REL 101-8-21 First-Year Writing Seminar: Living in Apocalyptic Times
(Winter 2027, Professor Robert Orsi) References to the end of time—to the end of the times we live in and to the end of time itself—have become so ubiquitous nowadays and so casual as to be almost banal. Yet they point towards something real. Suddenly, we are living in the subjunctive. Allusions to the future are hedged with contingency and uncertainty.
The question for this course is not how ought people live in this time, but how are they living. How are humans in their relations with each other and with non-humans making their way through a such a deeply disturbing and dangerous period in human history, when the horizon of the future itself seems to be vanishing? How does living in this time shape decisions? What becomes of memory and hope? How are humans to live responsibly and lovingly in this context?
We ask these questions in relation to the climate crisis; the development of AI; the decline of democracies and rise of religious authoritarianism around the globe, and other challenges. At the very end of the course, we will think critically and deeply about the possibilities for hope.
As a course in the humanities, we will be concerned with the questions traditionally taken up by the disciplines organized under this heading. How do we read in this time? How do we create? What becomes of the human imagination when the horizon of the future is so clouded?
REL 101-8-22 First-Year Writing Seminar: Hollywood Be Thy Name: Race, Religion, and Belonging Through Film
(Winter 2027, Professor KB Dennis Meade) In this seminar students will explore constructions of race, religion, and belonging in the U.S. through popular films and television. This course will center representations of Black religions and spirituality as case studies. Along with written sources, students will “read” moving images as texts that consists of an argument, evidence, and analysis. Through close reading and exploratory exercises students will develop analytical essays that follow the writing process — from brainstorming and outlining, to drafting and revision. Students will also learn how to conduct peer reviews and translate their work into multimedia project.
REL 173-20 Religion, Medicine & Suffering in the West (RHM)
(Winter 2027, Professor Robert Orsi) This course explores what religion(s), primarily Catholicism (although I will make references to other religious traditions as we go along), have made of the body-in-pain, what religion may offer to people in pain to assist them in understanding and living with their illness, and how religious people have used physical pain for specific ends, religious, social, and political. Central to the work of the course is understanding pain itself as a phenomenon and thinking about how culture generally, religion in particular, shapes the pain experience. The course counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentrations. The enrollment is restricted to religious studies majors and minors, or by instructor consent.
(Fall 2026, Professor Mark McClish) One of the largest and most ancient of all religions, Hinduism comprises a family of related traditions. Over the last 5000 years, the Hindu traditions of South Asia have developed a remarkable diversity of rituals, beliefs, and spiritual practices and a pantheon of hundreds and thousands of gods and goddesses, from the elephant headed Ganeṣa to the fierce goddess Kālī as well as many local deities. This course will examine the breadth of the Hindu traditions as they have developed over time, highlighting the major elements that characterize them collectively, such as ritual sacrifice (yajña), world renunciation (saṃnyāsa), law (dharma), spiritual discipline (yoga), devotion (bhakti), worship (pūjā), and theology. During the course we will explore both the scriptures of Hinduism as well as its practices. We will pay particular attention to how these traditions have contributed to the development of modern Hinduism.
(Winter 2027, Dr. Dhondup T. Rekjong) The Buddha's life and teachings, traditions that developed from these teachings, and systems of meditation, rituals, and ethics.
REL 262-20 / BLK_ST 262-20 Introduction to Black Religions: The North American Experience
(Winter 2027, Professor KB Dennis Meade) In this course students will be introduced to the variety of Black religions in the United States from the early 19th century to the present. We will examine the historical and political dynamics that shaped these traditions from their origins in Africa to the formation of new religions that emerged in urban cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest. We will use written and multimedia sources to explore topics such as gender, migration, the movement for civil rights, and Black religious technologies in the 21st century.
REL 314-20 Buddhism in the Contemporary World (RHM)
(Winter 2027, Professor Sarah Jacoby) Why does Buddhism receive a pass more often than other religions by the “spiritual but not religious” crowd? Can Buddhism be secular? In what ways is Buddhism compatible with science, and can Buddhist practices be proven effective using scientific methods? Can paying better attention by means of Buddhist meditation practices liberate us from suffering caused by digital distraction? In what ways can Buddhist articulations of interdependence, no self, and compassion be resources for addressing racial and structural injustice, even as sexual abuse, racism, and trans/homophobia continue to traumatize members of some Buddhist communities? These are some of the many questions we will consider through readings by some of the most creative Buddhist leaders and critics of our time. Counts towards Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentration.
REL 339-21 / JWSH_ST 339-1 Reading the Talmud (RLP)
(Winter 2027, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer) The Talmud is one of the most important works of Jewish literature. For the last millennium, Talmud study has been a central part of Jewish religious and cultural practice. Despite the splintering of Judaism into different denominations, Jews the world over are unified by their commitment to studying Talmud. The Talmud is an unusual work of literature, and it has been credited as an influence on codes of law, sermons, modern works of Jewish literature, and even Seinfeld. This course will explain the Talmud’s import and durability within Jewish culture while introducing students to the rigors of legal analysis that lie at the heart of most talmudic passages. The course is ideal for those interested in religion, law, logic games and questions of textual interpretation. The course will study the Talmud entirely in English translation; there is neither a language prerequisite nor an expectation of prior experience reading the Talmud. Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.
(Winter 2027, Professor Brannon Ingram) Islamic law – the sacred law of Islam grounded in the Qur’an, the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, and the writings of Muslim scholars and jurists – stretches back nearly 1400 years. This course offers, first, an overview of the origins and evolution of Islamic law from the life of Muhammad to end of the classical era. We then seek, secondly, to understand how colonialism and the modern nation-state affected the conceptualization and implementation of Islamic law in the modern period. To these ends, we will look in some depth at two specific areas of law – marriage and divorce, and criminal law – in a number of comparative contexts, including the Ottoman empire, colonial India, and contemporary Pakistan. Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.
REL 369-20 Religion, Violence, and Nonviolence in the US (RLP)
(Winter 2027, Izzak Novak) Scholars have noted that there has never been a generation of Americans that has not lived through an armed conflict involving the US (or the Thirteen Colonies before that). At the same time, religion has touched and shaped the lives of Americans at every point in the nation's history, whether they liked it or not. Religious Americans, then, have had to reckon with violence–and whether, when, why, and how to avoid it. This course traces religion's role in colonialism, the making of war and its avoidance, the Black civil rights movement, hunting and foodways, and more, uncovering the complex relationships religious Americans have had to violence across time and space. Counts toward Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.
(Winter 2027, Grace Christensen) Ideas, beliefs, and practices pertaining to death from a variety of ancient and modern cultures. Immortality, afterlife, care for the dying, suicide, funerary rituals, transhumanism. The course counts toward the Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentration.
REL 379-22 / MENA 390-5-2 Mediating Religion (MTJR)
(Winter 2027, Professor Usman Hamid) This seminar is an inquiry into how we experience religion in the world today. It takes seriously the idea of religion as mediated phenomena. We experience the religious through an engagement with multiple sensorial forms—things seen, felt, tasted, heard, and smelt. These can include a wide set of media ranging from YouTube videos of preachers to calendars with images of Hindu deities sold in bazars; mechanized prayer counters to the corporeal remains of venerated figures; food distributed in Hindu temples, Muslim shrines, Christian churches and Sikh gurdwaras to water brought back from pilgrimage to holy sites; Gregorian chants to Muslim calls to prayer; incense lit to commemorate the dead to camphor burnt before the image of the divine. The spaces in which we experience these religious phenomena are ever broadening as well. We do not experience the religious in places of worship alone but also at museums and in public buildings, on superhighways and in cyberspace.
While this seminar adopts the perspective of religious materiality, with its concern for aesthetics, presence, memory, and space, it does not require previous knowledge of specific theories or familiarity with any particular religious tradition. It invites students specializing in different traditions and frameworks to engage with scholarship on religion and media in the hope that it offers a fresh perspective on their own materials. Counts toward the Media, Technology, Journalism and Religion (MTJR) religious studies major concentration.
REL 379-26 / CLASSICS 370 Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World
(Winter 2027, Abbe Walker) In this course, we will examine the magicians, witches, wonderworkers, and quacks of the ancient Greco-Roman world and the techniques and devices they used to manipulate the world around them and/or to serve their clientele. We will consider magical practices both real and imagined—from curse tablets, spell books, and amulets to elaborate descriptions of sexy sorceresses and hideous hags, all in the light of theories relating to the religious, political, and social contexts in which magic was used.
REL 440-20 / ASIAN_LC 492 Readings in Tibetan literature
(Winter 2027, Dr. Dhondup T. Rekjong)
This course explores a variety of Tibetan-language genres of writing such as history, poetry, philosophy, doctrine, narrative literature, and more, with attention to their form and content. All course readings are in Tibetan, presuming at least an intermediate ability to read Tibetan. Students will focus on Tibetan-English translation techniques while broadening their knowledge of Tibetan literary genres. Course readings will vary depending on enrolled students' specific areas of interest.
REL 468-20 / GER 408-1 Graduate Seminar: Critical Theory and Religion
(Winter 2027, Professor Christine Helmer) This course explores the central place the concept of “religion” has occupied in the development of critical theory and, in turn, the role critical theory has played in reframing “religion” in modernity and in the contemporary geopolitical moment. We take up questions of politics and capitalism in relation to religion, and we consider the contributions of “religion” to possibilities of social transformation. Readings by: Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Schmitt, Strauss, Fraser, Jaeggi, Gibson-Graham, Helmer, and Mariña.
REL 481-2-20 Graduate Seminar: Secularities: Thinking with, through, and against “Religion”
(Winter 2027, Professor Brannon Ingram)
This course will introduce students to a range of approaches to theorizing the category of “religion” in recent interdisciplinary scholarship. In this course, these approaches will revolve primary around theories of secularity – that is, theories of how the category of “religion” is produced, negotiated, maintained, and/or contested in its intersections with other domains of human life against which it is often defined, e.g. “culture,” “society,” “economy,” and so on. We will also see some of the ways scholars have approached the ways that the category of religion informs, intersects with, and/or is constitutive of law and politics. We will begin with pioneering work in this subject from Talal Asad, Winnifred Sullivan, and Saba Mahmoud. We will then proceed to explore how a second wave of scholars on secularity put these foundational texts in conversation with a range of archives, drawing on scholars such as Elizabeth Hurd and Mayanthi Fernando. Finally, we turn our attention to the most recent scholarship in this vein from the likes of J. Barton Scott, Joseph Blankholm, Elayne Oliphant, and Charles McCrary.
