(Spring 2026, Professor Christine Helmer) Theology is an academic discipline that, like philosophy, has to do with the big questions of life: What does God have to do with the world? How does body relate to soul? Why is evil so pernicious? What is special about theological thinking? We address the question “what is theology?” by asking theologians how they think, what topics fascinate them, and how they bring their experiences to their work. We discuss Christian theologians from the past, who have impressed their ideas on both the development of theology and culture in the west. We look to contemporary theologians to explain why some forms of theology perpetuate exclusions and how theology can be a tool for thinking about inclusive practices in church and world.
REL 318-21 Religion and Culture in the People's Republic of China (RLP)
(Spring 2026, 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. The course counts towards the Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.
(Spring 2026, Professor Shira E. Schwartz) This seminar explores theoretical and methodological links between textual and ethnographic research. As an interdisciplinary and topic-motivated field, religious studies pursues research questions that can cross multiple disciplines and periods. This seminar takes up one of those crossings—text and ethnography—as a site of rich potential for methodological innovation and theoretical exchange. Responding to recent calls to decenter “the human” within the (post)humanities and social sciences, we will investigate what gets lost by dividing meaning from materiality, the natural from the cultural, the archival and literary from the ethnographic. Troubling disciplinary boundaries and categorical binaries, students will be encouraged to explore what text and ethnography share as entangled sites of human and nonhuman production and what we stand to gain by linking them. What are the textual practices inscribed by our ethnographic fields and scholarly productions? How do we locate the sites in which textual projects emerge and include the bodies in which they come to live? Students will learn how to expand and deepen their own textual and ethnographic projects by incorporating research practices from both methods. Readings will be drawn from fields like anthropology, textual, literary and media studies, queer and trans studies, lived religion, science and technology studies, antiquity studies, history. The course will be of interest to students across these fields. Assignments will position students to integrate course readings and topics to their own research projects, to develop interdisciplinary research methods across time and modality, and to apply that knowledge toward research proposal development.
