The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Department of Religion in Spring 2021 were submitted by the course instructors.
Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official webpage: Schedule of Courses for Spring 2021.
If you are looking for a complete syllabus for a course, check the Syllabi area for availability.
IDS 2935 Women and Religion in Popular Literature – Rachel Gordan
Women and Religion have been central to 20th and 21st Century American popular fiction. Why? And how have popular portrayals of womanhood and religion changed over time? These are some of the questions we’ll consider.
IDS 2935 Religious Extremism – Terje Ostebo
Religious extremism, and similar words like radicalism, fanaticism, or fundamentalism, is frequently used in the media and the policy world. These concepts are usually meant to depict violent behavior based on ideological outlooks, wherein exclusivist positions categorize humans as either insiders or as opposite “others”. But what is religious extremism? How do we define extremism? Who are the extremists? Is religious extremism meaningful and useful as a concept? And, what should it be understood in relation to its assumed opposite – the moderate. This course digs into these questions and provides students with critical knowledge about what is called extremism within major religious traditions. However, rather than examining extremism according to Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism, it investigates it in relation to broader topics such as nationalism, race(ism), and gender and sexuality. Moreover, it explores extremism in relation to processes of radicalization, and to violence/non-violence, and points to efforts made to counter violent forms of extremism. While rooted in the discipline of religious studies and the humanities more broadly, the course is inter-disciplinary in nature, drawing on perspectives from the social science, such as political science, anthropology, and security studies. It focuses mostly on the contemporary period, and analyzes particular representations of extremism in different contexts across the globe.
REL 2104 Environmental Ethics – Erin Prophet
Exploration of competing secular and religious views regarding human impacts on and moral responsibilities toward nature and of the key thinkers and social movements in contention over them.
REL 2121 American Religious History (online) – David Hackett
This course explores the vital and diverse story of religious life in the United States from the first European contacts to the late twentieth century. We begin with native Americans, Protestants and Puritans, early African religious life and the origins of civil religion at the time of the Revolution. We then turn to relations between men and women in nineteenth century Protestantism, the emergence of Mormons and other new religions, the persistence of Indian religions, the creation of African American Christianity, and the many meanings of the American civil religion. Immigrant Catholics and Jews then hold our attention before we consider the sixties counterculture, the resurgence of Evangelical Protestantism, and the post-1965 arrival of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. Through careful attention to the extraordinary creativity and diversity of religion in American society, this course provides students with an essential understanding of how religion informs our contemporary life.
REL 2300 Intro to World Religions (online) – Vasudha Narayanan
The origin, historical development and key figures, concepts, symbols, practices and institutions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and East Asian traditions, including Taoism, Shinto and Confucianism. When you complete this course, you will be able to:
- Explain basic world views, rituals, and beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Chinese religions, Japanese religions, Indigenous Religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
- Problematize the category of religion and identify your own working definitions.
- Identify the social, political, and cultural factors that come into play in the formation and understanding of a given religion.
- Equipped with this knowledge of different religious traditions, and the contexts in which they thrive, identify your own vantage point, as well as engage with different cultures and countries in an informed, respectful manner.
REL 2388 Indigenous Religions of the Americas – Robin Wright
This course introduces the student to the historical and contemporary religious beliefs and practices of Native peoples of North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. With such a vast and diverse universe to study, our approach will (1) highlight key features of indigenous religious traditions across a variety of cultures; (2) discuss central features of religious traditions in historical civilizations such as the Maya and Inca; and (3) focus on religious ethnographies of, and by, contemporary native peoples in the Americas. Thus, the course is a mix of what we understand about the indigenous religious traditions in history, and in the present.
REL 2600 Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness – Rachel Gordan
Multidisciplinary approach to the Jewish experience from its Biblical origins to modern times.
REL 3082 Global Ethics – Anna Peterson
This course will explore the ethical dimensions of global social, political, and environmental issues. Students will learn about diverse theoretical approaches in philosophical and religious ethics and then use those approaches to understand and evaluate the moral issues involved in contemporary global issues, including human rights, war and peace, climate change, and public health. In examining these case studies, students will learn to “do ethics” in a rigorous way, identifying the moral aspects of a social, political, economic, or environmental problem; defining and analyzing the issues clearly; and evaluating the ways different theoretical and methodological approaches help clarify and address the problems. We will pay particular attention to the roles of religion and cultural traditions in the emergence of problems, in people’s interpretations of and responses to them, and in the development of solutions. We will also address the relationship between different scales – e.g., local, regional, and national – in both the emergence of these issues and the efforts to understand and address them.
REL 3103 Religion and Nature in North America – Bron Taylor
This course critically examines the roles played by religion, ethics, and nature during the evolution of the cultural, political, and environmental history of North America since European contact. It pays special attention to the role religion has variously played in hindering and promoting proenvironmental behaviors and the quest for environmental sustainability and social justice.
REL 3191 Death and Afterlife in World Religions (online)– Vasudha Narayanan
This course explores notions of death and the afterlife in many religious traditions as well as in popular culture. It is divided into two major sections. In the first (and larger section, we will look at several topics including: conceptions of a soul (if any), what happens to a person at death, funerary rites, various conceptions of a/the ultimate reality (theistic, monistic, and so forth), notions of salvation and/or liberation, judgment, and various conceptions of time (e.g., linear or cyclical). The second section will explore how some of these religious perspectives are reflected in popular culture and spiritual movements. This section will focus on views of reincarnation and debates over the topic of near-death experiences, and briefly look at what is “death?”
REL 3213 Hebrew Bible as Literature – Robert Kawashima
This course will introduce students to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern context. Our primary focus will be on a wide and varied reading of biblical narrative — along with a bit of poetry — but students will also be introduced to the scholarly study of the Bible from a literary perspective. More generally, this course will introduce students to the scholarly, interdisciplinary study of literature. That is, if the solutions and interpretations proposed will be specific to the Bible, the problems and ideas raised will have relevance for the study of literature in general.
REL 3252 Acts, Paul, and Earliest Christianity – James Mueller
The purpose of the course is to expose the student to both canonical and non-canonical texts that helped to shape the various forms of earliest Christianities.
REL 3321 Early Judaism and Early Christianity – James Mueller
This course will trace the developments from Ancient Israelite religion to Early Judaism (concentrating on the Hellenistic and Roman periods), and the emergence of Christianity from this Jewish matrix (including both the indebtedness of Early Christianity to Judaism and the Early Christian [and to a lesser extent Jewish] polemic against its sibling). The course does presuppose some background on the part of the student in terms of both course content and critical methodology.
REL 3330 Religions of India – Jonathan Edelmann
This course focusses on the religious traditions and cultural diversity seen in the Indian subcontinent. The lectures and discussions will span the following areas:
(a) a historical introduction to the Hindu tradition;
(b) thematic studies including domestic and temple rituals, discussions on the status of women, and Hinduism in the diaspora; and
(c) a study of the “minority” traditions in India.
REL 3931 Junior Seminar – David Hackett
Intensive introduction to the study of religion.
REL 3938 (Writing Rule 4) Religion and the Paranormal – Erin Prophet
A critical approach to the paranormal as an “other” category for religion and science, including insights from folklore studies, laboratory research and cognitive science.
REL 3938 Buddhist Philosophy – Mario Poceski
The course is a survey of the main concepts and traditions of Buddhist philosophy. It focuses on the classical systems of Buddhist philosophy that developed in India, covering both the early schools and the Mahāyāna movement. Additionally, it explores the growth and transformation of Buddhist philosophy outside of India, especially in China. While Buddhist philosophy tends to be shaped by soteriological concerns, centered about a quest for spiritual liberation or insight into reality, the course examines the creative ways in which major Buddhist thinkers have addressed central philosophical concerns with metaphysical, hermeneutical, epistemological, and ethical implications.
REL 3938 Religion and Psychology – Jonathan Edelmann
This course covers the history of philosophy and religion on the matter of psychological theory. It looks at ideas of consciousness, intelligence, emotion, and cognition within the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion. Special attention will be given to the emergence of modern science as a tool or a method for resolving psychological problems. Thus, this course will also address theories of knowledge, of ignorance, and other matters in the sciences. By engaging with key thinkers, this course helps students construct their own psychological models for explaining human experience, belief, and well-being. As we examine texts, attention will be given to the social and the intellectual contexts in which they were created. Students are encouraged to think about and taught to write about psychology within the disciplines of philosophy and religion, thus engaging questions on the sources of knowledge (epistemology), the nature of being (ontology and metaphysics), and application to society and to the environment (ethics).
REL 3938 Shamanisms – Robin Wright
This course examines the varieties of religious experience that have come under the rubric of ‘shamanism’ and ‘shaman’. The course will include contemporary shamanisms among indigenous peoples of Amazonia, outer Asia, and North America; urbanized, non-indigenous movements, especially core shamanism and the neo-shamanic movements; and prophet movements of the Americas directly connected to shamanic cosmologies.
REL 4349 Buddhist Medication – Mario Poceski
The course explores the theories and practices of meditation developed by the major Buddhist traditions, in relation to the relevant social, philosophical, and religious contexts. The focus is on the classical models of contemplative practice developed in South Asia, their transformation in East Asian Buddhism, the contemporary practice of meditation in America, and the growing popularity of mindfulness practice.
REL 4368 Global Islam – Benjamin Soares
As one of the world’s largest and fastest growing religions, Islam exerts significant global influence in politics, culture, and society. This course addresses the urgent need for a better and deeper understanding of Muslim cultures and societies in the contemporary global context. With a focus on lived Islam in the contemporary world, the course will provide knowledge about the diversity and complexity of global Islam and Muslim cultures and societies in global context. The course will be topical in approach, and it will study Islam as the intersection of broader social, cultural, and political economic processes in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The course is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences.
REL 4221 The Pentateuch II – Robert Kawashima
In the nineteenth century, philologists revealed, through painstaking criticism of the biblical text,
that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) could not have been composed, as venerable tradition would have it, by Moses or, for that matter, by any one individual, but must have been written and redacted (combined) by a number of authors and editors, in different times and places. This “Documentary Hypothesis,” as their discovery came to be called, is one of the great and enduring achievements of modern philology, and it laid the foundation for the modern study of the Bible. n this course, we will take the analysis of the Pentateuch into its underlying sources as our starting point, and carefully read our way through it, from the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai to Moses’ farewell speech at the border of the Promised Land. If our basic approach is literary, we will not simply read it through as we would, say, a modern novel. Rather, we will interpret the underlying sources individually and then consider the meaning of their subsequent redaction. In addition to tracing the Pentateuch’s narrative arc, we will also devote a substantial part of the semester to studying biblical law in relation to the legal conventions of the ancient Near East. What we will ultimately find is that philological analysis, far from detracting from the Bible’s meaning, actually helps restore it, by stripping away some of the accumulated obscurities that have come to distort readers’ perceptions of this ancient text. Numerous secondary readings will, furthermore, expose students to modern approaches to and interpretations of this foundational book or, rather, collection of composite books.
REL 5361 Global Islam – Benjamin Soares
As one of the world’s largest and fastest growing religions, Islam exerts significant global influence in politics, culture, and society. This course addresses the urgent need for a better and deeper understanding of Islam and Muslim societies in the contemporary global context. With a focus on Islam in the contemporary world, the course will provide knowledge about the diversity and complexity of Islam and Muslim cultures and societies in global context with particular attention to questions of politics. The course will be topical in approach, and it will study Islam at the intersection of broader social, cultural, and political economic processes in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The course is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences.
REL 6387 Religion and Politics in Latin America – Anna Peterson
This advanced undergraduate course explores the relations between religion and politics in Latin America and the Caribbean, past and present. We will study institutions and movements in a variety of regions, religious traditions, and historical periods. Students will learn about different theoretical and methodological approaches, reflecting a range of scholarly disciplines. Among the specific topics we will explore are religion and politics in pre-colonial societies, the lingering impact of colonialism, millenarian movements, the political implications of growing religious diversity, and religion’s role in contemporary social movements.