. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

(Winter 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) 
The Talmud is one of the most important works of Jewish literature. For the last millennium, Talmud study has been a central part of Jewish religious and cultural practice. Despite the splintering of Judaism into different denominations, Jews the world over are unified by their commitment to studying Talmud. The Talmud is an unusual work of literature, and it has been credited as an influence on codes of law, sermons, modern works of Jewish literature, and even Seinfeld. This course will explain the Talmud’s import and durability within Jewish culture while introducing students to the rigors of legal analysis that lie at the heart of most talmudic passages. The course is ideal for those interested in religion, law, logic games and questions of textual interpretation. The course will study the Talmud entirely in English translation; there is neither a language prerequisite nor an expectation of prior experience reading the Talmud. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.

(Spring 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz) 
This course approaches Jewish texts through the lens of media studies. The course will 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, music, and performance. 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. All non-English language texts will be presented in translation. No prior background with Jewish sources necessary. Class time will be divided between partnered text study and group discussion, and a special site visit to Special Collections at the University Library.

(Spring 2025, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) 
Narratives are centrally important to religions. From foundational myths that create the space within which religion happens to discrete episodes that ground specific rituals, narratives are the very stuff of religion. The purpose of this course is to consider narratives as a special site for the production of religious meaning; the course will draw heavily from both religion theory and literary theory. Issues we will cover include: whether textual meaning is located in the author, text or reader; how the religious context of a narrative affects its possible interpretations; how myths and rituals comprise different modes of narrative; the relationship between narrative time and religious time; the challenge to authority inherent to much religious narrative; the variety of ways through which religious figures mobilize narrative to further their authority.
This course will utilize Jewish and Christian narratives from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Rabbinic Literature, Apocrypha, Gnostic Texts and Church Fathers as primary texts. Students will be expected to build on materials covered in the course by applying narrative theory to the study of these narratives. Students will also learn about the near simultaneous emergence of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism and put these two religious formations in conversation.
Some of the theoretical works to be used are: Paul Ricouer, Figuring the Sacred; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality;” Robert Segal, ed., The Myth and Ritual Theory; Jerome Bruner, The Making of Stories; Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?

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 2025, 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 2025, Professor James Bielo)
In this course, students will explore the religious, social, and political dimensions of Christian nationalist movements. We will consider the U.S. case in historical and ethnographic perspective, and contextualize it amid global comparative examples.

(Spring 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)

Update 02/18/25. The seminar is currently full. If you are still interested in the topic, contact Prof. Lily Stewart to check if you can be added to a waiting list.

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 2024, Professor Usman Hamid)

This course introduces Sufism, the ‘mystical' tradition of Islam. After critically examining the concept of ‘mysticism' within Religious Studies, we will examine the historical origins of Sufism, its emergence from and relationship to foundational discourses within Islam, its engagement with the Qur'an, and the figure of the Prophet Muhammad in Sufi devotions. We will then investigate notions of ‘sainthood' in Islam, the roles of Sufism in popular Muslim piety, the centrality of the body and bodily disciplines in Sufi practice, and the writings produced by Sufis, their supporters, and critics. Particular attention will be paid to the study of Sufi literature both in prose and poetry. The course will offer a broad introduction to the historical and geographic range of Sufism in Islam, but will give special attention to Sufi traditions in the Indian subcontinent and the broader Persianate world.

(Spring 2025, Professor Usman Hamid)
This course introduces students to Islamic narratives concerning the lives of famous figures from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Prophets such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Soloman, and Jesus feature prominently in the Qur’an, popular storytelling, universal histories, paintings, and poetry. How did Muslims view these figures? What do these narratives about the Prophets tell us about Muslim interactions with Judaism and Christianity? How were the stories of important Prophetic figures used to impart important religious teachings? This course presumes no previous knowledge of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.

(Fall 2024, 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.

(Spring 2025, James Bielo)
In this course students, students will explore diverse ways in which religion is made through artistic expression. We will consider examples such as tattooing, Christian outsider artists, Muslim rappers, and accusations of blasphemy.

(Fall 2024, Professor Sarah Taylor)

It is often said that in riding a horse “we borrow freedom.” From winged Pegasus of Greek mythology, to mystical Kelpies of Celtic lore, to the Hippogriffs in Harry Potter, horses hold a special allure for humans that transcends cultures. Come explore the power of the sacred human-horse bond as represented in art, film, and popular culture. Come learn about the use of horses in healing veterans with PTSD as we visit “Brave Hearts,” the country’s largest healing horsemanship program right here in Illinois. Do “horse whisperers” truly exist? What do we make of divine horses portrayed in myth and symbol, horses as spiritual teachers, practices of horse meditation and healing, spiritual journeys with horses, ghost horses, and those who practice horsemanship as a spiritual life path? Delight in discovering just what it is about horses that fascinates us, captures our hearts, and fuels our imaginations. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) .

(Winter 2025, Professor Michelle Molina)

In the aftermath of the World War I, many artists and filmmakers asked new questions about the relationship between realism and religion. Could one reconcile concrete reality (or realism) with faith in the other-worldly? Many of the artists under discussion in the course drew upon themes that had already been raised by Kierkegaard in the 19th century. What was the relationship between religion and modernity, faith and ethics, reality and the supernatural, observable phenomena and invisible causes? How did one make sense of death in a meaningless universe? Was the universe meaningless? Could meaning be found in realism itself? Through engagement with films by directors ranging from Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman, to Woody Allen and Harold Ramis, we will study mid-to-late 20th century films whose common theme is the quest to understand the meaning of life, either actively through taking up religious life, or because the protagonists consider themselves inhabiting a godless and meaningless universe. Class will be discussion-based, with a few short lectures to set up pertinent themes. Class readings will include Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, among others. *Registration By Instructor Permission Only.

(Spring 2025, Professor Christine Helmer)
Our concern in this course is examine the concept of modernity so that we can better understand our modern world. Our discussion focuses on how Christianity is bound together with particular conceptions of modernity, for example secularization and antisemitism. We also examine how Jewish philosophers and Christian theologians offer critical accounts of modernity, even as we explore movements coalescing around criticisms of modernity that possibly undermine modernity itself.

(Fall 2024, 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 2025, Professor James Bielo)
In this course students will explore diverse representations of religion in museum settings and other contexts of public display. Student research will include engagement with Chicago area museums, and the opportunity to design their own exhibit.

(Winter 2025, Professor Usman Hamid)
This seminar is an inquiry into how we experience religion in the world today. It takes seriously the idea of religion as mediated phenomena. We experience the religious through an engagement with multiple sensorial forms—things seen, felt, tasted, heard, and smelt. These can include a wide set of media ranging from YouTube videos of preachers to calendars with images of Hindu deities sold in bazars; mechanized prayer counters to the corporeal remains of venerated figures; food distributed in Hindu temples, Muslim shrines, Christian churches and Sikh gurdwaras to water brought back from pilgrimage to holy sites; Gregorian chants to Muslim calls to prayer; incense lit to commemorate the dead to camphor burnt before the image of the divine. The spaces in which we experience these religious phenomena are ever broadening as well. We do not experience the religious in places of worship alone but also at museums and in public buildings, on superhighways and in cyberspace.

While this seminar adopts the perspective of religious materiality, with its concern for aesthetics, presence, memory, and space, it does not require previous knowledge of specific theories or familiarity with any particular religious tradition. It invites students specializing in different traditions and frameworks to engage with scholarship on religion and media in the hope that it offers a fresh perspective on their own materials.

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Taylor)

What counts or does not count as “religion”? How do we know? And who gets to decide? This course explores the major foundational theorists in the field of Religious Studies, while placing them into conversation with contemporary perspectives in the field. We begin by asking “What is a theory? And what does it mean to have a theory about something?” We then dig into those theories and engage with them -- “activating theory” by representing each theory we study in creative and participatory ways that actively involve the whole class. Throughout the quarter, you will be formulating your own theory of religion and then making the case for it in your final project. Have you taken theory courses in the past that are a bit dry and opaque? We take a different tack. Put on your creative and artistic thinking caps as we make theories of religion come alive in unique and innovative ways. This course involves music, art, video, podcasts, and other artistic mediums, in addition to written texts.

(Fall 2024, Professor Sarah Jacoby)

This course explores a variety of Tibetan-language genres of writing such as history, poetry, philosophy, doctrine, narrative literature, and more, with attention to their form and content. All course readings are in Tibetan, presuming at least an intermediate ability to read Tibetan. Students will focus on Tibetan-English translation techniques while broadening their knowledge of Tibetan literary genres. Course readings will vary depending on enrolled students' specific areas of interest.

(Spring 2025, Prof. Orsi and Prof. Helmer)
If "we" have never been modern, then what have "we" been, and what does this have to do with "religion" (as object of inquiry) and "religions" (as lived practice) amid the multiple crises of the current moment? Topics will include the question of the secularity (or not) of critique; the resurgence of the supernatural across multiple fields of contemporary thought and practice; post-liberalism and the enduring power of anti-realism; and theologies of modernity. Readings comprise a mix of classic texts (Horkheimer, Barth, Schleiermacher, and others); recent scholarship and theory in religious studies and adjacent fields; and first-person accounts of contemporaries consumed with or by these questions.

(Fall 2024, Professor Michelle Molina)

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)
This course will engage historical and ethnographic sources that examine the diverse entanglements between religion and capitalism across cultural contexts. Our organizing question is this: how have religious expressions and capitalist systems mutually formed one another? We will consider cases such as Islamic banking; the commodification of religious materiality; theologies of financial prosperity in multiple traditions; ties between neoliberalism and religious change; and anti-capitalist movements grounded in religious frameworks. Students will conduct original research that explores a question they design in collaboration with the professor and course colleagues.

(Winter 2025, Professor KB Dennis Meade)
In this course we will explore the cosmological, material, and spiritual technologies in Black Atlantic magico-religious traditions in the Caribbean and U.S. South. Our readings will help us interrogate the distinctions between practitioners self-understanding of supernatural technologies and the academic study of these traditions through the ethnographic and anthropological lens. Through theory, case studies, and primary sources we will trace the impact of antiblackness on the criminalization of these magical traditions from the colonial period to the present.

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
This course will consider the state of the field of Buddhist Studies by examining a selection of relevant recent scholarly works. The nine weeks of this course will survey a wide range of topics, such as Buddhist ritual, cosmology, literature, philosophy, geopiety, and intellectual history. We will attend not only to the range of subject matter covered in new Buddhist Studies scholarship, but also to the methodologies and theoretical approaches favored in selected works. Through engaging in what we can call a type of “reverse engineering process” in which we analyze the parts that comprise the whole of recent monographs in the field of Buddhist studies, our goal will be not only to critique, but to consider how scholars have put together recent projects with an eye toward preparing students for their own research and writing. All required course readings are in English; this is a graduate seminar but motivated undergraduates with a background in Buddhist Studies courses are welcome to request permission from the professor to register.

(Spring 2025, Professor Brannon Ingram)
This course offers a critical examination of scholars – the Comparative Religions “canon” – who played major roles in the formation of Religious Studies as a discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course begins by interrogating the very notion of a canon. What is a canon for? How do they get formed? For what purpose and by whom? Are they still relevant? Can we form new canons? We then proceed to approach the “canon” through a series of modules, focusing on the work, legacies, and scholarly interlocutors of William James, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Mircea Eliade.

(Fall 2024, Professor Elizabeth Hurd)

This course offers students tools for thinking in a critical and comparative way about the intersections of religion, law, and politics from a global perspective. Much ink has been spilt considering and reconsidering definitions of religion, secularism, and politics, and how these concepts work to shape each other and the worlds we inhabit. This course asks, what comes next in the study of religion in politics? What does it look like to not only globalize this question by asking about a wider diversity of contexts and histories beyond Europe and its settler colonies but also to move beyond vocabularies that have framed and limited discussions of these questions for decades? This transdisciplinary seminar is an experiment in thinking the question of religion and politics in modernity anew. Themes to be considered through this prism include sovereignty, governance, coloniality, borders, Indigeneity, human movement, race, and law.

(Spring 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz)
This seminar introduces students to the growing subfield of queer and transgender studies in religion. Combining theoretical frameworks from religious studies and queer and transgender studies, we will study the impact of religious norms on queer/trans lives within religious communities, queer/trans forms of religion that emerge on the margins of normative religious communities, and when queerness/transness become points of religious exit. We will explore the norming systems of religion and gender/sex/sexuality together, examining how they produce both normative and non-normative forms of embodiment and desire, while interrogating the boundaries of religion/race/ethnicity. Crucial to our study will be the examination of the language and categories of “queer” “trans” and “religious” as social identities and structural subject positions. Where do these terms originate and who do they include? Do they articulate forms of identity, practice, belief, or power? And how do we trace the boundaries of normativity in a transnational, transhistorical, and comparative ethnoreligious context?