DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(Fall 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.

(Fall 2025, 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.

(Winter 2026, 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.

(Winter 2026, Professor Shira E. Schwartz)

 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.

(Fall 2025, 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, Professor Robert Orsi)
This course examines major developments, movements, controversies, and figures in American religious history from the end of the Civil War, as the nation struggled to make sense of the carnage of war and to apportion responsibility, to the 1930s, when economic crisis strained social bonds and intimate relations and challenged Americans to rethink the nature of public responsibility. Topics include urban religion; religion and changing technologies; African American religion; religion and politics; and the religious practices of immigrants and migrants.

(Spring 2026, Professor Robert Orsi)

(Spring 2025, Professor Sarah Jacoby)
In the middle of the twentieth century, cutting-edge literary theorists concluded that autobiography was exclusively a product of “Western” individualistic culture, thereby ignoring the literary output of large parts of the globe, including Buddhist religious literature. The goal of this course is to explore Buddhist biography and autobiography as literary genres and as lenses through which we can examine the various meanings of living an exemplary Buddhist life, focusing on religious literature from India and Tibet. Questions the course will probe include: How did a religious doctrine such as Buddhism, which denies the ultimate existence of the self, become a major locus of auto/biographical writing? What is the nature of the self as it is expressed in Buddhist religious auto/biography, and what were the aims of this literature? What can we learn from reading biographies and autobiographies about Buddhist selves, societies, and histories? How do differences of gender, nationality, and religious lineage inform auto/biographical representations of the self? 

(Fall 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.

(Winter 2026, Professor Brannon Ingram)

(Winter 2026, 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. The course counts towards the Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration. 

(Fall 2025, 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 the Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and the Media, Technology, Journalism and Religion (MTJR) major concentrations.

(Winter 2026, 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.