(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. *Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.
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.
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.
REL 262-0-20 / BLK_ST 262-20 Introduction to Black Religions: The North American Experience
(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.
REL 316-20 Religion and the Body in China (RSG, RHM)
(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.
REL 318-22 Religion and Politics in the People's Republic of China (RLP)
(Winter 2025, Professor Antonio Terrone) This course will examine the role of religion in post-1980’s China with an emphasis on the political implications of the practice of religion in the People’s Republic of China. Students will read various forms of literature and policy documents to assess the extent to which Marxist theory is central to the interpretation of “religion” in Communist China. Primary sources will include Chinese constitutional articles, white papers, and editorials in English translation. Secondary sources will cover a wide range of interpretations and perspectives on the position of religious institutions and religious practices in the PRC. The first part of this course will investigate the expression of religiosity under Communism in China; the rehabilitation of Confucian values; the constitutional protection of religion and religious belief in China; the relationship between ethnicity and religious policies; the Sinicization of religion; and the administration of the five officially accepted religious traditions in the People’s Republic of China (Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam). The second part of the course will focus on the recent cases related to the Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the Tibetan Buddhists of Western China. The class will explore some of the most controversial issues related to these two ethnic minorities including terrorism, religious violence, nationalism, assimilation, foreign influence, and soft power. The course format will consist of both lectures and discussions, during which students will be encouraged to exercise critical thinking and lead in-class presentations. Students will analyze various types of documents, critically evaluate content and concepts, and endeavor to synthesize the information and communicate it effectively and thoroughly.Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.
REL 319-24 / HUM 370-5-30 Being Human in a More Than Human World (RHM)
(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?
(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.
REL 349-20 Medicine, Miracles, and Magic: Healthcare in the Middle Ages (RHM)
(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.
REL 371-21 / RTVF 398-20 Religion, Film, TV: Religion, Existentialism and Film
(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.
(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.
REL 395-20 Theories of Religion (Senior Capstone Seminar)
(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Taylor) What is "theory"? What does it mean to have a theory about something? How are theories helpful? What do theories do? What is "religion"? How do things get excluded or included in this category? What counts as "religious" and why? Who gets to decide? This course is an introduction to foundational theories of religion and to the history of the construction of the category of “religion” over time. Throughout the term, you will be working on formulating your own theory of religion, which you will articulate and defend in your final seminar paper. In this course, you will gain (as ritual theorist Catherine Bell says) “the skills and tools to make sure that very complicated situations and ideas can be put into words, thereby making it possible to have discussions about issues that can only be discussed if there is language for reflexivity, nuance, counter-evidence, and doubt.” In the process, you will be asked to make theory translatable to your peers by actively engaging theoretical concepts in creative and innovative ways.
(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.
REL 471-22 Graduate Seminar: Black Magic: Conjure and Healing Traditions in Black Atlantic Religions
(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.
REL 473-20 Graduate Seminar: Buddhist Studies: State of the Field
(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.