Summer 2026 Class Schedule: Department of Religious Studies

Summer 2026 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
REL 230-26 ONLINE	Introduction to Judaism	Wimpfheimer	3 WKS (6/22/26 to 7/12/26)
REL 230-26 ONLINE Introduction to Judaism (Summer 2026, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) 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.
REL 339-26 ONLINE	Rabbinic Sex Stories (RHM, RLP, RSG)	Schwartz	3 WKS (8/3/26 to 8/23/26) MWF 10am-1:20pm
REL 339-26 ONLINE Rabbinic Sex Stories (RHM, RLP, RSG) (Summer 2026, Professor Shira Schwartz) Do rabbis have sex? Is Jewish knowledge erotic? And what is “the Talmud”? This course will explore these questions in relation to the original rabbis of late antiquity (3rd-7th centuries CE) through narratives, myths, and ethnographic accounts about rabbinic sex, gender and sexuality in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. You will learn to expand the definition of what constitutes “sex” or “desire,” “kinship” or “connection,” “body” or “text,” by examining ancient rabbinic forms of gendered, textual, and bodily transmission. Students will learn to become curious about bodily norms that are quite removed from the worlds that we inhabit no matter one’s starting point, and will learn to make connections across the ancient and contemporary. This is a deep-reading, discussion-based course that will provide students with an opportunity to learn how to read rabbinic texts in translation, to generate conversational learning through Jewish textual practices like question-and-response, and partnered study, also known as hevruta, and to deepen your knowledge of contemporary theory in gender/sex and sexuality. We will focus our attention continuously and deeply on a few key rabbinic texts, taking our time to plumb their many layers and the dynamic quality of rabbinic interpretive possibilities. No previous knowledge of Talmud or other Jewish texts required. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM), Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.
REL 349-26 ONLINE	Christian Healing and Dying (RHM)	Davis	5 WKS (6/22/26 to 7/26/26) MWF 2pm-4pm
REL 349-26 ONLINE Christian Healing and Dying (RHM) (Summer 2026, Professor Phil Davis) This Mortal Life: Healing and Dying in the History of Christianity Does immorality make you sick? Can bad behavior cause physical ailments? Is it possible to learn how to perform healing miracles—to mend broken limbs, cure diseases, and even raise the dead? Does the Devil possess healing powers or do those belong only to Jesus, the Great Physician? And when healing does not come and life nears its end, how should one prepare for death’s arrival? This course explores the history of three interlocking experiential themes in the history of Christianity: sickness, healing, and death. We will ask how the meanings of these themes have been defined in particular historical contexts in tandem with other concepts that carry significant power to shape the lived experience of Christianity—concepts like holiness and sin, spirit and body, damnation and salvation. We will begin by studying prophecies and promises of healing in Biblical texts and end with present-day Pentecostal attempts to bring those promises to fruition. As we move through the intervening centuries, we will consider both early Christian practices of imitating Christ through suffering and much later attempts to deny suffering a meaningful place in Christian devotional ethics. We will study the establishment of early Christian hospitals as well as Christians’ relationship to medieval healthcare and modern medicine. In our present context of sprawling, professionalized hospitals, we will ask: where does the religious inheritance of modern healthcare stop and the domain of secular medicine begin? Also in view are questions of Christianity and mental health, the theological problem of pain, the effects of notions of Heaven and Hell on how Christians experience loss, and what it means to think of death as an enemy of God. We will take stock of the social meanings of Christian healing, too, especially the evangelistic value of miracles and the role healing plays in liberation theologies that center the experiences of marginalized and oppressed people. By the end of the term, we will be able to navigate the rich variety of Christian ways of relating to sickness, healing, and death. We will become conversant in how each scene of pain, comfort, healing, or loss discloses particular ways of relating to the body, to other people, to suprahuman beings (for example, God, Satan, Saints, angels, demons, or Nature), and to the very substance of what it means to be Christian. The course counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentrations.