Search Results
Your search for courses · during 25FA, 26WI, 26SP · tagged with RELG Christian Traditions · returned 10 results
-
RELG 100 Dying for God 6 credits
Conventional wisdom says that religion provides comfort to individuals and stability to society. So why have so many religious people throughout history sought bodily death and pain—not just for themselves, but sometimes for others? Does God want people to die? Does subjugating the body destroy the self, or does it enhance it? This course uses a religious studies framework to examine the noble death tradition in Greco-Roman antiquity, ancient asceticism, martyrdom movements, and instances of religious violence.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2025
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1
-
Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
-
RELG 100.02 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 303 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 303 1:10pm-2:10pm
-
RELG 100 Re-Imagining God 6 credits
How have religious thinkers interrogated the concept “God” in response to the intellectual challenges and political crises of the modern world? In this class, we consider how mass suffering, racial injustice, political oppression, ecological concerns, and religious pluralism have prompted theologians to redefine the very meaning of the word “God” and the nature of God's power, agency, and relationship to human communities. We also examine the definitions of power, truth, and human fulfillment embedded in these theologies, as well as their interpretations of suffering, faith, meaning, and resilience. Readings draw primarily from Christianity, and also from Judaism.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2025
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
-
RELG 100.04 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 303 1:50pm-3:00pm
- M, WLeighton 330 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 303 2:20pm-3:20pm
- FLeighton 330 2:20pm-3:20pm
-
RELG 162 Jesus, the Bible, and Christian Beginnings 6 credits
Who was Jesus? What’s in the Bible? How did Christianity begin? This course is an introduction to the ancient Jewish texts that became the Christian New Testament, as well as other texts that did not make it into the Bible. We will take a historical approach, situating this literature within the Roman Empire of the first century, and we will also learn about how modern readers have interpreted it. Along the way, we will pay special attention to two topics of enduring political debate: (1) Whether the Bible supports oppression or liberation and (2) What the Bible says about gender and sexuality.
-
RELG 162.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 330 2:20pm-3:20pm
-
-
RELG 213 Religion, Medicine, and Healing 6 credits
How do religion and medicine approach the healing of disease and distress? Are religion and medicine complementary or do they conflict? Is medicine a more evolved form of religion, shorn of superstition and pseudoscience? This course explores religious and cultural models of health and techniques for achieving it, from ancient Greece to Christian monasteries to modern mindfulness and self-care programs. We will consider ethical quandaries about death, bodily suffering, mental illness, miraculous cures, and individual agency, all the while seeking to avoid simplistic narratives of rationality and irrationality.
-
RELG 213.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 236 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 236 9:40am-10:40am
-
-
RELG 224 Religion, Science, and the Moral Imagination 6 credits
How do we imagine the relationship between religion and science? Are they at odds, in harmony, or different ways of imagining ourselves, our world, and our futures? This course explores historical understandings of religious and scientific thought, asking how the two came to be separated in the modern era. We use the imagination to explore power dynamics and moral judgments embedded in assumptions about matter, nature, mind, bodies, persons, and progress. We draw on literature, philosophy, and theology to consider questions about ethics, focusing on climate change, ecofeminism, technology and personhood, AI, and the possibility of alternative futures.
- Winter 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry WR2 Writing Requirement 2
-
RELG 224.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 305 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
RELG 225 Faith and Doubt in the Modern World 6 credits
Is religion an illusion we create to explain what we don’t understand? An elaborate means to justify the violence we commit? A way to hold onto meaning in the face of radical doubt? This course explores how Western theologians and philosophers have grappled with the loss of traditional religious beliefs and categories. What is the appropriate response to losing one's religion? It turns out that few abandon it altogether, but instead find new ways of naming the sacred, whether in relation to existential courage, aesthetic experience, moral hope, prophetic insight, or passionate love.
- Spring 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry WR2 Writing Requirement 2
-
RELG 225.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 402 1:15pm-3:00pm
-
RELG 251 African American Religious History 6 credits
African American religions are a mix of African, European, and indigenous American influences. The unique social, political, and economic concerns of Black people shape their spiritualities in intricate and surprising ways. This course explores the history of African American religions through a consideration of historical works, historiographical debates, and hermeneutical trends. Readings survey themes of race, gender, reproduction, natal alienation, and political struggle in African American religious experiences through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Course assignments introduce students to the practice of method and theory in the historical study of religion by emphasizing how historiography informs narrations of the past.
-
RELG 251.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Jorge Banuelos 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 402 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 402 1:10pm-2:10pm
-
-
RELG 287 Many Marys 6 credits
Christianity, by its very name, focuses on Jesus. This course shifts the focus to Mary, his mother: her various manifestations and her contributions to the myriad experiences of peoples around the world. Race, gender, class, and feminist and liberation theologies come into play as Mary presents as: the Mother of God; queen of heaven; a Black madonna; a Mestiza madonna; an exceptional woman with her own chapter in the Qur'an; various goddesses in Haitian Vodoun, Hinduism, and Buddhism; a tattoo on the backs of U.S. prisoners–and so on. In addition to considering Miriam (her Jewish name) as she appears in literature, art, apparition, and ritual practice around the world, we will also consider Mary Magdalene, her foil, who appears in popular discourse from the Gnostic gospels to The Da Vinci Code.
-
RELG 287.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Kristin Bloomer 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 402 3:10pm-4:55pm
-
-
RELG 322 Apocalypse How? 6 credits
When will the world end, and how? What’s wrong with the world that makes its destruction necessary or inevitable? Are visions of “The End” a form of resistance literature, aimed at oppressive systems? Or do they come from paranoid minds disconnected from reality? This seminar explores apocalyptic thought, which in its basic form is about unmasking the deceptions of the given world by revealing the secret workings of the universe. We begin with ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses and move into modern religious and “secular” visions of cosmic collapse, including doomsday cults, slave revolts, UFO religions, and Evangelical fantasies about armageddon in the Middle East. We will also create a giant handwritten manuscript of the book of Revelation using calligraphy pens, paint, and gold leaf.
X-List WMST 322
-
RELG 322.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 303 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 303 2:20pm-3:20pm
-
-
RELG 372 Sensory Cultures of Religion 6 credits
What makes a sound noise to someone and God's self-disclosure to another? What makes a statue a decorated stone to someone and a living deity to another? Are these distinctions rooted in faith or in people’s sensory experiences in different cultures? Together, we will explore such questions by inquiring into how sensory experiences and religious beliefs relate to one another. The course is designed as a practicum in which students will learn to develop sensory histories of objects and to practice exhibiting religious objects in museums or elsewhere for public understanding.