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.
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.
(Fall 2025, Professor Mark McClish) This course is an experimental, constructive, student-led inquiry into the idea of environmental consciousness, a term recently used by philosopher Michael Bonnett to posit an intrinsic relationship between consciousness and nature. He argues that education should be ecologized by aiming to help students develop environmental consciousness as a responsive receptivity to nature.
In this course we will explore the idea of environmental consciousness by developing and carrying out nature-based practices meant to help us understand its feasibility as a basis for education. Students will collectively design, undertake, and assess these practices. In doing so we will reflect on our relationship with nature and the environment, the goals of education, conceptions of learning and assessment, the putative distinction between the secular and religious, and the relationship between educational practices and climate catastrophe.
REL 316-20 Religion and the Body in China (RSG, RHM)
(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.
REL 318-20 Buddhist Cultures and the Rhetoric of Violence (RLP, MTJR)
(Fall 2025, Professor Antonio Terrone) This course investigates the intersections between religion and violence in the context of Buddhist Asia while also considering why in many religious traditions there seem to be a link between the two. The course will be structured in two parts: in the first part students will be encouraged to build expertise in the basic concepts, definitions, and general academic consensus (as well as debates) about categories including “religion,” “violence,” “sacrifice,” “ritual,” “martyrdom,” and also “nationalism,” “politics,” and “terrorism” through reading both primary sources (in English translation) and secondary sources (scholarly writings). We will then move into an analysis of case studies that focus on specific circumstances where Buddhist rhetoric, scriptural authority, and religious practices have played a role in violence including suicide, terrorist-related actions, and self-immolation predominantly in pre- and modern Asia.
Some of the provocative questions that this course asks include: Why and how is religion involved in politics? Is Buddhism a pacifist religion? How does religion rationalize violence? How can some Buddhist leaders embrace terror as a political tool? Are the recent practices of self-immolation in Tibet acts of violence? Can non-violence be violent?
REL 359-21 / MENA 390-5-1 Muslim Bodies (RHM, RSG)
(Fall 2025, Professor Usman Hamid) This course examines the relationship between bodies and religion by examining Muslim embodiment of the Islam tradition in historical and contemporary contexts. Bodies are the site of much religious attention, both in terms of discourses and practices. As the instruments of ritual performance, they are subject to religious self-discipline and careful social regulation. At the same time bodies are medium through which religious experiences are made sensible and social identities materialized. As pivotal sites of religious expression and practice, bodies have been subject to a wide range of discourses, including aesthetic, devotional, ethical, erotic, legal, medieval, and political. The material reality of bodies has also drawn special attention from Muslim scholars and laity alike, with concerns ranging from health and healing, disability and difference, birth and childrearing, sex and gender, to death and dying. Finally, the bodies of Muslim holy figures have played an important role in the construction of urban environments, ritual practices, and sacred geography. Over the course of the quarter, we shall examine case studies that address some of these major themes and issues.
REL 371-20 Religion, Film, TV: The Spirit of Horses (RHM, MTJR)
(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. This course explores the power of the sacred human-horse bond as represented in art, film, TV, and social media, while teaching techniques and tools for analyzing media and making your own media! We will start by looking historically and anthropologically at the co-evolution of humans and equids, investigating how the domestication of horses and the mutually shaping human-horse relationship radically changed the world. We will also learn how religion followed the path of horses across the globe. In fact, the history of religions, their spread, comingling, and influence can be told through the prism of human-horse partnerships over space and time. We will learn about horses in mythology and sacred symbol, divine horses with supernatural powers, and how horses become a mainstay of folklore on virtually every continent. We will read and listen to reflections on the ways horses help some people to think about, know, and experience God/the divine, and/or find existential meaning. We will explore horse religions and worship (old and new), the key role played by horses in many funerary rites, and learn more about peoples who know themselves as “the people of the horse.” We will also learn about the use of horses in therapy programs for those mentally, emotionally, physically, and developmentally challenged, and the successful use of horse therapy to heal veterans and others coping with PTSD. Finally, we look at a variety of horse trainers and clinicians who approach horsemanship as a kind of sacred vocation, devotional path, and/or spiritual discipline. At the core of this course is investigating why and how it is that horses fascinate humans, capture so many hearts, and fuel our imaginations. In other words, “What is it about horses . . . ?” We learn about media by “doing media,” so this course offers the chance to design and produce two media projects based on original research and analysis, examining works that mediate horses. We will also have a class field trip to an equine therapy center. [No experience with horses necessary, though not recommended for students who are allergic to equines.] *The course counts toward the Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and the Media, Technology, Journalism and Religion (MTJR) major concentrations.
REL 382-20 / POLI_SCI 382-20 Religion, Law, & Politics: Politics of Religious Diversity
(Fall 2025, Ely Orrego-Torres) This course teaches how think critically, comparatively, and globally about the intersections of religion, law, and politics. A central focus is on how “religious freedom” and “secularism” are contested concepts, influenced by historical context and the circulation of ideas. We study these dynamics comparatively, examining the ways in which religious, legal, and political traditions around the world intersect, interact and co-constitute. Students will learn to critically evaluate competing perspectives and articulate informed positions on contemporary challenges in diverse societies and it also aims to equip students with the knowledge and analytical tools to engage thoughtfully in global debates on religion, politics, and human rights.
The course is organized around a set of theories and legal cases curated by Professor Elizabeth Hurd and Professor Winnifred Sullivan which are available through the open access Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive. The course traverses disciplinary, geographic, and secular-religious boundaries, drawing on readings from politics, socio-legal studies, religious studies, indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and popular culture. Students will consider their own experiences of living with religious diversity as we explore strategies to think religion anew in the contemporary world. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and collective projects, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics of religious freedom and secularism in world politics.
(Fall 2025, Professor James Bielo) How is religious authority performed, negotiated, and challenged across cultural contexts and discourse genres? In this seminar, students will engage this question through a series of ethnographic works and their own original data analysis. We will explore the intersection of religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and linguistic anthropology through scholarship that examines diverse communicative practices and ideologies.
REL 481-2-20 Graduate Seminar: Contemporary Theories of Religion
(Fall 2025, Professor Michelle Molina) In this seminar, we trace the emergence of the category of religion as an object of scholarly inquiry and cross-cultural comparison, with particular attention to how the category emerged in the context of European colonialism and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This research seminar is for advanced undergraduates interested in U.S. American borders. We read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies. We also watch documentary films, listen to music, and engage with guest speakers. Central themes include the history of US borders with Mexico, American exceptionalism, Indigenous communities, protest movements, law on and around borders, sanctuary and sovereignty, the history of the passport, religion and borders, and environmental politics in the borderlands. Border issues are considered from multiple perspectives, including but also going well beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their choice involving border studies.
