2021-2022 Course Descriptions
Courses primarily for:
Courses Primarily for Undergraduate Students
REL-101-6-20 – First-Year Seminar: When did people first become Christian?
We take the existence of Christianity for granted, but it hasn’t always been there. And, for that matter, many people who we might describe as Christian didn’t call themselves “Christian” at all. In this seminar, we explore one of the most pivotal moments in world history: the generation of a religious identity that would grow into the world’s largest religion. When did people first start calling themselves Christian, and what alternative history of Christianity does that help us to write? (Fall 2021, Professor Matthew Chalmers)
REL 101-6-22 – First-Year Seminar: Happiness
Everybody (or almost everybody?) wants to be happy, but what is happiness and how does one cultivate it? This course will consider a variety of viewpoints on the promises and pitfalls of happiness through reading an array of leading thinkers including The Dalai Lama, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sarah Ahmed, Matthieu Ricard, and many others. (Spring 2022, Sarah Jacoby)
REL 170-20 – Introduction to Religion
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 19th and 20th 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." (Winter 2022, Professor Michelle Molina)
REL 170-26 – Introduction to Religion
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 19th and 20th 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." (Summer 2022, Professor Michelle Molina)
REL 172-20 – Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture
Dive into one of today’s most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship – the intriguing entanglements of religion and media in society and culture. This course draws from an array of sources, such as television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, streaming video, social media, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. Study media while getting to make your own media for course projects! (Fall 2021, Professor Sarah Taylor)
REL 210-20 – Introduction to Buddhism
This course offers an introduction to Buddhist history, culture, philosophy, and practice. We explore the major doctrinal varieties of Buddhism, from its inception through the rise of the Mahayana and Tantric or Vajrayana traditions. At the same time, we also investigate Buddhist visual, material, and ritual cultures—which offer windows onto aspects of Buddhism as a lived religion not always visible in scriptural sources. In the process we engage themes like the meaning of suffering, the cosmology of cyclical rebirth, the social role of monasticism and its intervention in traditional family structures, the place of women and gender in Buddhism, the relationship between religious ideals and everyday life, the question of self-reliance versus divine assistance, and the power of images and icons. (Winter 2022, Professor Kevin Buckelew)REL 210-26 – Introduction to Buddhism
This course offers an introduction to Buddhist history, philosophy, culture, and ritual practices. We explore texts, beliefs, and practices in all the major Buddhist traditions--Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. As we study how the practice of Buddhism differs in different Buddhist countries and traditions, we will read teachings by Buddhist masters including Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and the Dalai Lama and discuss their implications in the twenty-first century. In this course, we will pay close attention to primary and secondary source texts to learn about how Buddhists describe and teach the meaning of life, death, rebirth, suffering, karma, and enlightenment. Beyond an examination of texts, we will also discuss the contemporary practice of Buddhism in Asia and the West including the place of mindfulness. (Summer 2022, Nisheeta Jagtiani)REL 220-20 – Introduction to Hebrew Bible
There is no understating the significance of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in Western Culture. The Bible is a text that has been repeatedly turned to for spiritual guidance, for explanations of mankind's origins and as the basis of both classical art and contemporary cinema. English idiom is peppered with phrases that originate in the Hebrew Bible and many a modern political clash can be understood as a conflict over what the Bible's messages and their implications. This course introduces students to the Hebrew Bible by reading sections of most of the Bible's books. But reading is itself a complicated enterprise. The Bible has been put to many different uses; even within the world of academic scholarship, the Bible is sometimes a source of history, sometimes a religious manual, sometimes a primitive legal code and sometimes a work of classical literature. This course will introduce students to the various challenges that present themselves within the study of the Hebrew Bible and the varied approaches scholars take when reading the Hebrew Bible. This course is a critical introduction to the Hebrew Bible. (Fall 2021, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)REL 221-22 – Introduction to New Testament
The New Testament is one of the most significant collections of texts to have ever existed. It forms one of the foundation stones for the identity of Christianity as a global religion, as well as providing a powerful cultural reservoir even for contemporary secular American society. It did not, however, burst into the world fully formed, but emerged as an authoritative collection only over several centuries. This course introduces you to the texts of the New Testament, the context in which those texts emerged, and the processes by which the collection became authoritative (“canonization”). (Spring 2022, Professor Matthew Chalmers)REL 230-20 – Introduction to Judaism
Against the background of Jewish and world history, we will seek to understand the roots and evolution of Jewish rituals, literature, traditions, and beliefs in different places around the world. Our challenge will be to understand why Judaism changed in the ways that it did while also identifying the continuities that connect Jews across time and space. (Fall 2021, Dr. Claire Sufrin)REL 230-26 – Introduction to Judaism
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. (Summer 2022, Barry Wimpfheimer)REL 240-20 – Introduction to Christianity
Whose Christianity matters? More often than not, an introduction to Christianity is in introduction to big words and great men. That’s all very well, but most Christians throughout history have gone nameless; most rituals have no author, and a lot of the best loved texts and traditions are hard to fix on any individual. What does a Christianity look like when viewed not from the view of traditional history, but from the ground up? This course introduces the history, culture, and practices of Christianity from antiquity to the present by means of anonymous texts, texts without a confirmed author. (Winter 2022, Professor Matthew Chalmers)REL 250-20 / MENA 290-5-20 – Introduction to Islam
This course introduces Islam, one of the major religious traditions of world history, developing a framework for understanding how Muslims in varying times and places have engaged with Islamic scripture and the prophetic message of the Prophet Muhammad through diverse sources: theological, philosophical, legal, political, mystical, literary and artistic. While we aim to grasp broad currents and narrative of Islamic history, we will especially concentrate on the origins and development of the religion in its formative period (the prophetic career of the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, Islamic belief and ritual, Islamic law, and popular spirituality) and debates surrounding Islam in the contemporary world (the impact of European colonialism on the Muslim world, the rise of the modern Muslim state, and discourses on gender, politics and violence). (Spring 2022, Professor Brannon Ingram)REL 265-20 / HIS 200-28 – American Religious History from 1865 to the Great Depression
This course examines major developments, movements, controversies, and figures in American religious history from the end of the Civil War, as the nation struggled to make sense of the carnage of war and to apportion responsibility, to the 1930s, when economic crisis strained social bonds and intimate relations and challenged Americans to rethink the nature of public responsibility. Topics include urban religion; religion and changing technologies; African American religion; religion and politics; and the religious practices of immigrants and migrants. (Winter 2022, Professor Robert Orsi)REL 265-20 / HIS – American Religious History from WWII to Present (RLP)
This course examines major developments, movements, controversies and figures in American religious history from the 1920s, the era of excess and disillusionment, to the 1980s, which saw the revival of conservative Christianity in a nation becoming increasingly religiously diverse. Topics include the liberalism/fundamentalism controversy of the 1920s; the rise of Christian realism in the wake of the carnage of World War I; the making of the "tri-faith nation" (Protestant/Catholic/Jew); the supernatural Cold War; the Civil Rights Movement; the revolution in American Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the rise of Catholic political radicalism in the 1960s; religion and the post-1965 immigration act; the religious politics of abortion; and the realignment of American religion and politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Counts towards Religion, Law and Politics (RLP) major concentration. (Spring 2022, Professor Robert Orsi)REL 314-20 – Buddhism in the Contemporary World (RHM)
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. (Spring 2022, Professor Sarah Jacoby)REL 318-20 / ASIAN_LG 290-20 – East Asian Religious Classics
This course explores some of the most influential texts of the major East Asian religious and philosophical traditions including Confucianism, Daoism, Chan/Zen Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism still prominent in China, Japan, Tibet, and several other Asian societies today. The goal is to understand their significance in East Asian cultures, as well as consider what we can learn from these texts today. This course will probe the following questions: What are the major themes, dilemmas, and issues these texts address? How can humans achieve contentment in the world? What are the moral values these texts instill? Beyond this historical focus, this course will also reflect on ways that these literary and religious texts have been appropriated and adapted in the modern context. Each period dedicated to a specific text will be preceded by an introduction to the tradition it represents offering a historical background together with biographical and/or content outlines. Format The course format will include a combination of lecture and discussion. Students will be encouraged to exercise critical thinking and to participate in class discussions. Students will analyze primary source material in translation, critically evaluate content and concepts, and will be encouraged to synthesize the information and communicate it effectively and thoroughly. (Fall 2021, Professor Antonio Terrone)REL 318-21 / ASIAN_LG 390-20 – Buddhist Literature in Translation
In this course, students will read writings from Buddhist canonical and non-canonical literature on a variety of subjects to gain an introduction to the variety of literary genres used in Buddhist works, as well as to consider the central tenets of the Buddhist literary tradition these works convey. Who was the Buddha? What did he preach? Why do we suffer and how do we realize enlightenment? How should one follow the Buddhist path? What metaphors and parables have Buddhists used to convey these insights over the centuries? Students will be able to explore these and other questions through a selection of English translations of original texts in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan including the life of the Buddha, his sayings, Buddhist sutras, and Buddhist autobiographies. As this course is an introduction to Buddhist literature, there are no prerequisites, and students will gain familiarity with Buddhist teachings through engaging directly with primary sources in translation. (Fall 2021, Professor Antonio Terrone)REL 318-22 / ASIAN_LC 300-21 – Religion and Politics in the People's Republic of China (RLP)
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.Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration. (Winter 2022, Professor Antonio Terrone)
REL 318-24 / ASIAN_LC 390-21 – Fate, Fortune, and Karma in East Asia
Are our actions free or fated? What larger forces shape the choices we make? To what do we owe our successes, and what is to blame for our mistakes? In East Asian religions, such questions have been answered with reference to a variety of different concepts of fate, fortune, and karma. These concepts shape not only how people have viewed the world, but also how they have made their way through life. This class focuses on religious approaches to questions of destiny in premodern East Asia. We begin by studying Indian Buddhist ideas of karma and early Chinese notions of fate and fortune preceding Buddhism’s arrival in China, then turn to the ways people in China and Japan negotiated these various concepts over the many centuries following the arrival of Buddhism. In the end, we discover important throughlines amid the diversity of religious responses to the problem of destiny in East Asian history. (Winter 2022, Professor Kevin Buckelew)REL 318-26 / HIST 393-26 / ENVR_POL 390-30 – The Natural & Supernatural in Southeast Asia
This course examines the ways in which different Southeast Asian peoples have conceived of what we might think of as the natural world - the environment; and the supernatural world - various religious traditions and cosmologies; and the continuous interplay between the two. Together we will explore the Kahiringan tradition of the Ngaju Dayak people from Central Kalimantan in Indonesia; representations of nature in the textual traditions and temple paintings of the Vessantera jataka in Myanmar and Thailand; “magic” in colonial Malaya; and the hydraulic landscape of Bali's water temples. Our goal will be to understand the kinds of conceptual and practical resources Southeast Asians have brought to understanding and controlling the world in which they have lived. (Spring 2022, Professor Haydon Cherry)REL 319-20 / ASIAN_LG 390-20 – Buddhist Cultures and the Rhetoric of Violence
This course investigates the intersections between religion and violence in the context of Buddhist Asia while also considering why in many religious traditions there seem to be a link between the two. The course will be structured in two parts: in the first part students will be encouraged to build expertise in the basic concepts, definitions, and general academic consensus (as well as debates) about categories including “religion,” “violence,” “sacrifice,” “ritual,” “martyrdom,” and also “nationalism,” “politics,” and “terrorism” through reading both primary sources (in English translation) and secondary sources (scholarly writings). We will then move into an analysis of case studies that focus on specific circumstances where Buddhist rhetoric, scriptural authority, and religious practices have played a role in violence including suicide, terrorist-related actions, and self-immolation predominantly in pre- and modern Asia.
Some of the provocative questions that this course asks include: Why and how is religion involved in politics? Is Buddhism a pacifist religion? How does religion rationalize violence? How can some Buddhist leaders embrace terror as a political tool? Are the recent practices of self-immolation in Tibet acts of violence? Can non-violence be violent?
(Winter 2022, Professor Antonio Terrone)
REL 339-20 – Modern Judaism, Race, and Racism
This course will use Jewish texts, literature, film, visual art, and scholarly writing to explore how racial concepts and discourses have shaped modern Jewish cultures across the diaspora. By using the Atlantic Ocean as a framing device, we will consider the relationship of Modern Judaism to the histories of slavery and colonialism. This course will pay close attention to how modern interpreters of Jewish texts both shaped and were shaped by racial concepts and ideology, and the varied ways that Jews negotiated the politics of racial difference in the light of gendered, class-based, and interreligious conflicts. We will frequently examine our sources with an eye towards contemporary debates about Jewish identity, thereby raising fascinating and thorny issues about the nature and history of race and racism in Jewish contexts, and the relationship between religion and race in the past and in our own time. (Fall 2021, Professor Eli Rosenblatt)REL 339-21 – Jewish Revolutionaries
This course is designed as an introductory survey of Modern Jewish Thought during the modern period, from the perspective of Jewish "revolutionaries"-- individuals and movements-- that sparked radical change and transformation in how Jews expressed their Jewishness. Looking beyond Eurocentrism, we will read a variety of genres, a play, short stories, works of philosophy, political documents, and works of theology. We will begin by investigating various aspects of what constitutes varieties of the "modern" in Judaism in different parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and the Caribbean. We will also examine a variety of historiographical debates on the topic, ranging in their interpretations from the impact of 1492 to the Marrano experience of hiding one's Jewish identity to the Frankist and Sabbatian challenges to Jewish rabbinic authority as well as conversion to Islam and to Christianity. The course will look at the transformation of the economic and political roles played by Jews in modern times and their impact on Jewish religious practices and beliefs, the struggle for emancipation, the rise of antisemitism, and debates among Jews over assimilation versus Zionism. Constructions of "modern" Jewish identity and religious expressions will be studied in relation to the emergence of both Reform Judaism and Hasidism, and by examining differences between the Judaism constructed in Christian Europe and the Judaism constructed in Islamic regions. The course will also examine the crucial developments of the twentieth century, including mass migration to the United States, the Zionist movement, the Russian revolution, the Holocaust, post-WWII recovery and the establishment of the State of Israel. The differing impact of these movements on men and women will be examined, as well as the power of class and race to organize divisions of significance and meaning in the fabric of Modern Jewish Thought. (Spring 2022, Professor Eli Rosenblatt)
REL 349-21 – Blasphemy
Can a divine being be offended? If so, what sort of god is that? If not, who does blasphemy hurt? This course explores blasphemy as a concept, a fear, and a practice. We examine its cultural history, its social functions, as well as some key instances of blasphemy, law, and violence in (allegedly) “secular” societies. Far from being a relic of the premodern world, blasphemy takes on its sharpest and most coercive forms in modernity. And through modern ideas about blasphemy, we’ll grapple with the place of religious speech in society and the limits of our ideas about secularization. (Fall 2021, Professor Matthew Chalmers)REL 349-23 – Who claims Israel? Jews, Christians, Samaritans
What, or rather who, is Israel? This course explores the name “Israel” as it marks place, an identity, and a claim to belong. We examine its history, from the earliest appearances of the name in the archaeological record of ancient West Asia to the complex politics of the modern Middle East, and its significance for three groups to whose identity the claim to be Israel is fundamental: Jews, Samaritans, and Christians. In the process, we engage head-on with how people differentiate themselves from one another by means of a common past. How do you know you have a collective identity? And what happens when people with whom you don’t identify claim to have that identity as well – or instead – of you? (Spring 2022, Matthew Chalmers)
REL 360-20 / AF_AM 315-20 – Religion in the Black Atlantic
This course provides a broad introduction to major themes in the study of religion in the Black Atlantic. We will consider the stakes of defining and characterizing Black religions across time, space, and geographies throughout the Black Atlantic World, historically, contemporaneously, and in recent scholarship. The course’s scope covers over five centuries of Black Atlantic religious history—from the 1400s up to the present day, with an eye towards traditions of Orisha devotion and monotheisms; religion and revolution in African indigenous slave religions; racialization, Christianization, and empire; theories of religion, Africanisms, and diaspora; gender, sexuality and queerness; and embodiment and spirit possession. Indeed, how did the formation of the Black Atlantic shape religion and how did religion shape the Black Atlantic World? (Fall 2021, Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes)
REL 360-20 HYBRID – The Black and Diasporic Experience - A Religious Interpretation:
What is the relationship between Black Diaspora and Religion? The categories of religion and race emerge within the encounter between Europeans and Africans in New World conquest and enslavement. This suggests geography, conflict, and the entanglement and or emergence of cultures offer a story of religion in spatial, relational and temporal ways. This course will trace religion as a mapping of space, a motion of time and a making sense of encounter of Black movement. Black Diaspora, a religious interpretation will therefore examine key words, or themes, such as: SOUL, SPIRIT, AFRICA, ABOLITION, BLACK, MUSIC and more in a multi-sensory exploration of sound, sight, texts, tastes, ritual, resistance and more. This course will use readings, music, visual art and videos.
*This course is hybrid. Students can do in-person, online, or a mixture of both.
REL 364-20 / AMER_ST 310-20 – American Teenage Rites of (RSG)
Amish Rumspringa, the Apache ‘Isanaklesh Gotal, Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, the quinceañera, and high school senior prom. What do all of these have in common? They are all teenage rites of passage. Drawing from anthropological and sociological case studies, we will examine various rites of passage experienced by teens in the U.S. In analyzing these rites, students will become conversant with theories of ritual, contemporary surveys of teen demographics and cultural trends, media and cultural studies. We will examine teen popular media and consumption related to rites of passage as well as historical literature on the rise and development of the American teenager as a cultural phenomenon. Students will be asked to generate original research for their seminar final project, applying the tools from the course to a case study of their own choosing. This seminar will make use of multimedia materials and will feature multi-source digitized media viewing, analysis, and some mediamaking as part of course assignments. All course materials will be on Canvas. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. (Winter 2022, Prof. Sarah Taylor)REL 369-20 / HUM 325-5-30 – Religion in the Digital Age (RSG)
What happens when religion goes digital? In this course we examine how religions are adapting to an increasingly digital world and how digital environments are shaping old and new religious practices. Through a series of case studies, we will consider how religious practitioners and the “spiritual but not religious” are using digital media to challenge established religious authority, create community, innovate devotional practices, and theorize their experiences. We will examine, for example, collage and hip hop, virtual pujas, mindfulness apps, user-generated gods, emoji spells, tulpamancy, transhumanism, and Slender Man. Through these case studies we will explore how digital natives and adopters are reimagining religious presence, mediation, community, ethics, and ontology. This class centers BIPOC, queer, and feminist voices, digital arts, memetics, lived religion, and social justice. Students will practice skills for digital humanities research, engage in ethical reflection, and apply course learning to creating their own digital artifacts. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. (Winter 2022 Eda Uca)
REL 369-24 / ENVR_POL 390-24 – Media, Earth, and Making a Difference
When motivating public moral engagement in climate crisis, are the solutions being offered those that the planet will actually “register” or “notice” on a global scale? If not, what kinds of “media interventions” do we need to be making and how? Course content will include discussion of media interventions as moral interventions, media activism for social change, eco-media responses by religious communities and organizations, participatory digital culture, and the challenges of addressing environmental crisis in the distraction economy and what has been called the “post-truth era.” Students will have the opportunity to learn by doing, proposing and crafting their own environmental media interventions as the course’s final project. (Spring 2022, Professor Sarah Taylor).REL 374-20 – God After the Holocaust
Times of crisis and collective suffering give rise to theological innovation and creative shifts in religious expression as people seek to understand their traditions in light of their experiences. In the wake of the Holocaust, Jews and Christians faced such a need for religious rethinking. In theological terms, they asked: where was God and should we expect God to act in human history? What does this event indicate about God's existence? In human terms, they asked: how do we live as Jews today? As Christians? As human beings? Focusing on theological and literary texts, in this course we will explore how Jews and Christians reshaped their thinking about God and religion in response to the Holocaust and the experience of suffering in the modern world. (Winter 2022, Professor Claire Sufrin)
REL 374-21 – Religion and Literature
In this class, we will explore the intersection of religion and literature through three case studies. First, we will consider the use of a scriptural story as a foundation for theological reflection. This case study will focus on Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where the philosopher retells the story of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) and casts Isaac’s father Abraham as the Knight of Faith. In our second case study, we will consider the connection between narrative and theology from another perspective by reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home, a retelling of the Prodigal Son parable found in the Gospel of Luke. Finally, our third case study will consider the theological argument of The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick. The syllabus also includes essays by theorists of religion and literature; we will bring their arguments into conversation with the texts we are reading. Reading essays by Robinson and Ozick in particular will also allow us to address questions of authorial intention and reader response. (Spring 2022, Dr. Claire Sufrin)REL 375-20 – Foundations of Christian Thought
This course will examine the central issues in premodern Christian thought. We will begin with two works that show Christian thinkers struggling with theological issues that arise largely from their own experience: St. Augustine's Confessions and Julian of Norwich's Showings. Then we will examine interpretations of God and Christ as set forth by Eastern and Western theologians. (Fall 2021, Professor Richard Keickhefer)
REL 379-20 – Science Fiction and Social Justice (RLP, RSG)
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. (Fall 2021, Ashley King)
REL 379-21 / POLI_SCI 382-20 – Politics of Religious Diversity (RLP)
This course teaches how think critically, comparatively, and globally about the intersections of religion, law, and politics. It is organized around a set of legal cases and supporting materials curated by Professor Hurd and Professor Winnifred Sullivan which are available through the open access Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive. Rather than taking the US as the paragon of religious freedom and considering whether the rest of the world lives up to US standards, the course approaches the United States as one among many societies living amidst religious diversity. We study these dynamics comparatively, examining the ways in which religious, legal, and political traditions intersect, interact and co-constitute. A second objective is to connect these cases to local (Northwestern, Evanston, Chicago, Illinois, and US) communities and concerns, focusing on religion, race, and indigeneity. This contributes to an effort to strengthen Northwestern's Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and realize the objectives of the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion by including substantial course content on African American, Native American, and Jewish American political/religious history and experience. The course traverses disciplinary, geographic, and secular-religious boundaries, drawing on readings from politics, socio-legal studies, religious studies, indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and popular culture. Students will consider their own experiences of living with religious diversity as we explore strategies to think religion anew in the contemporary world. The teaching modules used in this course were developed under the auspices of two research projects supported by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs and the course itself with the support of a Provost's Faculty Grant for Innovation in Diversity and Equity. Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) major concentration.(Winter 2022, Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd)
REL 379-22 – Feminist Spirituality (RSG)
This course explores feminist religion and spirituality as a locus of care, community, reflection, ritual, and cultural memory. Feminist studies of religion have frequently assumed a secular framework that sees religion as a barrier to liberation. However, many feminists have issued transformative critiques of patriarchal authority from within religious institutions. Others have left their religious communities behind to forge new spiritual definitions and practices. This class incorporates these approaches through readings in feminist theory, theology, and popular media such as memoirs, manifestos, and zines. The class centers BIPOC, lesbian, and trans feminist voices, with particular attention to the works of Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. (Spring 2022, Ashley King)REL 379-23 / / AF_AM_ST 380-25 / GNDR_ST 382-23 – Race, Sexuality, and Religion (RSG)
This course examines the co-constructed histories of religion, sexuality, and race in the Americas. Drawing upon foundational and newer works in the field, we will explore how the construction of these categories, rooted in biological essentialism, has had immense consequences for the enslaved and her descendants, indigenous peoples, other people of color, and women, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals. The historical record shows that individuals born cisgender male and socialized as men, namely white heterosexual men, have historically and contemporaneously dominated and controlled the North Americas and the globe. They have upheld their hegemonic and institutional power by wielding the social constructions of “gender” and “sexuality” to their benefit, often using religion, and specifically white Christianities, biblical fundamentalism, and “religio-racial race making” to regulate sexual bodies gendered and understood as non-white and non-man. This course examines the interconnected histories of race, sexuality and religion in the Americas through the vantage point of African American Studies, and specifically Black Queer Studies, and charts the construction of these categories and how racialized people—both within and beyond religious institutions—have resisted and challenged their centrality. Counts towards Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. (Spring 2022, Ahmad Greene-Hayes)
REL 379-24 / THEA 340-20 / HUM 370-5-30 – Staging the Bible
Can religious make believe actually make belief? How is theatre used as both a method of evangelizing and as a platform to critique religious metanarratives? Staging the Bible will explore theatrical projects that aim to “bring the Bible to life” through adaptation. We will study biblical performances as objects of analysis and performance as a critical paradigm for understanding religious expression in the contemporary United States of America. The course will explore theatre productions that dramatize the Bible, ranging from traditional passion plays to Broadway musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar and postmodern adaptations like Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi. We will investigate Evangelical projects that use theatrical apparatuses to proselytize across various sites, like Megachurches, Christian theme parks, and Creation Museums. (Spring 2022, Chelsea Taylor)
REL 386-21 / HIST 292-20 – Witches, Heretics, and Demons: The Inquisition in the New World
The Inquisition is one of the most infamous and misunderstood institutions in the early modern world. This seminar examines some of the myths and debates surrounding the working of its tribunals and their impact on society, with special emphasis on the practices, experiences, and worldviews of ordinary subjects. How have the records of the Inquisition been used to reconstruct the histories of Jews, African healers, bigamists, homosexuals, and “witches,” among others? Participants will pursue their own answers, and even construct an alternate archive by which to tell the stories of prosecuted figures. Topics include religious tolerance and intolerance; healing and love magic in the Americas; the policing and politics of gender and sexuality; and the lives of Jewish conversos. (Fall 2021, Professor Paul Ramírez)REL 386-23 / HIST 393-32 – Catholicism in the Americas
Apparitions, moving crucifixes, miraculous cures – these and other aspects of Catholicism have long posed intellectual and methodological challenges for scholars of the past. Participants in this course will explore expressions and artifacts of Catholicism in Latin America (the former colonies of Spain and Portugal), with special attention to the various texts, objects, and living communities that have allowed scholars to make sense of religious practice and experience. We will consider ways of thinking and writing about religion, with emphasis on recent developments and interdisciplinary exchanges, as well as reasons for paying attention. How has an appreciation of the human and divine, sacraments, saints, lay associations, and ritual specialists illuminated topics of historical study, including slavery, gender, migration, labor regimes, colonialism, nationalism, and of course, religion? (Spring 2022, Professor Paul Ramírez)REL 395-20 – Theories of Religion
What is "theory"? What does it mean to have a theory about something? How are theories helpful? What do theories do? What is "religion"? How do things get excluded or included in this category? What counts as "religious" and why? Who gets to decide? This course is an introduction to foundational theories of religion and to the history of the construction of the category of "religion" over time. Throughout the term, you will be working on formulating your own theory of religion, which you will articulate and defend in your final seminar paper. In this course, you will gain (as ritual theorist Catherine Bell says) "the skills and tools to make sure that very complicated situations and ideas can be put into words, thereby making it possible to have discussions about issues that can only be discussed if there is language for reflexivity, nuance, counter-evidence, and doubt." In the process, you will be asked to make theory translatable to your peers by actively engaging theoretical concepts in creative ways. (Winter 2022, Professor Sarah Taylor)REL 471-20 / POLI_SCI 490-23 – Graduate Seminar: Religion, Race & Politics: Global and Imperial Perspectives
This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and global politics. We discuss how particular understandings of religion and race inform scholarship, shape national and international legal and governmental practice, and contribute to the establishment and maintenance of various social hierarchies and inequalities. Cross-cutting themes include religion and the rise of the nation-state; the politics of religious establishment, law, and freedom; race and the formation of the disciplines of religious studies, international relations and the social sciences more broadly; the formation of modern vocabularies of religious and racial exclusion including religious freedom; and race, indigeneity, and slavery in U.S. American history. (Spring 2022, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd)
REL 481-2-20 – Graduate Seminar: Theories and Methods
This course aims to provide a genealogy of the category of religion in European history and explores how the category became appropriated, debated, and/or contested in a variety of contexts beyond Europe. It gives particular attention to ways that the category migrated within, and was mediated by, colonial and imperial networks, with a particular focus on Asia and Asian diasporas. It continues by examining recent debates about secularity as a discourse that attempts to draw boundaries between ‘religion’ and not-religion (‘culture’, ‘politics’, ‘superstition’, and so on), and of ways that the category of religion was/remains imbricated in notions of race. (Spring 2022, Brannon Ingram)
ENVR_POL 390-25 – Land, Identity and the Sacred: American Indian Religious and Sacred Sites
This class focuses on a cross section of religion, law, cultural preservation, land management, and ethno-ecology. We will focus on Native American sacred sites and cultural landscapes and their relationships to land, ceremony, history, and tribal/ethnic identity. Central to the class will be a focus on the sacred aspects of tribal identity and the role that landscape plays in the creation and maintenance of these identities. The class will cover laws pertaining to religious freedoms and how they are applied to Native and non-Native contexts throughout U.S. history, along with the histories and philosophies that have, and still influences these polices.
The class will cover both Federal and Tribal management of sacred sites, ceremonial sites, and religious/spiritual traditions. Important to this discuss, will be the role of oral history in the preservation of culture and relationships to landscapes and how it has/is being utilized the U.S. legal system pertaining to Native American Tribes. The role of treaties and the conflicts that arise between Tribal/U.S. government to government relations and responsibilities will also be covered. (Fall 2021, Dr. Eli Suzukovich III)
Graduate-level Courses Available to Undergraduates
REL 313-20 / ASIAN_LC 390-20 – Buddhist Theocracy in Tibetan Society
This course surveys recent scholarship on the links between religion and political governance in Tibet. The objective is to understand the nature of the relationship between Buddhism, governance, and politics in premodern and modern Tibetan society. Therefore, this course aims at familiarizing students with the existing theoretical literature and empirical research on this topic. Course readings will evaluate recent research on the role of Buddhist actors, institutions, and ideologies in policymaking, state-building, conflict, war, and other political processes that have characterized the history of Tibet. Themes in this course include the relevance of Buddhist monasticism in Tibetan politics, the roles of the Dalai Lamas, the institution of reincarnation as a tool of leadership, and the issue of state-sanctioned conflict and violence in Tibetan Buddhist society. (Spring 2022, Antonio Terrone)
REL 316-20 / ASIAN_LC 300-20 – Religion and the Body in China
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. *Counts towards Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations. (Spring 2022, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
REL 339-22 – Introducing the Talmud
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. (Winter 2022, Professor Barry Wimpfheimer)
Courses Primarily for Graduate Students
REL 471-21 – Graduate Seminar: The Study of Religion as Vocation
The Study of Religion as Vocation
This seminar addresses the question of what it means to be a scholar of religion(s)—as opposed, or in addition, to being a scholar of Catholicism, for instance, or Islam, or Judaism, or US religions, or queer religion, etc.—in the contemporary academic and social context. What habits of mind and heart ought/might the scholar of religion cultivate? How are these habits best nourished? Beginning with an old and out-of-date, but learned and thorough, history of the discipline, Sharpe’s Comparative Religion: A History (selections), we will read excerpts from texts that proved essential in the making of the contemporary study of religion. The point is not to develop a genealogy, let alone a history (although what this would be like might be one of our topics), but a kind of exigent dialogue across generations. The whole seminar will be haunted by planetary climate crisis, and we will end with a reading of Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in order to consider how we might not only avoid derangement, but enlarge our vocation in response to it. In advance of our first meeting, students are asked to read Max Weber, “The Scholar’s Work.” (Fall 2021, Professor Robert Orsi)
REL 481-2-20 – Graduate Seminar: Buddhism in South Asia
A survey of Buddhism in South Asia from the time of the Buddha to the 12th century CE. This course will explore the cultural and social history of the Buddhist traditions as well Buddhist doctrine and practice from the time of the Buddha until the decline of Buddhism in India. We will also look at the transmission of Buddhism to Sri Lanka, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. (Fall 2021, Professor Mark McClish)
REL 473-21 / ASIAN_LC 492-21 – Graduate Seminar: Buddhist Studies: State of the Field
This course will survey the state of the field of Buddhist Studies by examining a broad range of monographs, with an emphasis on a selection of recent scholarship on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Topics covered in this course will include Buddhist ritual, cosmology, literature, philosophy, society, politics, and intellectual history. We will attend not only to the range of subject matter covered in Buddhist Studies scholarship, but also to the methodologies and theoretical approaches that scholars have used in the past and those in favor today to get a sense of the shifting terrain of this field. Through engaging in what we can call a type of “reverse engineering process” in which we analyze the parts that comprise the whole of recent monographs in the field of Buddhist studies, our goal will be not only to critique, but to consider how others have put together recent projects with an eye toward preparing students for their own research and writing. All required course readings are in English; this is a graduate seminar but motivated undergraduates with a background in Buddhist Studies courses are welcome to request permission from the professor to register. (Winter 2022, Professor Sarah Jacoby)