Search Results
Your search for courses · during 25FA, 26WI, 26SP · tagged with RELG Pertinent Course · returned 20 results
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ASST 285 Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined 6 credits
From ancient to present times, Japan drew and redrew its borders, shape, and culture, imagining its place in this world and beyond, its From ancient times to the present, Japan drew and redrew its borders, reimagining its cultural and racial identity, and its place in this world and beyond. This course is a cartographic exploration of this complex and contested history. Cosmological mandalas, hell images, travel brochures, and military maps bring to light Japan’s religious vision, cartographic imagination, and political ambition that dictated its geopolitical expansion and the displacement of minority peoples at home, defining its real and imagined boundaries. We will explore a variety of maps, focusing on those in Carleton’s unique library collection.
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ASST 285.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Asuka Sango 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 236 1:15pm-3:00pm
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CCST 230 Worlds of Jewish Memory 6 credits
Transmitting Jewish memory from one generation to the next has always been a treasured practice across the Jewish world. How have pivotal environments for Jews lived on in Jewish collective memory? How do they continue to speak through film, art, photography, music, architecture, museum/ memorial/ summer camp design, prayer, cuisine, and more? We'll compare dynamics of remembering and memorializing several Jewish worlds: ancient Egypt, medieval Spain, early modern Germany, pre- through post-Holocaust Europe and Russia, colonial into contemporary New York City, 1950s Algeria, and pre-State into contemporary Israel. Research projects can include family history explored through scholarship on cross-cultural memory.
CCST 230 is equivalent to MELA 230.
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CCST 230.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Stacy Beckwith 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLanguage & Dining Center 244 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLanguage & Dining Center 244 2:20pm-3:20pm
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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
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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.
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RELG 100.02 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 303 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 303 1:10pm-2:10pm
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RELG 110 Understanding Religion 6 credits
How can we best understand the role of religion in the world today, and how should we interpret the meaning of religious traditions–their texts and practices–in history and culture? This class takes an exciting tour through selected themes and puzzles related to the fascinating and diverse expressions of religion throughout the world. From politics and pop culture, to religious philosophies and spiritual practices, to rituals, scriptures, gender, religious authority, and more, students will explore how these issues emerge in a variety of religions, places, and historical moments in the U.S. and across the globe.
- Fall 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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RELG 110.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 11:10am-12:20pm
- FLeighton 330 12:00pm-1:00pm
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RELG 110.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 11:10am-12:20pm
- FLeighton 330 12:00pm-1:00pm
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RELG 110.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Chumie Juni 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 426 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 426 9:40am-10:40am
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RELG 120 Judaism: Text, History, Practice 6 credits
What is Judaism? Who are Jewish people? What are Jewish texts, practices, ideas? What ripples have Jewish people, texts, practices, and ideas caused beyond their sphere? These questions will animate our study as we touch on specific points in over three millennia of history. We will immerse ourselves in Jewish texts, historic events, and cultural moments, trying to understand them on their own terms. At the same time, we will analyze them using key concepts such as ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ ‘power,’ and ‘diaspora.’ We will explore how ‘Jewishness’ has been constructed by different stakeholders, each claiming the authority to define it.
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RELG 120.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Chumie Juni 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- M, WLeighton 330 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 330 1:10pm-2:10pm
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RELG 122 Introduction to Islam 6 credits
This course is a general introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the different ways Muslims have interpreted and put into practice the prophetic message of Muhammad through analyses of varying theological, legal, political, mystical, and literary writings as well as through Muslims’ lived histories. These analyses aim for students to develop a framework for explaining the sources and vocabularies through which historically specific human experiences and understandings of the world have been signified as Islamic. The course will focus primarily on the early and modern periods of Islamic history.
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RELG 122.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 301 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 301 1:10pm-2:10pm
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RELG 152 Religions in Japanese Culture 6 credits
An introduction to the major religious traditions of Japan, from earliest times to the present. Combining thematic and historical approaches, this course will scrutinize both defining characteristics of, and interactions among, various religious traditions, including worship of the kami (local deities), Buddhism, shamanistic practices, Christianity, and new religious movements. We also will discuss issues crucial in the study of religion, such as the relation between religion and violence, gender, modernity, nationalism and war.
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RELG 152.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Asuka Sango 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 236 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 236 1:10pm-2:10pm
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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.
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RELG 162.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 330 2:20pm-3:20pm
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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.
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RELG 213.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 236 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 236 9:40am-10:40am
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RELG 219 Religious Law, Il/legal Religions 6 credits
The concept of law plays a central role in religion, and the concept of religion plays a central role in law. We often use the word ‘law’ to describe obligatory religious practices. But is that ‘law,’ as compared with state law? Legal systems in the U.S. and Europe make laws that protect religious people, and that protect governments from religion. But what does ‘religion’ mean in a legal context? And how do implicit notions of religious law affect how judges deal with religion? We will explore these questions using sources drawn from contemporary religions and recent legal disputes.
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RELG 219.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Chumie Juni 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 330 1:10pm-2:10pm
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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
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RELG 225.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 402 1:15pm-3:00pm
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RELG 243 Native American Religious Freedom 6 credits
This course explores historical and legal contexts in which Native Americans have practiced their religions in the United States. Making reference to the cultural background of Native traditions, and the history of First Amendment law, the course explores landmark court cases in Sacred Lands, Peyotism, free exercise in prisons, and sacralized traditional practices (whaling, fishing, hunting) and critically examines the conceptual framework of “religion” as it has been applied to the practice of Native American traditions. Service projects will integrate academic learning and student involvement in matters of particular concern to contemporary native communities.
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RELG 243.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Michael McNally 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 330 10:10am-11:55am
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RELG 266 Modern Islamic Thought 6 credits
Through close reading of primary sources, this course examines how some of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East and South Asia conceptualized God and the ideal God-human relationship to address such pressing questions as: How should religion relate to modern technological and scientific advancements? Can Islam serve as an ideology to counter European colonialism? Can Islam become the basis for the formation of social and political life under a nation-state, or does it demand a transnational political collectivity of its own? What would a modern Islamic economy look like?
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RELG 266.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLibrary 344 10:10am-11:55am
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RELG 300 Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion 6 credits
What, exactly, is religion and what conditions of modernity have made it urgent to articulate such a question in the first place? Why does religion exert such force in human society and history? Is it an opiate of the masses or an illusion laden with human wish-fulfillment? Is it a social glue? A subjective experience of the sacred? Is it simply a universalized Protestant Christianity in disguise, useful in understanding, and colonizing, the non-Christian world? This seminar, for junior majors and advanced majors from related fields, explores generative theories from anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary studies, and the history of religions.
- Winter 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry
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RELG 300.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 303 10:10am-11:55am
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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
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RELG 322.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Sonja Anderson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 303 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 303 2:20pm-3:20pm
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RELG 359 Buddhist Studies India Program: Buddhist Meditation Traditions
Students will complement their understanding of Buddhist thought and culture through the study and practice of traditional meditation disciplines. This course emphasizes the history, characteristics, and approach of three distinct meditation traditions within Buddhism: Vipassana, Zazen, and Dzogchen. Meditation practice and instruction is led in the morning and evening six days a week by representatives of these traditions who possess a theoretical as well as practical understanding of their discipline. Lectures and discussions led by the program director complement and contextualize the three meditation traditions being studied.
Open only to participants in OCP GEP Buddhist Studies India Program
- Fall 2025
- IS, International Studies No Exploration
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Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Buddhist Studies in India program.
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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.
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RELG 399 Senior Research Seminar 6 credits
This seminar will acquaint students with research tools in various fields of religious studies, provide an opportunity to present and discuss research work in progress, hone writing skills, and improve oral presentation techniques.
- Winter 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry
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RELG 399.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Lori Pearson 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 301 10:10am-11:55am
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15 seats held for Religion majors with Senior Priority until the day after senior priority registration.
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RELG 400 Integrative Exercise 1 – 2 credits
Religion 400 covers two required elements of the comprehensive exercise for the Religion major. All seniors must enroll in Religion 400 for one credit in fall term of senior year, when students will write and revise their comps research proposals. All seniors must then enroll in Religion 400 for two credits in spring term of senior year, when each student will finalize the research paper, create and deliver an oral presentation on it, and attend the oral presentations of all religion majors in the senior class. (The paper is drafted during winter term in Religion 399.)
- Fall 2025, Spring 2026
- No Exploration
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Student is a Religion major and has Senior Priority.
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SOAN 228 Public Sociology of Religion 6 credits
This course focuses on special topics in the public sociology of religion. We will look at the intersection of race, religion, and politics in the U.S.; the intersection of science and religion in Indigenous-led environmental and land back movements; secular and Islamic feminism in Egypt and Indonesia; and democracy, secularism, and religious tolerance in Indonesia, Egypt, and globally. As we do so, we will examine core theoretical perspectives and empirical developments in the contemporary study and sociology of religion.
Recommended Preparation: Completion of SOAN 110 or SOAN 111 with a grade of C- or better.
- Spring 2026
- IS, International Studies SI, Social Inquiry
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SOAN 228.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Wes Markofski 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 236 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 236 2:20pm-3:20pm