REL 101-8-23 First-Year Writing Seminar: Religion and Horror
(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.
REL 172-20 Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture
(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!
(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.
(Spring 2025, Professor Mark McClish) This course will introduce students to the philosophical traditions of classical and early medieval India: Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. We will explore the features of Indian philosophy that make it distinctive, such as its goals, practices, and theories of knowledge. We will acquaint ourselves with the schools of Indian philosophy and follow debates between major thinkers from each on subjects such as the self, consciousness, the relationship between mind and the cosmos, and the relationship between language and reality.
In this course, students will read writings from Buddhist canonical and non-canonical literature on a variety of subjects to gain an introduction to the variety of literary genres used in Buddhist works, as well as to consider the central tenets of the Buddhist literary tradition these works convey. Who was the Buddha? What did he preach? Why do we suffer and how do we realize enlightenment? How should one follow the Buddhist path? What metaphors and parables have Buddhists used to convey these insights over the centuries? Students will be able to explore these and other questions through a selection of English translations of original texts in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan including the life of the Buddha, his sayings, Buddhist sutras, and Buddhist autobiographies. As this course is an introduction to Buddhist literature, there are no prerequisites, and students will gain familiarity with Buddhist teachings through engaging directly with primary sources in translation.
(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?
(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.
REL 349-22 *The course is FULL* Blood and Christianity: A History in Substance (RHM, RSG)
(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.
REL 359-20 / MENA 390-5-1 Biblical Prophets in Islam
(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.
(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.
REL 376-20 Christianity and the Making of Modernity (RLP)
(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.
(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.
REL 470-20 Graduate Seminar: Theology and the Study of Religion
(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.
REL 481-1-20 Graduate Seminar: Classical Theories of Religion
(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.
REL 482-21 / GNDR_ST 490-23 Graduate Seminar: Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion
(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?
