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 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.

(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.

(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.