(Spring 2026, Professor Richard Kieckhefer)

This class will focus on the making and remaking of Christianity. In its origins Christianity drew upon Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Scriptures, but also on other traditions circulating in the Mediterranean world. It brought together the themes of kingship, spirit indwelling, acting righteously and being justified, the present and future dimensions of God’s reign, connections between the world above and the world below. The New Testament combines all this and more in ways that later writers sorted and worked through. But then over time Christianity was also remade: its relationship with Judaism changed, its views of Christ became more formally developed and explicit, it wrestled with its own earlier demands for perfection, it splintered in ever new ways, and it adjusted to new cultural environments, including what we call modernity. We will look at all these developments and ask about their implications.

(Spring 2026, Professor Mark McClish)

This course explores the relationship between and among beings and their natural environment as reflected in the cultures and practices of different South Asian religious traditions. In doing so, we will look both at shared, institutional traditions as reflected in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam as well as different local, tribal, and indigenous traditions. In each instance, we will ask how relationships between beings, place, the cosmos, and the sacred exist within and through nature and natural environments, and how these relationships form bonds of community between them. A key goal of this course is the cultivation among class participants of environmental consciousness, our everyday awareness of, and participation in, the local natural world around us. Hence, as we pursue a widescale understanding of religion and ecology in South Asia, we will also use the opportunity afforded by our readings and discussions to cultivate our own everyday sense of relatedness with our natural environment.

(Spring 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)

For over two thousand years, Jews have engendered antagonism and hatred from some of their neighbors and erstwhile friends. This course will overview the history of anti-Jewish ideologies and episodes seeking to taxonomize and analyze this metahistorical phenomenon. The course will engage both primary and secondary sources covering over two millennia of world history while attending to diversity in time, place, political reality, and majority religion. Much of the course will be devoted to theorizing anti-Judaism and antisemitism, engaging different paradigms that look to history, theology, psychoanalysis, race and power to consider and reconsider this long-lasting set of hatreds. This course counts towards the Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.

(Spring 2026, Professor Sergey Ivanov)

This course explores the historical, cultural, and theological construction of sainthood in Christianity from antiquity to the modern period. Contrary to popular belief, neither Jesus nor the apostles defined saints as a special spiritual elite. Rather, sainthood emerged gradually as a social, literary, and institutional phenomenon, while the Church has never actually provided a definition of what a saint truly is. Saints embody a paradox: they represent an immediate, personal relationship with the divine, while the Church functions as an institution that regulates, formalizes, and mediates access to the sacred. This tension—between charisma and bureaucracy, spontaneity and control—lies at the heart of Christian history. The course examines how saints were invented, celebrated, regulated, and imitated, and how holiness functioned as a form of symbolic power. We will study stylites, holy fools, transvestites etc. as literary personae, as, as well as the genres, rituals, and institutions that shaped their memory. We will tell about the living who mortify themselves, and on the dead who are nevertheless alive.

(Spring 2026, Sarah Eisen)

Religion permeated every aspect of life in the ancient Mediterranean. Even though it was believed that one could encounter the gods anywhere, some places were more sacred than others, and over time the concept of a sanctuary formed. This course will investigate sacred spaces in the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on Greece and Rome. We will ask: what made one place more sacred than others? What activities and rituals occurred in a sanctuary? How can we recognize a sanctuary archaeologically, and how were they discussed in ancient literature? By investigating ancient sacred spaces, students will explore the social, political, and economic realities and imaginations of religious spaces as they effected polities, empires, and interconnected cultures.