Faculty of Arts & Sciences

The aim of this course is to introduce students to key categories in the study of religion, both within a comparative context and with significant attention to theoretical and methodological issues in the field. The specific topic of the course will vary from year to year. Topic examples include: scripture, ethics, ritual, body and practice, art, violence, gender and sexuality.

This course provides an introduction to the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, often referred as the "Abrahamic" traditions. The course considers key moments in the history of these interrelated traditions, while also attending to how boundaries have been negotiated within and between traditions. Significant themes include scripture and authority; the role of history, revelation, and reason; law, ethics, and community; and the rise of modernity. The course will also consider the interpretive issues at stake in referring to these traditions as "Abrahamic" faiths.

An exploration of the Jewish religious tradition, from its inception in biblical Israel through its rabbinic, medieval, and modern iterations, with a focus on central theological claims and religious practices. Readings concentrate on classical sources and their various modes of interpretation but also include modern restatements, reformulations, and critiques of tradition.

This introductory course focuses on 1) the Pauline epistles in their first-century sociopolitical context, and their earliest interpretations; 2) recent trends in Pauline studies, including feminist and postcolonial interpretation, the New Perspective, and European philosophical treatments (Badiou, Zizek). Special attention will be given to ideas of the gendered/enslaved body and its potential for transformation and pollution, ethnicity in the Roman world, the relations of communities to Roman imperial power, and views of time and the impending eschaton.

This lecture course will deal with the major challenges of modernity that the Catholic Church faced in the Twentieth Century through an analysis of some theological classics of the century. Among the challenges to be considered are: the impact of historical critical studies on the understanding of Christianity, the philosophical critique of metaphysics and classical proofs for God's existence, the impact of the Protestant Reformation, the challenge of religious pluralism and religious freedom, the challenge of the modern world with its technological, communicative, and economic development, the changed relation of the church and state and to the claims of human rights. It will discuss these problems in relation to the writings of Maurice Blondel, Alfred Loisy, Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, Documents of Vatican II, Gustavo Gutierrez, and select Papal Documents.

What is an authentic individual life? How does one find meaning in light of modern challenges to claims about the nature of God, revelation and the soul? Is religious faith compatible with an understanding of historicity and the threat of nihilism? This course introduces central questions in Western philosophy of religion through close reading of fundamental texts in existentialism with some attention to their Christian theological sources. Reading and participatory discussion of text by Plato, Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, Bultmann and Tillich.

Introduction to methods and theories in the study of religion, including major themes and arguments that have defined the field. Course emphasizes critical thinking and writing skills.

Part of the sequence of small seminars focused on critical thinking and writing skills for concentrators, this course provides in-depth study of selected themes, texts, traditions or time periods.

The course follows key themes in religion and gender as these were shaped and reshaped through the colonial and post-colonial eras. In particular, the religious history of American women and the history of women in Islam primarily in relation to the Middle East (professors Braude's and Ahmed's fields respectively) are intertwined and brought into conversation. The interaction of religion, gender and sexuality and the turns and complexities imparted to these by the politics of imperialism, race, resistance, and the politics of class, are examined in the context of the emergence of modernity, nationalism, feminism and the globalization of religions in the wake of empire and Christian mission.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the religious practices, beliefs, and movements of African Americans from 17th century to present. Topics include, but not limited to, black religions in North America under slavery, black churches, black Muslims, Jews and conjuring traditions, the civil rights movement, and the relation of African American religion to literature and music. Readings will include Albert Raboteau, Michael Gomez, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Barbara Diane-Savage, Karen McCarthy Brown and others.

Conducting fieldwork with groups and people based on their religious/spiritual beliefs requires a complex understanding as well as critical knowledge of both the theory and methods of the "field research" process. This year-long course will provide students interested in conducting anthropological style "field research" with religious/spiritual groups/peoples, an in-depth and critical survey of theory and methodological approaches towards an anthropology of "the religious." The first semester will focus primarily on the theoretical questions/problems in the study of religion in anthropology, including what is a field site, how is it constituted, and how do we understand our own research and theory in relation other academic projects? The second semester is a methodological workshop, where students will be required to conduct method-intensive weekly projects. Through different methodological modalities, students will be required to think about what their research means to the communities they intend to work with as well as questions of positionality, the divide between participant/observer, new forms of research methods and other problematics of research.

This course seeks to give an introduction to contemporary discussions about justice, human rights, and religion. It will survey the conceptions of rights within political theology and within contemporary theories of justice. Special attention will be given to the work of Rawls, Habermas, Nussbaum, Sen, Walzer, Sandel, Motlmann, Woltersdorf, and Schmitt. It will seek to show how a conception of human rights relates to religion with the framework of a discourse ethics.

This course explores the nature of selfhood as it is constituted in the writing of autobiography. Our questions include: What do autobiographies tell us about the relationship of personal identity, individuality, subjectivity, and alienation to religious truth? What can we say about the relationship of the lived life to what is remembered and written in autobiography? To whom are autobiographers telling their self-stories, and why? What constitutes such critical experiences as moments of conversion, enlightenment, or self-consciousness? Our interpretive methodology will draw from literary theory on autobiographical writing. Autobiographical writings to be studied include those by Augustine, Teresa of Avila, a Tibetan Buddhist hermitess, a Jewish Kabbalist mystic, a contemporary Chinese-American novelist, a 17th century Venetian Rabbi, an American freed slave, a Japanese pilgrim poet, and James Joyce.

This course will explore how secularism and pluralism have figured in recent scholarship on the construction of the category of religion. We will begin by asking how prominent theorists of secularization and pluralization have described these processes and their relation to one another, before turning to the question of how these processes relate to the -isms they inspire: secularism and pluralism. After laying these foundations, we will consider how historians of American religion have portrayed secularism, pluralism, and the relationship between the two, with an eye to the historical metanarratives their treatments imply. Does a robust defense of religious pluralism require an embrace of secularism or antagonism to it? Do secularism's claims to neutrality undermine religious pluralism or allow it to flourish? Are secularism and pluralism opposed to one another, or are they closely related concepts?

This seminar examines the relationships between modern states and religion with particular attention to Islam in Muslim majority countries and beyond. We will analyze institutional arrangements from separation to establishment, and we will examine the meaning of secularism as a modern project. We will explore what the formation of the modern state owes to religion, but also how the modern state transforms religion. More broadly, the seminar will analyze the general consequences of the modern states' engagement with religion, and will explore new potential research paths. Readings will include historical, anthropological, theoretical, as well as quantitative perspectives.

A continuation of Religion 1212a.

Using three renowned sanctuaries at - Brauron, Eleusis, and Samothrace - as foci, this course will consider the role of initiation in ancient Greece in the wider context of mystery cults. We will attend to the archaeological and literary evidence as well as to relevant secondary scholarship.

This introductory course will focus on the major Greek authors of the late antique Christian East (third through eighth centuries). Authors will include Origen, Antony the Great, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius of Pontus, Cyril of Alexandria, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus.

This course will consider newly discovered works, as well as engage critical readings of well-known sources, around such topics as the politics of martyrdom, performance and ritual, gender, and intra-Christian controversies.

An investigation of the Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and other ancient Christian Gospel literature (Gospel of Thomas, Dialogue of the Savior); discussion of the developments from the oral traditions about Jesus to their written fixation and of the theological and communal concerns that influenced this process. Discussion of the question of the "historical Jesus."

This course will survey Augustine of Hippo's theological career through the lens of his encounters with three "heresies" of Roman North Africa: Manichaeism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. Particular attention will be paid to following themes: evil, freedom, the will, and selfhood.

This course is designed to provide a historical overview of the Church and society in western Europe from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Thus, this course will investigate high and late medieval Christianity in its social and its cultural context. Narrative and theological story lines to be pursued will include medieval monasticism and other new forms of religious life; heresy and its repression; scholasticism, the university and Gothic architecture; the bid for papal monarchy; means of Christianization; saints, relics, pilgrimage and other forms of popular devotion; the decline of the late-medieval papacy and conciliarism; late-medieval heresy; Christianity and other world religions (especially Judaism and Islam); and late-medieval attempts at reform. We will also be strengthening our skills as interpreters of primary sources. Some attention will be paid to major historiographical issues.

The course is devoted to close reading and interpretation of 1 Corinthians. Discussion of the Greek text of 1 Corinthians will focus on literary style, use of rhetoric, philology, and the social and theological issues of the text.

What Is the spiritual significance of money? Wealth and poverty have posed controversial questions for faith since the attacks by the Hebrew prophets; Jesus' warnings to the rich about the eye of the needle; and the sharp objections raised by monastics, St. Francis and reformers. These themes persist in current disputes, sparked in part by Pope Francis's statements about inequality, and by controversies around the prosperity gospel and liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor." This course will explore biblical, theological and ethical dimensions of these issues and will include some comparative discussion of how other religions approach them.

This course will examine the history of mystical theology in early and medieval traditions of Christianity. Through a close reading of primary texts in translation students will engage questions of divine mystery, transcendence, and hiddenness; the practice of affirmation (kataphasis) and negation (apophasis); mystical union; and the limits of language.

This course will explore the relationship between Christianity and slavery from 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia, to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865. We will discuss biblical defenses of slavery, "scientific" racism, plantation missions, slave resistance and rebellion, abolitionism, and slave worship and theology. Readings include African-American memoirs, fugitive slave narratives, proslavery sermons, abolitionist newspapers, and interviews with ex-slaves. Students will also analyze visual representations of slavery and listen to slave spirituals.

A study of the life, thought, and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. An ethical analysis of his primary concepts, ideas, and strategies based upon a reading and discussion of his writings and their sources.

Using history and anthropology, this course explores the role of Capitalism in the growth and development of Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

A survey of contemporary Roman Catholic theology that discusses issues in the interpretations of God, Jesus, and the church with reference to theological method. The broad spectrum of present-day Roman Catholic theology will be covered through an analysis of diverse theologians and approaches: existential, transcendental, liberationist, feminist, analytical, and hermeneutical.

This course offers a historical, theological, and practice-based introduction to Christianity. We will explore key episodes in Christian history and central themes of Christian theology, highlighting the diversities of culture, ideology, gender, and practice that have characterized Christianity throughout its history. We will use integrative case studies as well as readings from the disciplines of church history, systematic theology, and practical theology to discover the many insights that emerge at the intersections of these disciplines.

A study of how some of the major philosophers of the West -- many of whom considered themselves Christians -- interpreted Christianity. Through the lens of the philosophical account of Christianity, we consider the content of the Christian message and its implications for the conduct of life and the organization of society. We also explore, from this perspective, the nature of religious experience and its relation to the ambitions of philosophy. Readings drawn from the works of Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others as well as from the writings of twentieth-century theologians who have worked across the contested frontier between philosophy and theology.

An examination of the intellectual and institutional history of the University that leads students through a chronological exploration of key events and significant presidents. Among themes to be considered are European antecedents, developments in faculty, changes in student life, curricular alterations, as well as the maturation of the built environment. Significant attention is paid to the evolution of the religious context of the school, which was a vital component of the University's identity for several centuries.

This course is a survey of American religion from Reconstruction to the present. We will ask several related questions. How did religious communities shape social and political movements like women's suffrage, the anti-lynching campaign, the Civil Rights Movement, and second-wave feminism? How did religious communities respond to developments like urbanization, segregation, industrialization, the Great Depression, and the creation of new media? How did ordinary people practice their faith? We will discuss a wide variety of religious communities and movements, including the Social Gospel, Catholicism, Fundamentalism, Judaism, Pentecostalism, New Thought, and the Christian Right. We will also discuss the transformation of the American religious landscape after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. In addition to reading major scholarly accounts, we will consult a wide variety of primary sources, including memoirs, sermons, religious periodicals, speeches, and music.

An exploration of the interplay of aesthetics, politics, and religion in contemporary American poetry. Poets to be read will likely include Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Susan Howe, Dan Beachy-Quick, C.D. Wright, Elizabeth Robinson, Lisa Robertson, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Myung Mi Kim, and Harryette Mullen.

This seminar examines will explore major figures and issues within political theology. The focus will be on the relation between religion and society, especially public and political life. The seminar will consider the relation between the development of diverse modern political theologies and their contrasting interpretations of modernity. It will also focus on relation between political theology and the notions political justice, law, and human rights. Special emphasis to the work of Schmitt, Agamben, Metz, Moltmann, Charles and Mark Taylor, Wolterstorff, Nancy Fraser, Iris Young, Amartya Senn, Martha Nussbaum, and Jurgen Habermas.

The nineteenth century formulated many of the questions and frameworks that continue to dominate theology and religious reflection in the West. This course considers the developing interplay between modern Christian theology (primarily continental) and the principal philosophical and social critiques of religion in the nineteenth century. Topics include human nature, religion, the divine-human relationship, religious knowledge, the social, and historicity. Readings from Lessing, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Harnack, and Troeltsch.

A growing number of books have appeared recently recounting personal journeys of faith — faith searched for, wrestled with, lost, found, abandoned, affirmed, re-imagined, understood in new ways — or any combination of these. We will read contemporary works in this genre exploring, among others, themes of religion, gender and identity. Our readings will include Sarah Sentilles, Breaking Up with God, Joanna Brooks, The Book of Mormon Girl, Sheila Weinberg, Surprisingly Happy, Tariq Ramadan, What I Believe, Chris Stedman, Faithiest, Colleen Carroll Campbell, My Sisters the Saints, and Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.

This course considers the classical figures in the American pragmatic tradition, seeking both to understand the genesis and claims of "pragmatism" and its relation to and implications for religion. Ordered chronologically, the course begins with Charles Sanders Pierce, but give particular attention to the writings of William James and John Dewey. Topics include belief, human experience, truth, action, ethics, rationality, and the nature and role (socially and individually) of religion.

This seminar will explore the major shapers of the Unitarian and Universalist traditions in the twentieth century, with special attention to the influence of the social gospel, religious humanism, process thought, and liberation theology. Featured writers will include Francis Greenwood Peabody, Clarence Skinner, John Haynes Holmes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Curtis Reese, Frederick May Eliot, James Luther Adams, Sophia Fahs, Henry Nelson Wieman, Charles Hartshorne, A. Powell Davies, Kenneth Patton, William R. Jones, and Rebecca Parker.

The course will explore the theoretical articulation of sex, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century theory, particularly in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. Readings will include texts by Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Moira Gatens, and others.

This course will explore the lives and works of the Protestant theologians and ethicists Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962). Throughout their long careers, the Niebuhr brothers carried on a remarkable intellectual dialogue in both their published and unpublished writings and their private correspondence. In addition to surveying the similarities and differences between the brothers and their intellectual projects, we will also consider how their thought was shaped by various interlocutors, including Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, William James, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, John Dewey, and Will Herberg, and by the broader historical contexts in which they lived and worked. We will pay particular attention to how the Niebuhr brothers viewed God and human nature, democracy and politics, secularism and pluralism, church-state relations, and the meaning and character of history.

Based around a series of traditionalist guest speakers, this course interrogates the study of religion in general and of Native American traditions in particular in light of indigenous religious experiences, perspectives and histories. Questions of appropriation, repatriation and religious freedom will be approached through legal as well as cultural frameworks.

This course explores the lives, practices, and experiences of contemporary South Asians from Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Sikh perspectives. Concepts central to South Asian worldviews will be carefully considered in the context of both rural and urban day-to-day activities, rituals, and family life. Readings are drawn from a wide range of ethnographic literatures, and films documenting a diverse range of religious, cultural, and social settings from across South Asia will frequently be shown.

Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu classic of devotion and theology, has received extensive classical and contemporary commentary. The seminar explores selectively the interpretations of classical commentators (Sankara, Ramanuja, and Madhusudana Sarasvati), and 20th century interpreters (B. G. Tilak, Mohandas Gandhi, Bede Griffiths). Part of the series, Reading Hindu Texts Interreligiously, meant for students interested in closely reading Indian/Hindu texts, with attention to textual analogues from other religions.

Focusing on the genres of itihasa, purana, and katha, this seminar explores the relevance of both classical Indic and contemporary Euro-American literary theories for the understanding of pre-modern South Asian narrative.

A close look at practices and cultural productions of Tibetan Buddhism and other religious traditions in light of their distinctive historical contexts in Tibet. Topics include: yogic, lay, and monastic religions; visionary practices; religion, magic and the state; Buddhism in literature and art; medicine and Buddhism; death and reincarnation practices; the creation of sacred landscape; and certain distinctive literary genres including "mind training," "advice" writings, self-revelatory autobiography; and religious historiography. Throughout the course we will be considering a number of new publications that have recently enriched our understanding of Tibetan religious cultures and institutions.

An introduction to basic issues in reading Buddhist Scriptural Anthologies, both historical and hermeneutic. Special emphasis will be given to issues of intertextuality that the formation of scriptural anthologies generates. Examples of Buddhist scriptural anthologies will be drawn from across the Buddhist world.

An introduction to the study of narrative and story literature in the Buddhist world. A primary focus will be on the narrative and story literature found in Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, but there will also be consideration of examples of narrative and story literature that circulated independently. Examples will be drawn from across the Buddhist world.

Introductory survey of Sufism, focusing on its fundamental concepts, ritual practices, institutions, and its impact on literary and sociopolitical life in different Muslim societies.

We will read contemporary works in the history of Islam in the U.S. and Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.

An examination of the study of religion from early modernity to the present, with attention to key thinkers, methods, and theories.

If secularism privileges the temporal over the eternal, what are the ramifications for how death is thought by those who live within a secular frame? We will explore the question as it is posed and answered, however provisionally, within modern Western philosophy, literature, and the visual arts. Material will include work by Henry James, William James, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Carole Maso, Janet Kauffman, and Susan Howe.

The first portion of the course will introduce students to working with archaeological data from the Greco-Roman world (inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, coins). The second portion consists of seminars in Greece and Turkey during May, including some meetings with archaeologists and other scholars abroad.

The course will examine the phenomena of witchcraft in selected early Christian texts to explore its socio-cultural and rhetorical implications by positing them within the broader context of Greco-Roman culture and society.

The main focus of this course will be on the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple and early Christian periods through the close reading in translation of four representative texts (1 Enoch, Daniel, the Apocalypse of John, and 4 Ezra). The course will not be limited to the reading of apocalyptic texts, but it intends to address the main themes that characterize historical research on and the exegesis of this subject, as the definition of the apocalyptic genre, the counter-hegemonic elements in the texts, or the role of violence, which often informs apocalyptic imagery.

The seminar will focus on both ethical discourses in the NT and on the ethics of interpretation Special attention will be given to the rhetoric of subordination and empire and how they have shaped the theological vision, symbolic worlds and rhetorical practices of NT writings. We also will explore how the theoethical discourses of the NT have shaped and still shape religious communities and society today. The seminar will engage in a collaborative style of learning.

At the center of the Summa of Theology, the reader finds a broad analysis of the motives and purposes of human action. But the analysis remains incomplete until Thomas takes up the incarnation, narrated life, and memorial sacraments of the Christ. Incarnation is the pedagogical principle that makes moral formation possible. It also justifies the teaching of Christian theology, not least in a summa. This course will read selected questions from Thomas's Summa. It will seek to understand the logic of divine teaching that explains God's choice to become incarnate, the events of Jesus's life, and the legacy of sacramental scenes of instruction. It will then ask how this logic was already at work in Thomas's description of moral life, perhaps especially in his treatments of the passions, the succession of laws, and vocation to a way of life.

Early Christians wrote their ethical teaching not only in response to existing religious law or rite, but in competition with philosophical programs for soul-shaping. The religious traditions and the philosophic schools alike wanted to discipline bodily actions and passions, but even more to elicit certain roles or characters. This course reads some ancient philosophical examples of ethical persuasion before turning to early and medieval Christian texts that want to surpass them in power to shape lives.

An analysis of select theologians in their approach to the knowledge and the nature of God. Special attention will be paid to their theological method and philosophical presuppositions.

This course will study the role of Christian images, theologies, traditions, histories, and identities in contemporary American fiction. The course will seek to ask what it might mean for a literary text to bear religious meaning in contemporary America. What does it mean for a text (or a person, for that matter) to be religious in America today? We will pursue these questions primarily through the study of literary texts (novels and short stories) published within the last twenty years, with authors to include Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Lorrie Moore, among others.

This course will examine the writing of American religious history from the nineteenth century until the present. In the first part of the course, we will trace the creation of an American religious historical canon. Readings will include Robert Baird's Religion in America (1844), William Warren Sweet's The Story of Religions in America (1930) and Sydney E. Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People (1972). In the second part of the course, we will explore the transformation of the field of American religious history since the 1970s. In addition to reading textbooks such as Catherine Albanese's America: Religion and Religions (1981) and George Marsden's Religion and American Culture (1990), we will read case studies of new approaches and methodologies. Our goal is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of both the canon and the new religious history that has taken its place.

An in-depth analysis of the investigation into and construction and critique of "religious experience" in philosophy of religion, theology, critical religious thought and contemporary neuroscience. Issues will include asking what is at stake in the appeal to experience, what experience is or might be, and what evidence for such experiences currently looks like. Authors will include Edwards. James, Katz, Otto, Proudfoot, Schleiermacher, as well as contemporary neuroscientists.

Practices of piety that are also acts of protest provide access to contemporary developments relating religion, gender and sexuality. This course historicizes current women's cultures of protest within, against and on behalf of their religious faiths. Case studies drawn primarily from Judaism, Christianity and Islam include ecological critiques; the resurgence of the veil in Islam; the ordination of women; the return to orthodoxy in Judaism; as well as consolidations of heterosexuality. The course concludes by interrogating international iconoclastic political protests in light of earlier feminist art work in which the female body is a site of piety and protest, such as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.

This advanced level seminar engages on selected works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It focuses on the influence of Christian ideas on his work and the relationship between philosophy and theology. It also engages the works of thinkers influenced by Merleau-Ponty, including Franz Fanon, Judith Butler, and others.

The first section of this course will study writings that exhort us to take up the Buddhist path. The second part will turn to meditation theory. The third section will consider how study of the modes of being encouraged in path writings can shed light on the relationship between meditation practice and breakthrough. The course readings, all in English translation, will be chapters from Visuddhimagga, Abhidharmakoṡa, Abhisamayalamkara, and Indo-Tibetan path literature.

Reading and research conducted in a specific foreign language, normally French or German, to satisfy the modern language reading proficiency requirement for PhD students in the Study of Religion.

Topic for 2014-15: Authors, Books, Religion: Ancient Christianity. The course will consider material, social, economic, and political practices with regard to Christians' production and use of books. The goals of the course are to introduce students to current work being done on these issues, to bring the results of this work to bear on early Christian literature, and to examine the implications of these shifts in understanding about the nature and inter-relationship of authors, writing(s), and religion.

Presentation and discussion of the research of doctoral candidates in American religious history.