DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Religion: we think we recognize it when we see it, and yet it is always changing.  How does one study a moving target?

In the first weeks of the course, we look back in time to understand how the ideas about religion that are familiar to us today are rooted in history.  The emergence of the concept of “religion” as an object of comparison and study grew out of early modern European sectarian violence and colonial overseas expansion. 

We then turn to study some thinkers from the 19^th and 20^th centuries who developed theories about the best ways to study religion. These scholars developed and honed the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology by testing their methods on case studies about religion. To know this history is to know our present, as well as to understand the methodologies that shape the university curriculum.

What do we do with this legacy?  Are these methods adequate to understanding religion today?  In the second half of this class, we critically evaluate these methods by putting them to work to analyze religion in the world, both past and present.  We will focus on how religion moves people.  People are rooted in space and place by their religious practices, while simultaneously being moved by religion.  As will have become clear in the first half of the course, religion is a moving target because people themselves do not stay the same.  Throughout the course, we track the tension between rootedness and mobility by examining three themes:  “conversion,” “borderlands,” and “death/afterlives.”  *Reserved for first-years, sophomores, and religious studies majors and minors. (Winter 2021, Professor Michelle Molina)

This seminar explores the place of the body in Chinese religion, from the ancient period to the present day. In the course of this exploration, we seek to challenge our presuppositions about a seemingly simple question: what is “the body,” and how do we know? We open by considering themes of dying and the afterlife, food and drink, health and medicine, gender and family. We then turn to Daoist traditions of visual culture that envision the human body as intimately connected with the cosmos and picture the body’s interior as a miniature landscape populated by a pantheon of gods. We read ghost stories and analyze the complex history of footbinding. Finally, we conclude with two case studies of religion and the body in contemporary China, one situated on the southwestern periphery, the other in the capital city of Beijing. Throughout the quarter, we investigate how the body has mediated relationships between Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious traditions. By the course’s end, students will gain key resources for understanding historical and contemporary Chinese culture, and new perspectives on what it means to be religious and embodied. *Counts towards Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations. (Winter 2021, Professor Kevin Buckelew) 

The phenomenon of sainthood opens a range of issues: a saint is an exemplar of heroic virtue, and ideas of sainthood reflect the ethical norms of a particular Christian society; a saint is the focus of veneration, and the ways people behave toward saints (going on pilgrimage to venerate their relics, showing reverence to their images, etc.) tells a great deal about official and unofficial Christian piety; a saint is a figurehead for some interest group such as a religious order or a city, and in churches that have a process of canonization this becomes a mirror of ecclesiastical politics. (Winter 2021, Professor Richard Kieckhefer)

This course will examine major utopian and dystopian texts and films in relation to social justice issues in the twentieth century and beyond, while following the stories of artists, organizers, and communities that have used speculative world-building to imagine livable, sustainable futures. We will focus on how feminist, anarchist, LGBTQ, and Afrofuturist art and activism have contributed to a substantial critical discourse on the intersections of science, technology, ecology, war, race, gender, sexuality, health, and ability.

This course will further examine how artists and activists have understood religion as both impediment and partner to social justice work, while alternatively embracing, subverting, and defying religious authority. We will attend to how religious myths and imagery are sampled and remixed by science fiction authors to plot an alternative course for history. *Counts towards Religion, Law and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations. (Winter 2021, Ashley King) 

This seminar explores theoretical approaches to the problems of embodiment/materiality/affect. One aim of the course is to examine various methodological approaches to embodiment, materiality and affect, making use of sociology and philosophy (Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Massumi). The second and closely related aim is to situate bodies in time and place, that is, in history. Here we look to the particular circumstances that shaped the manner in which historical actors experienced their bodies in the Christian west (Peter Brown, Caroline Bynum, Mary Carruthers, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault). Ultimately, we will be examining theoretical tools while we put them to work. The goal: how to use these thinkers to write more dynamic, creative, interesting scholarship? (Winter 2021, Professor Michelle Molina)