This course explores the history of religions among people of African descent from the period of the development of the transatlantic slave trade (1440s) to the present. Its aim is to introduce students to the complex ways religion has shaped their lifeworlds. Such study involves, among other things, encounters with the religious cultures of slaves and slaveholders in the antebellum South; the development of independent Black churches, the effects of emancipation, migration, and urbanization upon Black religious life; new black religious movements (e.g., Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, Black Hebrews); the emergence of Black secularism/humanism; the impact of Black religious expressive culture (e.g., music, sermon, song, and film); the religious dimensions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; as well as contemporary developments and transformations in Black religious life. All of which requires attentiveness to how we tell the story of Africana religions, and how scholars have developed and pursued the modern study of Africana religion.

Full details for RELST 2060 - Introduction to Africana Religions

This course introduces the academic study of religion. This course serves as both an introduction to the academic study of religion and a survey of major topics in the intersections of religious communities and environmentally sustainable practices. Using real cases of environmentally sustainable, religiously oriented communities, we explore how myth, ritual, symbols, doctrines, and ideologies of time and space are activated in practical living decisions. This class involves readings of both primary sources, poetry and literature, secondary sources, films and site visits. (RL)

Full details for RELST 2273 - Religion and Ecological Sustainability

This course serves as an introduction to key concepts in the study of the Fantastic, a fundamental analytic category in several academic disciplines, including literature, psychology, anthropology, art, and religion. Asia, the continent with the world’s largest population and the birthplace for several major religious traditions, is replete with narratives, beliefs and artistic practices which traverse the Fantastic’s diffuse aspects and explore its myriad dimensions. Our encounter with such phenomena will be concentrated on three of its key genres with roots in Asian and Asian-inspired religious movements: gods, ghosts, and gurus. Accordingly, course readings will discuss case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, Traditional Chinese Religions, Vietnamese Cao Ðài, and other such sectarian perspectives. Beyond gaining an empirical understanding of how each of these traditions has interpreted the classifications of god, ghost, and guru, we will also consider how religious practitioners have articulated their ideas about these entities in storytelling, visual objects, cinematic productions and other arenas of cultural expression. Overall, these inquiries will encourage students to critically engage with the following question: “How can studies of Fantastical Figures affirm and expand conventional notions of religion?” (RL)

Full details for RELST 2287 - Gods, Ghosts, and Gurus: A Global Exploration of the Fantastic in Asian Religions

This course is an introduction to the study of Islam and Islamic history. Organised historically, the lecture series will begin with the career of the Prophet Muhammad, before charting the course of the Islamic Conquests, the establishment, zenith and collapse of various Islamic Empires, ending with European colonialism. Along the way, this geopolitical and historical overview will provide a backdrop to our exploration of changes and developments in Islamic thought and practice. In particular, we will focus on the emergence of the Sunni-Shi'i conflict, the rise of Sufism and Salafism, as well as how scholars across time and space thought and wrote about questions of ideal Islamic governance, the religious authority of the caliph, women's role in society and public space, slavery, the ethics of living under non-Muslim rule and the place of non-Muslims in Islamic society.

Full details for RELST 2627 - Introduction to Islam

For thousands of years, people have believed that the world is ending imminently. In this course, we will examine the roots of apocalyptic thinking in the ancient world, especially among Jews and Christians. We will look at biblical apocalyptic texts as well as a wide array of other apocalyptic literatures, such as the books of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Apocalypse of Paul, and many others. These texts contain visions of end times, journeys to heaven and hell, and dramatic images of angels and demons, war and peace, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Our goal is to understand the circumstances that gave rise to apocalypticism and how disaster-thinking may have, paradoxically, provided comfort during crises. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the meaning of apocalypse as revelation, an unveiling, a discovery.

Full details for RELST 2666 - Apocalypse!

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is a repository of ancient Israelite religious, political, social, historical, and literary traditions. For the modern reader these ancient traditions are often obscured by a focus on the text as revelation. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the biblical world by reading the Hebrew Bible in translation, on its own terms, as a body of literature that evolved in an ancient Near Eastern context. The Bible itself will be the primary text for the course, but students will also be exposed to the rich and diverse textual traditions of the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Moab, and Ugarit. In addition, this course will explore the impact of early biblical interpretation on shaping the monotheistic traditions inherited in the West. As participants in a secular course on the Bible, students will be challenged to question certain cultural assumptions about the composition and authorship of the Bible, and will be expected to differentiate between a text's content and its presumed meaning.

Full details for RELST 2724 - Conflict and Coexistence in the Jewish Bible-Old Testament

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

Full details for RELST 2770 - Islam and Gender

Did ancient Egyptians believe in the existence of souls? Why did they mummify the dead? Was the body of a pharaoh different from that of an ordinary person? This course sets the famous mortuary practices of ancient Egypt alongside treatments of living bodies and their immaterial components. We will read translated excerpts from ancient Egyptian texts—from magical spells recited for ancestors, to poetry on sex and death—while learning about items taken to the grave and monuments set up for posterity. In the process, we will reflect on contemporary representations of the past and evaluate the assumptions behind modern treatments of ancient artifacts and human remains.

Full details for RELST 2772 - Body and Spirit in Ancient Egypt

This course explores past and contemporary theories of emotions and different kinds of emotions like wonder, grief, anger, and fear, all with an eye toward the study and practice of religion, and its relationship to race, gender, class, and politics. We will also explore how the academic study of religion and different religious tradition impact our understanding of emotions. We will draw from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, affect theory, gender studies, psychology, and neuroscience. We will examine several questions related to emotions and its rise. First and foremost, what is an emotion? How is it different from affect, feeling, or passion? How are emotions investigated across disciplines? Can we study emotion historically? How are certain emotions racialized or gendered? What is a religious experience? How identifying as religious or otherwise impact one's understanding and experience of emotions? How do emotions lend force to ideas and ideologies, to causes such as the recent surge of White (Christian) nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and other countries? Finally, what do emotions (and affect theory) bring to the study of religion?

Full details for RELST 3060 - Emotions, Religion, and Race

Practice makes perfect, the old saying goes, but the nature of that connection remains opaque. This course, conducted in English and intended as a sequel to FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention, gives students the opportunity to engage with everyday material and spiritual practices, and to reflect upon the kids of things these practices make. What is the place of routine and repetition in our lives? How can we open a conversation about our habits? We'll look for models to the long history of writing on the subject, largely but not exclusively by Christian thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Benedict, Aelred, Francis, Ignatius), even as we develop new ways of accounting for, and developing, the practices that make our lives meaningful. Artists, athletes, and introverts especially welcome.

Full details for RELST 3770 - On Practice and Perfection

The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.

Full details for RELST 3787 - The Qur'an

This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the “six schools” of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, Dôgen, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the “way of the warrior” and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the “Dôgen boom” in American literary theory. (RL)

Full details for RELST 4021 - Zen Buddhism and its Japanese Context: Major Thinkers

Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches “politics” broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice. (RL)

Full details for RELST 4023 - Buddhism and Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.

Full details for RELST 4100 - Latin Philosophical Texts

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for RELST 4310 - Methods in Medieval

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Full details for RELST 4407 - Hasidism: History, Community, Thought

What does it mean to be “modern”? How is it tied to one’s (person, community, country, government, stakeholders) desires and aspirations for the future? How does it relate to one’s past? In this seminar we explore how idea(l)s of modernity have taken shape, how they were received and articulated, and how they continue to change. We will read scholarship addressing idea(l)s of modernity in relation to health, technology, the environment, politics, gender, the economy, and more. Reading materials will adapt to seminar members’ interests.

Full details for RELST 4480 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

This course will focus on the array of perspectives offered in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on such contemporary social issues as: immigration; abortion rights, surrogate childbirth, gay marriage, gender identity, etc. We will consider the range of voices the Bible preserves on these and other topics, and how biblical texts and biblically based arguments shape and inform American political discourse. Students will be expected to read biblical texts on their own terms in their ancient Israelite and early Christian contexts, as well as to consider how those texts have been received with Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions and absorbed into American political thought. Students will read political theory, Jewish and Christian ethics, recent newspaper and magazine articles and will also consider other forms of media.

Full details for RELST 4548 - The Bible in America

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for RELST 4706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory. (SC)

Full details for RELST 4931 - Vitality and Power in China

For undergraduates who wish to obtain research experience or do extensive reading on a special topic. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course.

Full details for RELST 4990 - Directed Study

RELST 4995 is the first course in the Honors two-part sequence. The Honors Program is open to Religious Studies majors who have done superior work and who wish to devote a substantial part of their senior year to advanced, specialized, independent research and writing of a thesis. Successfully completing an honors thesis will require sustained interest, exceptional ability, diligence, and enthusiasm. While admissions to the Honors Program and completion of a thesis do not guarantee that students will be awarded honors in Religious Studies, most students find the experience as intellectually rewarding as it is rigorous.

Full details for RELST 4995 - Senior Honors Essay I

Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.

Full details for RELST 6020 - Latin Philosophical Texts

This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the “six schools” of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, Dôgen, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the “way of the warrior” and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the “Dôgen boom” in American literary theory. (RL)

Full details for RELST 6021 - Zen Buddhism and its Japanese Context: Major Thinkers

Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches “politics” broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice.(RL)

Full details for RELST 6023 - Buddhism and Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for RELST 6310 - Methods in Medieval

What does it mean to be “modern”? How is it tied to one’s (person, community, country, government, stakeholders) desires and aspirations for the future? How does it relate to one’s past? In this seminar we explore how idea(l)s of modernity have taken shape, how they were received and articulated, and how they continue to change. We will read scholarship addressing idea(l)s of modernity in relation to health, technology, the environment, politics, gender, the economy, and more. Reading materials will adapt to seminar members’ interests. (SC)

Full details for RELST 6678 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for RELST 6706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.

Full details for RELST 6787 - The Qur'an

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Full details for RELST 7404 - Hasidism: History, Community, Thought