Courses

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.

Key aspects of religion, including culture, tradition, family, community, the divine, ritual, selfhood, place, and embodiment all collide in food and foodways, making food a rich entry-point into the study of religion. Working across time and space, we will explore the following key questions: 1) how does food shape individuals and communities; 2) how does food encapsulate the values of a society; 3) how does food play a sacred role across cultures? 4) what is the role of food in solidifying and crossing identities; 5) how has food been a site of privilege and resistance?

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.

This course explores the history and contemporary practice of Native American religious traditions, especially as they have developed amid colonization and resistance. While surveying a broad variety of ways that Native American traditions imagine land, community, and the sacred, the course focuses on the local traditions of the Ojibwe and Dakota communities. Materials include traditional beliefs and practices, the history of colonization, intertribal new religious movements, and contemporary issues of treaty rights, sacred place protections, and language revitalization.

This course introduces students to the rituals, rites, customs, cosmologies, beliefs, and theologies of African-descendant people in an international context. It samples contemporary works in Black Religious Studies that includes, but are not limited to, Black liberation theologies, social scientific approaches to Black religion, Black religious arts, and the intersection of Black religion & Black politics. We will explore monotheistic & polytheistic spiritualities, Black religious histories, Black religion & media (such as 'televangelism'), Black esoteric spiritualities, as well as Black styles of worship and praise.

Encounters with the sacred on the landscape present a thorough line of Irish religion: pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian. Holy mountains, islands, stones, and wells materialize the sacred and organize the practices of lived religion. Such places are also charged sites of historical memory, colonization, and resistance. Long wellsprings of Irish cultural nationalism, they now capture spiritual imaginations of global seekers of earth-based spirituality. Through readings, field visits, and walking several pilgrimage routes, this course explores narratives and practices of sacred places, engages the blurry boundary between the sacred/secular entailed in pilgrimage, and queries the modern romance with “Celtic Spirituality.”

The past is a strong presence in Ireland.  People live with Iron Age tombs in their backyards and Irish language place names rehearse ancient epics.  Places resound with collective memory as they have been storied through myth, literature, and folklore.  So too are Irish political identities made and remade through evocations and practices of sacred place. This course explores the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, Celtic Revival spiritualizations of the landscape, and materials by and about “New Irish” communities. The course centers place-based learning: curated experiences at archaeological sites, historical walking tours of Galway and Dublin, and an immersive week in the politically charged cityscape of Belfast.

How does gender shape the Jewish tradition, and how have Jewish historical moments, texts, and practices shaped Jewish notions of gender? Taking Judaism as a test case, this course will explore the relationship between historical circumstance, positionality, and the religious imaginary. We will examine the ways that Jewish gender and theology inform each other. We will see how gender was at play in Jewish negotiations of economic and social class, racial and ethnic status, even citizenship. Following the threads of practice and narrative, we will think about how intersectional gender has shaped the stories Jews tell, and the stories that are told about them.

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.

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.

Historically, yoga’s roots can be traced as far back as 1500 BCE. As for “religion,” in the modern period, yoga has largely been unyoked from it. But the Sanskrit root yuj means to “add,” “join,” or “unite”—and in Indian philosophy and practice it has long been: a method of devotion; a way to “yoke” the body/mind; a means to unite with Ultimate Reality; a form of concentration and meditation. Over time, it has been medicalized into a form of public health. This course will concentrate on texts, images, and cultures old and new. Come prepared to wear loose clothing!

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.

Why do religious people do violence—in their words and deeds, against themselves and others? Is violence a distortion of real religion? Is it the inevitable result of certain beliefs? Or are these the wrong questions? This course considers several case studies of religious violence drawn from different traditions and time periods, including ancient paganism, early Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and so-called cults. Our approach will be historical, literary, and comparative. We will seek to understand how violence can be meaningful as a religious act, and how adherents of the same religious tradition can have widely diverse views on violence and nonviolence.

As the chosen messenger of God's final revelation, Muslims consider Muhammad to be God's beloved par excellence. He is believed to have not only received God's words but to have also experienced the divine. For Muhammad's followers, love has been a central means of attaining experiential knowledge of God. The Islamic tradition, particularly in the form of Sufism, developed a highly sophisticated literature for understanding God through love. This course will trace and analyze the historical development of this literature and the practices associated with it from the Qur'an (600s) to Rumi (1200s).

With Jews and Jewishness front and center in American political contestations, it is increasingly urgent to understand formations of Judaism, past and present, in relation to normative concepts of the "American." This course will consider the ways that Judaism interacts with, is shaped by, and in turn shapes, America and Americanness. We will apply historical, anthropological, and theoretical lenses to explore the many aspects of what Jewishness means and has meant in this country.

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.

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.)