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This course is designed to introduce students to the language, grammar, and vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. By the end of the semester students will be able to read and understand a number of biblical narrative passages, drawn from texts such as the stories of: creation in the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Joseph and his brothers, the Israelites' exodus from Egypt, David and Goliath, and others stories students are interested in reading in the original language. Emphasis will be placed on learning vocabulary in context so that students begin to understand the language of the Bible as a window on ancient Israelite religion, culture, and experience.

Who were the Jews that first settled in the Americas and around the Atlantic? How did their experiences intersect with processes of colonization, empire-building, racialization, and the formation of an interconnected Atlantic World? Why do half the world's Jews live currently in countries on the Atlantic littoral? How do they maintain trans-national bonds with other Jews around the world? This course will reconstruct the rise of the Sephardi Diaspora following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, their settlement patterns across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, their global economic activities, and the uneasy ways they mapped onto religious, political, and racial schema of the period. We will also explore the mass-migrations of European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews in the 19-20th centuries that rejuvenated the Jewish Atlantic and will investigate how the formation of the State of Israel has impacted the bonds of solidarity within this multi-ethnic Jewish Diaspora.

This course explores the history of religions among people of African descent from the period of the development of the transatlantic slave trade (1440s) to the present. Its aim is to introduce students to the complex ways religion has shaped their lifeworlds. Such study involves, among other things, encounters with the religious cultures of slaves and slaveholders in the antebellum South; the development of independent Black churches, the effects of emancipation, migration, and urbanization upon Black religious life; new black religious movements (e.g., Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, Black Hebrews); the emergence of Black secularism/humanism; the impact of Black religious expressive culture (e.g., music, sermon, song, and film); the religious dimensions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; as well as contemporary developments and transformations in Black religious life. All of which requires attentiveness to how we tell the story of Africana religions, and how scholars have developed and pursued the modern study of Africana religion.

Religion is a term with a rich history but without a precise definition. Everyone can describe a religious idea or a religious experience even though there is no agreement about what it is that makes an idea or an experience religious. How did this state of things come about? What is it that makes religion both one thing and many things? Why do we apply this concept to Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to the deep feelings we associate with secular forms of devotion and enthusiasm - for food, for love, for family, for art, for sport? In this seminar, we will discover that religion is a distinctly modern concept, developed to address the psychological and social needs of Europeans increasingly adrift from the traditional communal practices and moral commitments of their parents and grandparents. Tracing the history of religion - rather than the history of religions - from the age of Immanuel Kant to the age of Emmanuel Levinas, we will examine paradoxical connection between the rise of religion and the decline of faith.

This course is designed for students who are interested in reading the language of the Qur'an with accuracy and understanding. The first week (4 classes) will be devoted to an introduction of the history of the Qur'an: the revelation, collection, variant readings, and establishment of an authoritative edition. The last week will be devoted to a general overview of revisionist literature on the Qur'an. In the remaining 12 weeks, we will cover all of Part 30 (Juz' 'Amma, suuras 78-114) and three suuras of varying length (36, 19, and 12).

In this course we will learn about the rich varieties of religious life in imperial China, focusing on major historical transformations between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. We will investigate the organization of pantheons and human relations with the divine, and consider how they might illuminate social relations. We will examine the ways in which religious rites and festivals helped to constitute social groupings such as families, communities, sects, and states. We will consider the roles of texts, theatrical performances, and clergy in transmitting and transforming understandings of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Finally, we will explore the spatial organization of the sacred in bodies, things, sites, and landscapes.

For millennia, Buddhist monks, merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and adventurers have moved around the Indian Ocean arena circulating Buddhist teachings and powerful objects. In doing so they helped create Buddhist communities in the places we now refer to as southern China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. The course explores these circulatory histories by focusing on case studies in each of four historical periods: premodern (esp. early second millennium A.D.); the era of 19th-century colonial projects; mid-20th-century nation-state formation in South and Southeast Asia; and contemporary (early 21st century) times. Drawing together materials from Indian Ocean studies, Buddhist studies, and critical studies of colonialism, modernity, and nation-state formation, this course attends to the ways in which changing trans-regional conditions shape local Buddhisms, how Buddhist collectives around the Indian Ocean arena shape one another, and how trade, religion, and politics interact.

This course will explore religious traditions in South Asia (Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka) and East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) including Hinduism, Buddhism (South Asian and East Asian), Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto. We will also encounter a wide range of religious expressions, including myth, ritual, pilgrimage, mysticism, meditation, and other spiritual technologies.

This course introduces the academic study of religion. This course serves as both an introduction to the academic study of religion and a survey of major topics in the intersections of religious communities and environmentally sustainable practices. Using real cases of environmentally sustainable, religiously oriented communities, we explore how myth, ritual, symbols, doctrines, and ideologies of time and space are activated in practical living decisions. This class involves readings of both primary sources, poetry and literature, secondary sources, films and site visits. (RL)

Students will study Chinese myths from the earliest times. Focus will be on understanding how people have used myth to create and convey meaning, on examining the form Chinese myths take, and on considering how they are related to religion, literature, historical accounts, and intellectual trends.

This course serves as an introduction to key concepts in the study of the Fantastic, a fundamental analytic category in several academic disciplines, including literature, psychology, anthropology, art, and religion. Asia, the continent with the world’s largest population and the birthplace for several major religious traditions, is replete with narratives, beliefs and artistic practices which traverse the Fantastic’s diffuse aspects and explore its myriad dimensions. Our encounter with such phenomena will be concentrated on three of its key genres with roots in Asian and Asian-inspired religious movements: gods, ghosts, and gurus. Accordingly, course readings will discuss case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, Traditional Chinese Religions, Vietnamese Cao Ðài, and other such sectarian perspectives. Beyond gaining an empirical understanding of how each of these traditions has interpreted the classifications of god, ghost, and guru, we will also consider how religious practitioners have articulated their ideas about these entities in storytelling, visual objects, cinematic productions and other arenas of cultural expression. Overall, these inquiries will encourage students to critically engage with the following question: “How can studies of Fantastical Figures affirm and expand conventional notions of religion?” (RL)

This course will explore the Buddhist tradition from its origins in ancient India to its migrations throughout Asia and eventually to the West. The first part of the course will deal with Indian Buddhism: the Buddha, the principal teachings and practices of his early followers, and new developments in spiritual orientation. We will then turn to the transmission of Buddhism to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, where at least one of the early schools has been preserved. Next we will look at Mahayana Buddhism as it moves north and east, encompassing China, Japan, and Tibet. While much of the course will be devoted to developments in traditional times, we will also look at some of the ways Buddhist cultures have responded to modernity.

This course uses art and popular culture to provide a dynamic view of Black religion in the United States and the Diaspora throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussion topics include: religiosity in the visual art of Kara Walker, P-Valley's Hoodoo representation, and James Baldwin's Black Sanctified aesthetics. By engaging broadly with visual art, film, music, and television, students will gain a sense of the various religious and spiritual traditions that pervade contemporary popular culture and gain the ability to think critically about how religious themes show up on television, in music, and in the world around them.

This course explores the major debates that define the study of contemporary Iran. Drawing from ethnographic works, literary criticism, intellectual histories and more, we will examine historical events and cultural developments from a diverse set of theoretical approaches. Topics include the Iranian revolution in comparative perspective, the Iran-Iraq war and its continued legacy, media forms and practice, contemporary film and literature, women's movements, youth culture, religious diversity, legal systems, techniques of governance, and more. Of particular interest will be the intersections of religion and secularism in Iranian society. Ultimately, it is the objective of the course to explore the diverse cultural, political, and material worlds that shape collective life and individual subjectivity in Iran today.

This course examines the history of Zionism as an idea and as a political movement in all its various forms, currents, and transformations from its origins in mid-nineteenth century Europe to the present. Despite its success in establishing the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism, which also sought to normalize Jewish collective life and provide a safe haven from persecution for the Jews, has encountered multiple challenges from within and without. Some continue to think of it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people while others regard it is a Western inspired colonial project. Originating largely as a radical rejection of both traditional Jewish religious life and the Jews' diaspora in favor of modern nationalism, since 1967 Zionism has witnessed religious-nationalist fervor and a Jewish diaspora increasingly interested in or disinterested with the state of Israel. The course also considers the phenomenon of post-Zionism in Israeli historiography as well as Zionism's difficulty in coming to terms with the idea and reality that two peoples rather than one live in the land west of the Jordan. We'll also consider the Palestinian response framed as Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.

This course offers an anthropological approach to the study of religious traditions and practices in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The course begins with a short survey of the major religious traditions of South Asia: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. We look to the development of these traditions through historical and cultural perspectives. The course then turns to the modern period, considering the impact of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization upon religious ideologies and practices. The primary focus of the course will be the ethnographic study of contemporary religious practices in the region. We examine phenomena such as ritual, pilgrimage, possession, devotionalism, monasticism, asceticism, and revivalism through a series of ethnographic case studies. In so doing, we also seek to understand the impact of politics, modernity, diasporic movement, social inequality, changing gender roles, and mass mediation upon these traditions and practices.

This course will introduce students to the study of sex and sexuality in the medieval and early modern Islamic World, ending at the dawn of the twentieth century; we will begin with the study of desire in pre-Islamic and early-Islamic poetry and end with the study of the impact of colonialism on the family, the home and morality across the Islamic world. Students will read (in English) from the Qur'an, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, obscene and chaste poetry, erotological works, medical treatises, moral condemnations of sex, legal case studies, erotic stories and travel literature. Students will also engage with modern scholarship on the history of sex and sexuality in the Islamic world. Major topics of study will include: the composition of the family across time and space, the intersection between slavery and sexuality, homosexuality and homoerotic desire in the premodern world, marriage and adultery, questions of consent and sexual violence in law and storytelling, and the discrepancies between law, morality and social practice.

This course explores the history of medicine and other sciences in the ancient Near East, broadly defined. In addition to medicine, the other scientific disciplines covered in this course include mathematics, astrology, astronomy, alchemy, zoology, among others. Geographically, the course traces the transmission of scientific knowledge in ancient Babylonia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and beyond. As such, the course offers students a tour of different ancient civilizations and corpora. Students read selections from cuneiform Akkadian tablets, Egyptian Christian Coptic spellbooks, rabbinic sources such as the Talmud, among many other works. At the same time, students will be required to critically engage recent scholarship in the history of science and medicine as a way to help frame their analyses of the ancient materials. The course interrogates how ancient civilizations transmitted and received scientific knowledge, as well as the relationship between what we today tend to call science, medicine, magic, and religion. This course is intended not only for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also for those majoring in science or medicine.

This course is an introduction to the study of Islam and Islamic history. Organised historically, the lecture series will begin with the career of the Prophet Muhammad, before charting the course of the Islamic Conquests, the establishment, zenith and collapse of various Islamic Empires, ending with European colonialism. Along the way, this geopolitical and historical overview will provide a backdrop to our exploration of changes and developments in Islamic thought and practice. In particular, we will focus on the emergence of the Sunni-Shi'i conflict, the rise of Sufism and Salafism, as well as how scholars across time and space thought and wrote about questions of ideal Islamic governance, the religious authority of the caliph, women's role in society and public space, slavery, the ethics of living under non-Muslim rule and the place of non-Muslims in Islamic society.

This course provides a literary and historical introduction to the earliest Christian writings, especially those that eventually came to be included in the New Testament. Through the lens of the Gospel narratives and earliest Christian letters, especially those of Paul, we will explore the rich diversity of the early Christian movement from its Jewish roots in first-century Palestine through its development and spread to Asia Minor and beyond. We will give careful consideration to the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious circumstances that gave rise to the Jesus movement, as well as those that facilitated the emergence of various manifestations of Christian belief and practice. The course will address themes like identity and ethnicity, conversion and debate, race and slavery, gender and sexuality, and the connections between politics and religion.

What must (or could) God be like, and what reasons do we have for thinking that a being of that sort actually exists? What difference would (or could) the existence of God make to our lives? Religion & Reason examines the idea, shared by several major world religions, that God must be an absolutely perfect being. What attributes must a perfect being have: must it have a mind, be a person, care for human beings? Is the concept of a perfect being coherent? Is the existence of a perfect being compatible with the presence of evil in the world, the existence of human freedom, the nature of the world as modern science understands it? Does what is morally right and wrong depend in any important way on the nature or will of a perfect being? Is a perfect being among the things that actually inhabit our universe? The course approaches these questions with the tools and methods of philosophical reason and through readings drawn from both classic texts and contemporary philosophical discussion.

This course is an introduction to Jewish identities, values, and practices from the ancient to modern era. Organized thematically, it examines Judaism as a religious phenomenon, with a particular emphasis on its cultural and textual diversity across three millennia. Themes covered include creation, Sabbath, prayer, Jerusalem, pious customs, magic, reincarnation, revelation, among others. Throughout the semester students perform close readings of a wide selection of Jewish texts from the Bible, Talmud, kabbalah (mysticism), philosophy, liturgy, and modern Jewish thought. In what ways are these various traditions of Judaism interrelated and/or in tension with one another? In the face of the Jewish history's tremendous diversity, what is it that has unified Judaism and the Jewish people over the centuries? By exploring these types of questions, this course examines the appropriateness of defining Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a civilization, and/or a culture. Readings include introductory-level textbooks and essays, as well as a range of primary source materials in translation.

Why is it that the age of emancipation which saw most of the world's Jews gain citizenship status and achieve unprecedented levels of socio-economic modernization, also witnessed a catastrophic assault on Jewish life? How do we explain the conjunction between the spread of liberal values and the exponential rise of anti-semitism? Most historians refer to the virulence of racism in accounting for the scale and brutality of anti-Jewish rhetoric which prepared the way for the destruction of European Jewry in the twentieth century. But this explanation fails to account for the fact that progressive democratic discourse which explicitly endorses ethnic diversity and emphatically repudiates racial prejudice remains susceptible to anti-Jewish animus even now. In this class, we will examine the complex relationship between emancipation and anti-semitism from the perspective of those who benefited from the former but had to contend with the reality of the latter - Europe's rising class of Jewish intellectuals. We will discover that their insights into the problem of modern Jew-hatred were both acute and prescient and have much to teach us about the current Jewish predicament.

For thousands of years, people have believed that the world is ending imminently. In this course, we will examine the roots of apocalyptic thinking in the ancient world, especially among Jews and Christians. We will look at biblical apocalyptic texts as well as a wide array of other apocalyptic literatures, such as the books of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Apocalypse of Paul, and many others. These texts contain visions of end times, journeys to heaven and hell, and dramatic images of angels and demons, war and peace, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Our goal is to understand the circumstances that gave rise to apocalypticism and how disaster-thinking may have, paradoxically, provided comfort during crises. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the meaning of apocalypse as revelation, an unveiling, a discovery.

From the poet-kings of medieval Persia to the trading networks of the famed “Silk Road” to the wandering mystics of Herat to the constitutional revolution of Iran to the colonial and post-colonial occupations of contemporary Afghanistan, this course offers a broad cultural and political history of Iranian and Turkic Central Asia. In addition, we will explore the highly complex intellectual, artistic, and architectural trends and “cross-cultural” exchanges that formed the backbone of many disparate Iranian-Turkic cultures.

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is a repository of ancient Israelite religious, political, social, historical, and literary traditions. For the modern reader these ancient traditions are often obscured by a focus on the text as revelation. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the biblical world by reading the Hebrew Bible in translation, on its own terms, as a body of literature that evolved in an ancient Near Eastern context. The Bible itself will be the primary text for the course, but students will also be exposed to the rich and diverse textual traditions of the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Moab, and Ugarit. In addition, this course will explore the impact of early biblical interpretation on shaping the monotheistic traditions inherited in the West. As participants in a secular course on the Bible, students will be challenged to question certain cultural assumptions about the composition and authorship of the Bible, and will be expected to differentiate between a text's content and its presumed meaning.

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

Did ancient Egyptians believe in the existence of souls? Why did they mummify the dead? Was the body of a pharaoh different from that of an ordinary person? This course sets the famous mortuary practices of ancient Egypt alongside treatments of living bodies and their immaterial components. We will read translated excerpts from ancient Egyptian texts—from magical spells recited for ancestors, to poetry on sex and death—while learning about items taken to the grave and monuments set up for posterity. In the process, we will reflect on contemporary representations of the past and evaluate the assumptions behind modern treatments of ancient artifacts and human remains.

Most people think of Christianity as the daughter religion of Judaism. In this course, we will see that what we now know as Judaism and Christianity both claimed ownership of the same textual tradition and emerged together from the same set of historical circumstances, shaped by political crisis, a radical transformation of the social order and the challenge of Graeco-Roman culture. Through close reading of the principal sources of Christian literature, such as Paul's letters to the first communities of gentile believers and the accounts of the life and death of the messiah, known collectively as the gospels, we will explore how and why the followers of Jesus first came to think of themselves as the New Israel and how a polemical engagement with their controversial interpretation of Hebrew prophecy shaped the development of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine.

Before Jewish politics, Jewish identity and Jewish philosophy, there was Jewish law. No other institution is more important to the history of Judaism and to the Jewish way of life. In this lecture course, we will explore the ways in which legal thought and legal discourse shaped Jewish experience and expression between the biblical age and the computer age. We will discover how the cultural meaning of law changed over time, how legal concepts shaped Jewish belief and Jewish behavior, and how the study of Jewish legal sources contributed to the emergence of modern constitutional thought in the Atlantic world.

In the past two centuries, Jewish men and women have adapted remarkably well to the modern condition, embracing the opportunities associated with higher education, city life, industrial capitalism and democratic politics. Jewish artists, writers, scientists and philosophers can be found on every list of luminaries associated with the modern age; it is enough to mention Marx, Freud and Einstein to conjure up the celebrated image of Jewish participation in the modern project. No less remarkable than these names is the resurgence of Jewish tradition, despite the inroads of secularization and the dissolution of communal self-government. This course explores the tensions implicit in the Jewish experience of modernity, marked by intense longing for personal and collective emancipation from religious obligation and social discipline, on the one hand, and by a powerful countervailing impulse to strengthen ethnic loyalties, to invigorate Jewish practice and to keep Jewish values intact. Drawing on various forms of Jewish expression, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, we will address the contradictions implicit in the strange hybrid of Jewish modernity.

This course explores past and contemporary theories of emotions and different kinds of emotions like wonder, grief, anger, and fear, all with an eye toward the study and practice of religion, and its relationship to race, gender, class, and politics. We will also explore how the academic study of religion and different religious tradition impact our understanding of emotions. We will draw from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, affect theory, gender studies, psychology, and neuroscience. We will examine several questions related to emotions and its rise. First and foremost, what is an emotion? How is it different from affect, feeling, or passion? How are emotions investigated across disciplines? Can we study emotion historically? How are certain emotions racialized or gendered? What is a religious experience? How identifying as religious or otherwise impact one's understanding and experience of emotions? How do emotions lend force to ideas and ideologies, to causes such as the recent surge of White (Christian) nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and other countries? Finally, what do emotions (and affect theory) bring to the study of religion?

A selective survey of Western philosophical thought from the fourth to the 14th century. Topics include the problem of universals, the theory of knowledge and truth, the nature of free choice and practical reasoning, and philosophical theology. Readings (in translation) include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Some attention will be given to the development of ideas across the period and the influence of non-Western traditions on the West.

A knowledge of the Bible's images, stories and themes is crucial to understanding not only the art and literature of many cultures, but also ancient and contemporary world politics. It is the world's most widely read book and a sacred text of three great religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This course will offer students an introduction to the Bible's major historical, anthropological and literary contexts. Students will learn about the Bible's literary divisions and its main stories and characters as well as its ideas about faith, salvation, history and the end of time. We will use the New Oxford Annotated Bible for all course work.

How do Buddhists live out their philosophies and ethics? What are the spaces of ritual, devotion, meditation, education, and politics? How do Buddhist practices and affiliations satisfy aesthetic and emotional needs and build social networks? Working with textual and visual materials, including video clips and longer films, this course explores the unfolding of Buddhist life in 20th- and 21st-century South and Southeast Asia, in locations such as Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The first semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones and artists like Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

This course explores the intentional removal of oneself from society as expressed in East Asian Buddhist literature, through the acts of hermits and pilgrims. We read the diaries, essays, autobiographies, and poetry of recluse monks and nuns from China, Korea and Japan, and the musings of pilgrims through the ages in these countries, with special attention to Japan. Last, we examine how the actions of many of these writers influenced the American counter-culture movement in the 1960’s and into the present. We inquire what light these writings can shed on “the great resignation” of recent years, and “quiet quitting” as a response to late capitalism, ecosystem collapse and climate change and social upheaval in our current times. Many of the figures we read were directly critiquing social excess and materialism, and these writings offer surprising assessments of our current age.

This course will explore the origins and early developments of a movement in Indian Buddhism known as the Great Vehicle. We will intensively examine a small slice of this movement’s voluminous literature so as to better understand its call for a new spiritual orientation within Buddhism. Topics of discussion will include the career of the bodhisattva, the lay/monk distinction, attitudes of Mahayanists toward women and other Buddhists, and the development of Buddhist utopias and transcendent buddhas.

This course will survey the rich and sophisticated tradition of Indian philosophical thought from its beginnings in the speculations of Upanishads, surveying debates between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and materialistic philosophers about the existence and nature of God and of the human soul, the nature of knowledge, and the theory of language.

This course approaches the study of religion, symbols, and myth from an anthropological perspective. The centrality and universality of religion and myth-making in social and symbolic life has been fundamental in the development of cultural theory. Our aim is to understand with this is so. We begin by examining the classic theories of religion in the works of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Mauss, and Freud, among others, followed by an exploration of how these theories have been influential in anthropological studies of symbolism, cosmology, ritual, selfhood, myth, sorcery, witchcraft, and pilgrimage. We conclude by examining the apparent persistence, revival and transformation of religious and magical beliefs and practices within modern, modernizing, and postcolonial states. We ask whether an increasing politicization and globalization of religious ideology through technological mediation poses significant challenges to the anthropological analysis of religion. In so doing, we also try to understand better the human experience of and identification with the spiritual, mythical, and religious in the contemporary moment. This, in turn, leads us to investigate the inherent volatility of such identifications and experiences within the larger national and global framework of cultural politics.

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The second semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Maureen Mahon, Marla Frederick, Lynee Denise, and Deesha Philyaw and artists like the Clark Sisters, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, and Beyonce. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.

This course is an introduction to Jewish philosophy - from Biblical texts to 20th century work. Our inquiries will span metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. We will reflect on questions such as the relation between philosophy or reason on the one hand, and religion and ethics on the other, on the possibility of knowledge of God, the ethics of human relations, the nature of suffering, and finally the nature of a tolerant and just society. We will read works by Maimonides, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx, Buber, Rosenzweig, Cohen, Arendt, Levinas, and Butler, among others.

This course is an introduction to the religions of Iran from antiquity to the present. For over three millennia, Iran has been a hotbed and intercultural crossroads of religious activity as a result of its incredible ethnic and religious diversity, its many centuries of imperial rule, and its important geographical location between east and west. In this class, students survey the major religions of Iran, with an emphasis on those that originated there, including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mandaeism, Yezidism, and Bahaism. We will pay particularly close attention to the history of Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest religions, whose adherents today, known as Parsis, reside mostly in India and Iran, and around the world. In addition to these native religions, students will also explore the impact that Iranian politics and culture have had on the presence of foreign religions in Iran, including on Judaism, Christianity, and Shi'ite Islam. Through a combination of lectures, secondary readings, and especially the close reading of primary sources in translation, students will not only gain a broad understanding of these religions, but also of Iranian history.

In the age of smartphones and social media, it's a cliche to say that the competing claims made on our attention only seem to be multiplying. But a cliche can be true. This course is an opportunity to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing largely from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical sources. We'll be trying to slow down our normal critical processes, to suspend the appropriative, pragmatic, and goal-oriented nature of much of the modern university. Through various exercises, from memorizing poems to immersing ourselves in our surroundings to reading about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, we'll try to make ourselves more attentively available to that world.

The Purpose of this course is to trace the development of Monotheism from its origins in Israelite/Canaanite polytheism. We will examine worship of the God, Yahweh and other deities in ancient Israel, and will trace the long and complicated process by which Yahweh became the sole deity to be formally accepted within Judaism. Using biblical evidence as well as inscriptional and archaeological evidence from Israel and elsewhere in the ancient Near East, we will address the question of why the Israelites eventually rejected deities such as Baal, Asherah, El and others, and how imagery associated with these deities informs biblical descriptions of Yahweh. We will explore the ways in which a small group of Jerusalem elites helped shape the monotheistic tradition that has been inherited in the West, and will consider the political, social and theological implications of this transformation.

The purpose of the course is to place the Bible within the context of a larger ancient world that can be explored by systematic excavation of physical remains. Students will become familiar with archaeological excavations and finds from ancient Syria-Palestine from 10,000 bce to 586 bce. We will explore this archaeological evidence on its own terms, taking into consideration factors such as archaeological method and the interpretive frameworks in which the excavators themselves work, as well as the implications of this body of evidence for understanding the complexity and diversity of biblical Israel.

This course focuses on how Biblical texts represent women in ancient Israel, and how the Bible's representations constitute both a fabrication and a manifestation of social life on the ground. We will use biblical, archaeological, and ancient Near Eastern textual evidence to consider the complicated relationship between ancient society and the textual and material records from which we reconstruct it. In addition, this course will examine how women's roles in the Hebrew Bible have been understood and integrated in later Jewish and Christian thought, and how these discourses shape contemporary American attitudes towards women, sexuality, and gender.

What happens after death? If there is an Afterlife, how is it connected to earthly life? What would the Afterlife actually look like? What role does God or Satan play in the Afterlife? Since the earliest Qur'anic Revelations, Muslims have questioned, imagined and written about the Afterlife. In this course, we will read widely from across the Islamic religious and literary traditions, reading primary texts in translation. We will begin with a survey of the imagination of the Afterlife in scriptural, religious and literary texts, before examining the role and importance of the Afterlife in Islamic legal thinking and morality. Thereafter, we will focus on theological and ethical problems that arise from the imagination of the Afterlife, focusing in particular on the gendered experience of the Afterlife, as well as the question of whether the individual has free will and moral agency or whether eschatological fate is predetermined.

What is religion, and how can we use material culture to investigate ancient beliefs and rituals? This course (1) explores major themes and problems in the archaeology of ancient Greek religion, and (2) compares and critiques selected theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeology of cult more generally. Students will examine ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation).

Practice makes perfect, the old saying goes, but the nature of that connection remains opaque. This course, conducted in English and intended as a sequel to FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention, gives students the opportunity to engage with everyday material and spiritual practices, and to reflect upon the kids of things these practices make. What is the place of routine and repetition in our lives? How can we open a conversation about our habits? We'll look for models to the long history of writing on the subject, largely but not exclusively by Christian thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Benedict, Aelred, Francis, Ignatius), even as we develop new ways of accounting for, and developing, the practices that make our lives meaningful. Artists, athletes, and introverts especially welcome.

The figure of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh looms large in the modern imagination, whether as awesome demigod or awful despot. But how did these fabled kings portray themselves, and how were they seen by their subjects? To probe the ideology of Egyptian kingship and examine how it was celebrated and questioned, we will read a selection of ancient Egyptian texts in translation: royal dream visions and birth legends; records of tomb robberies and an assassination conspiracy; and tales of cantankerous monarchs and squabbling gods. Skepticism, humor, and historical memory abound in these writings, which will introduce nonspecialists to one of the world’s earliest literary traditions.

The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.

This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?

Do modern times (which are experienced and conceptualized in varied ways) pose distinctive problems and opportunities for Buddhists? How are Buddhist teachings drawn into forms of social and political critique, activist and advocacy projects, and theorizing about human communities and social processes? In the 20th and 21st centuries, how do Buddhist teachings and practices inform practical and conceptual approaches to human flourishing? Drawing on thinkers from several parts of Asia and the Americas, this seminar highlights how persons work creatively with Buddhist teachings. We shall explore how Buddhist teachings are interpreted to address painful circumstances, as well as how such hermeneutics may offer new (and sometimes liberatory) ways of seeing selves, others, and communities. Writers and artists considered in this seminar interpret Buddhist teachings and practices in relation to capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, environmental ethics, and nationalism.

This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the “six schools” of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, Dôgen, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the “way of the warrior” and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the “Dôgen boom” in American literary theory.

Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches “politics” broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice. (RL)

Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.

Seminar covering a topic in Biblical Hebrew prose.

Global conflicts, raising children, electing presidents, praying for a loved one: from the mundane to the extraordinary, religion plays a significant role in social life, regardless of whether or not one considers oneself religious. In this course we will investigate religion and its impacts in society from a sociological perspective. Questions we will ask include: How does religion fit into society? What are the contours of contemporary religion in the United States and around the world? How do religious identities interact with other aspects of social life, including gender, race and politics? In what ways have religions and religious life changed over time? As social scientists, how can we best study religion? The course will use examples from a variety of religious and secular traditions to help us understand religion's sociological significance in the contemporary world.

How has the remembrance of the past shaped the evolution of Jewish religion, identity, and culture from Biblical times to the present? How have the creation, dissemination, and preservation of Jewish memory changed over time? How is Jewish history used in political discourse in contemporary society in the U.S. and around the Globe? How can the historical tools be utilized to generate a sophisticated and discerning public engagement with the complexities of the Jewish past? In this course, students will explore these questions through seminar discussions, attending, evaluating, and critiquing exhibits and cultural events and watching films that put Jewish history on display, and by deploying their own research, writing, and creative skills to produce public facing final projects or a traditional research paper.

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

An introduction to belief systems in ancient Mexico and Central America, emphasizing the blending of religion, astrology, myth, history, and prophecy. Interpreting text and image in pre-Columbian books and inscriptions is a major focus.

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Seminar topics rotate each semester. Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns.

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Topics will address South Asian culture and literature and change in relation to curricular needs within the Department of Asian Studies.

This seminar will explore the development of and variety in the academic discipline of Religious Studies. We will consider the emergence of secular approaches to the study of religion arising out of the European Enlightenment, and more particularly, the methods in the academic study of religion based upon different theoretical approaches. We will be particularly concerned to reflect upon the category of religious experience in modern discourses from historical, social, hermeneutical, neurobiological points of view.

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Idea(l)s of modernity across the Global South have been largely rooted in Euro-American projections of civilization, and civilizational projects. The colonial worldview in which only Western(ized) experiences could be modern is foundational to the multifarious ways in which scholarship and nation-builders have engaged with progress, whether aspiring to it, rejecting it, or appropriating it. In this seminar we explore how imperial authorities, nationalists, and scholars/intellectuals have interfaced with idea(l)s of progress and modernity in Asia, reading works (one book a week) grounded in multiple disciplines and cultural settings. Core themes will include: health and hygiene, consumption, technology, gender, piety and devotion, imperialism and race, and nationalism. (SC)

This course offers a broad survey of contemporary Shi'i beliefs, practices, and politics with a focus on Twelver or Imami Shi'ism. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual and political histories, theological writings, and more we will investigate the themes which define the politics and cultural practices of contemporary Shi'ism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which Shi'is utilize their theological beliefs to negotiate and respond to the socio-political context of the times in which they live. The course begins by examining the early days of what would later be called Shi'ism. We then examine the key theological concepts which distinguish Shi'ism from Sunnism, including themes of adalat (divine justice), shahadat (martyrdom), the Karbala paradigm, and the role of the imamate and clerical class. The rest of course is devoted to investigating the ways that Shi'ism informs and interacts with the social realm and vice versa, ranging from negotiations of the everyday to responding to moments of great civil and society unrest and to that which is called sectarianism. Travelling from South Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to America, we will ultimately examine how Shi'i beliefs and identity act as a dynamic force for shaping the worlds in which they live today.

Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.

This course will focus on the array of perspectives offered in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on such contemporary social issues as: immigration; abortion rights, surrogate childbirth, gay marriage, gender identity, etc. We will consider the range of voices the Bible preserves on these and other topics, and how biblical texts and biblically based arguments shape and inform American political discourse. Students will be expected to read biblical texts on their own terms in their ancient Israelite and early Christian contexts, as well as to consider how those texts have been received with Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions and absorbed into American political thought. Students will read political theory, Jewish and Christian ethics, recent newspaper and magazine articles and will also consider other forms of media.

How and why do landscapes come to inspire the religious imagination? And why do religious practices, rituals, traditions, and beliefs take place in particular landscapes? This seminar treats these questions by focusing on the desert, both imagined and real, as it has shaped religious ascetic practice, especially the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East. We will read widely from monastic literatures, mostly from late ancient Egypt, to explore both the historical development of monasticism in Christianity and examine why the monastic impulse seems so closely tied to the desert. In addition to reading saints lives and the stories of hermits, we will read early monastic rules, the desert fathers, and we will draw from archaeological sources to examine the varieties of ascetic practices in the deserts of late ancient Egypt, Gaza, Sinai, Palestine, and Syria. Throughout the course we will explore ancient and modern ideas about wilderness and we will explore parallels between ancient Near Eastern literatures and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century parallels in the American frontier and environmental literatures.

What is Gnosticism and why has it come to be so hotly debated among scholars and in our contemporary media? What is the Gospel of Judas and are its ideas heretical? Who wrote the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary and why were these Gospels not included in the New Testament canon? To what extent did Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code draw from ancient Christian gnostic sources? This seminar will explore answers to these questions and many others by focusing on the complex array of literary sources from late antiquity-primarily from a cache of manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945-that have long been associated with a so-called Christian Gnosticism. Church Fathers condemned the movement on a variety of grounds, but in this course we will not simply read the condemnations written by the opponents of gnostic thought; rather, we will focus our attention on reading (in English translation) substantial portions of the gnostic texts written by the adherents themselves. We will give special attention to the ways in which conflicts about Gnosticism connected with conflicts about gender, heresy, power, and authority. To set these texts within a socio-historical context, we will discuss the possible Jewish and hellenistic roots of early Christian Gnosticism and ties to Stoic and other ancient philosophical movements.

This course examines the fixity of Bible's representations of Israel as it relates to the fluidity of Israel's social, political, and religious experience as revealed in archaeology and texts from outside the Bible. We will use the tools of biblical criticism (philological, archaeological, literary historical) and methods drawn from such disciplines as History, Political Science, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism, to examine four biblical narrative traditions: The Joseph story; the exodus from Egypt; the Israelite conquest of Canaan; and the Song of Deborah, a text widely regarded as the oldest in the Hebrew Bible. Each of these played an essential role in the process of fabricating biblical Israel. As works of biblical historiography, each functioned to create a shared sense of a Jewish past in light of the urgencies of the present. Each is also witness to a creative process that unfolded when the past was still malleable, the terms not yet rigid. We will focus on the modes and materials of textual production and on how modern historians engage biblical narrative in fabricating their own narrative histories of ancient Israel. We will also consider how ancient and modern historical writing on ancient Israel has been put into the service of contemporary political discourse on boundaries and borders in Israel-Palestine.

Topics for this course vary.

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory.

For undergraduates who wish to obtain research experience or do extensive reading on a special topic. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course.

For undergraduates who wish to obtain research experience or do extensive reading on a special topic. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course.

RELST 4995 is the first course in the Honors two-part sequence. The Honors Program is open to Religious Studies majors who have done superior work and who wish to devote a substantial part of their senior year to advanced, specialized, independent research and writing of a thesis. Successfully completing an honors thesis will require sustained interest, exceptional ability, diligence, and enthusiasm. While admissions to the Honors Program and completion of a thesis do not guarantee that students will be awarded honors in Religious Studies, most students find the experience as intellectually rewarding as it is rigorous.

RELST 4996 is the second course in the Honors two-part sequence. The Honors Program is open to Religious Studies majors who have done superior work and who wish to devote a substantial part of their senior year to advanced, specialized, independent research and writing of a thesis. Successfully completing an honors thesis will require sustained interest, exceptional ability, diligence, and enthusiasm. While admissions to the Honors Program and completion of a thesis do not guarantee that students will be awarded honors in Religious Studies, most students find the experience as intellectually rewarding as it is rigorous.

Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.

This course explores the Buddhist tradition of Zen through a focus on the major figures in its Japanese context who have contributed to its foundational practices and promulgation and its revitalization after periods of decline. We begin with the introduction of Buddhism into Japan in the 6th century and the issues surrounding the establishment of the “six schools” of Buddhism in the 8th century and the prestige and dominance of the Tendai School on Mt. Hiei. This allows us to see the uniquely Japanese context of religious debates. We then turn to an exploration of the Zen thinkers Eisai, Dôgen, Keizan, and Hakuin and see how these thinkers all introduced ideas to Japanese Zen practice that led the tradition into new directions from its Chinese origins: tea cultivation, work practice, and monastic reform. Last, we study how Zen came to be regarded as the “way of the warrior” and a symbol of Japanese uniqueness and militarism. The course ends with an exploration of Zen expansion in the US in the 20th century and the “Dôgen boom” in American literary theory. (RL)

Do modern times (which are experienced and conceptualized in varied ways) pose distinctive problems and opportunities for Buddhists? How are Buddhist teachings drawn into forms of social and political critique, activist and advocacy projects, and theorizing about human communities and social processes? In the 20th and 21st centuries, how do Buddhist teachings and practices inform practical and conceptual approaches to human flourishing? Drawing on thinkers from several parts of Asia and the Americas, this seminar highlights how persons work creatively with Buddhist teachings. We shall explore how Buddhist teachings are interpreted to address painful circumstances, as well as how such hermeneutics may offer new (and sometimes liberatory) ways of seeing selves, others, and communities. Writers and artists considered in this seminar interpret Buddhist teachings and practices in relation to capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, environmental ethics, and nationalism.

Buddhist ideas, practices, and institutions play many roles in the political life of South and Southeast Asia, in the present day and throughout the long history of these regions. This course approaches “politics” broadly. Thus, the course explores how persons invoke Buddhist concepts and understandings of Buddhist traditions when acting for and against state and sovereign powers, but also how Buddhist ideas and institutions are drawn into other social projects that shape the flow and accumulation of social capital, economic benefit, and authority. Case studies and theoretical works address historical, modern, and contemporary materials. Assignments include the opportunity for students to focus on a contemporary regional location of their choice.(RL)

Graduate seminar covering a topic in medieval philosophy. Spring 2025 Topics include: Augustine; Philosophy in the Islamic World (800-1400).

What types of political outcomes can religion and culture help explain? What political and social factors affect religious identity and institutions? This course is designed to provide graduate students with an overview of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and culture in the social sciences. This course has three objectives. First, students will be able to identify traditional ways in which religion and culture have been theorized and operationalized in political science. Second, students will use empirical evidence to evaluate these theories and measurement strategies and assess potential threats to inference. Finally, students will complete their own research project on the relationship between politics and religion.

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.

Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns.

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The second semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Maureen Mahon, Marla Frederick, Lynee Denise, and Deesha Philyaw and artists like the Clark Sisters, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, and Beyonce. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

This course offers a broad survey of contemporary Shi'i beliefs, practices, and politics with a focus on Twelver or Imami Shi'ism. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual and political histories, theological writings, and more we will investigate the themes which define the politics and cultural practices of contemporary Shi'ism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which Shi'is utilize their theological beliefs to negotiate and respond to the socio-political context of the times in which they live. The course begins by examining the early days of what would later be called Shi'ism. We then examine the key theological concepts which distinguish Shi'ism from Sunnism, including themes of adalat (divine justice), shahadat (martyrdom), the Karbala paradigm, and the role of the imamate and clerical class. The rest of course is devoted to investigating the ways that Shi'ism informs and interacts with the social realm and vice versa, ranging from negotiations of the everyday to responding to moments of great civil and society unrest and to that which is called sectarianism. Travelling from South Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to America, we will ultimately examine how Shi'i beliefs and identity act as a dynamic force for shaping the worlds in which they live today.

How and why do landscapes come to inspire the religious imagination? And why do religious practices, rituals, traditions, and beliefs take place in particular landscapes? This seminar treats these questions by focusing on the desert, both imagined and real, as it has shaped religious ascetic practice, especially the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East. We will read widely from monastic literatures, mostly from late ancient Egypt, to explore both the historical development of monasticism in Christianity and examine why the monastic impulse seems so closely tied to the desert. In addition to reading saints lives and the stories of hermits, we will read early monastic rules, the desert fathers, and we will draw from archaeological sources to examine the varieties of ascetic practices in the deserts of late ancient Egypt, Gaza, Sinai, Palestine, and Syria. Throughout the course we will explore ancient and modern ideas about wilderness and we will explore parallels between ancient Near Eastern literatures and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century parallels in the American frontier and environmental literatures.

The purpose of the course is to place the Bible within the context of a larger ancient world that can be explored by systematic excavation of physical remains. Students will become familiar with archaeological excavations and finds from ancient Syria-Palestine from 10,000 bce to 586 bce. We will explore this archaeological evidence on its own terms, taking into consideration factors such as archaeological method and the interpretive frameworks in which the excavators themselves work, as well as the implications of this body of evidence for understanding the complexity and diversity of biblical Israel.

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

This course examines the fixity of Bible's representations of Israel as it relates to the fluidity of Israel's social, political, and religious experience as revealed in archaeology and texts from outside the Bible. We will use the tools of biblical criticism (philological, archaeological, literary historical) and methods drawn from such disciplines as History, Political Science, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism, to examine four biblical narrative traditions: The Joseph story; the exodus from Egypt; the Israelite conquest of Canaan; and the Song of Deborah, a text widely regarded as the oldest in the Hebrew Bible. Each of these played an essential role in the process of fabricating biblical Israel. As works of biblical historiography, each functioned to create a shared sense of a Jewish past in light of the urgencies of the present. Each is also witness to a creative process that unfolded when the past was still malleable, the terms not yet rigid. We will focus on the modes and materials of textual production and on how modern historians engage biblical narrative in fabricating their own narrative histories of ancient Israel. We will also consider how ancient and modern historical writing on ancient Israel has been put into the service of contemporary political discourse on boundaries and borders in Israel-Palestine.

What does it mean to be “modern”? How is it tied to one’s (person, community, country, government, stakeholders) desires and aspirations for the future? How does it relate to one’s past? In this seminar we explore how idea(l)s of modernity have taken shape, how they were received and articulated, and how they continue to change. We will read scholarship addressing idea(l)s of modernity in relation to health, technology, the environment, politics, gender, the economy, and more. Reading materials will adapt to seminar members’ interests. (SC)

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

This course focuses on how Biblical texts represent women in ancient Israel, and how the Bible's representations constitute both a fabrication and a manifestation of social life on the ground. We will use biblical, archaeological, and ancient Near Eastern textual evidence to consider the complicated relationship between ancient society and the textual and material records from which we reconstruct it. In addition, this course will examine how women's roles in the Hebrew Bible have been understood and integrated in later Jewish and Christian thought, and how these discourses shape contemporary American attitudes towards women, sexuality, and gender.

What happens after death? If there is an Afterlife, how is it connected to earthly life? What would the Afterlife actually look like? What role does God or Satan play in the Afterlife? Since the earliest Qur'anic Revelations, Muslims have questioned, imagined and written about the Afterlife. In this course, we will read widely from across the Islamic religious and literary traditions, reading primary texts in translation. We will begin with a survey of the imagination of the Afterlife in scriptural, religious and literary texts, before examining the role and importance of the Afterlife in Islamic legal thinking and morality. Thereafter, we will focus on theological and ethical problems that arise from the imagination of the Afterlife, focusing in particular on the gendered experience of the Afterlife, as well as the question of whether the individual has free will and moral agency or whether eschatological fate is predetermined.

The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.

This seminar is an intensive study of the political thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Approaching texts in contexts, we will seek to recover King the political thinker from his mythologization in American political culture by carefully reading his books, speeches, sermons, interviews, notes, and correspondence as illocutionary interventions into the major crises and ideological disputes of twentieth century American politics. Topics we will explore include the politics of dignity, leadership and mass politics, rhetoric and democratic persuasion, law and direct action, nonviolence, loss and mourning, race and political economy, global justice, and the practices of prophetic critique. Along the way, we will study King in dialogue with both his contemporaries as well as more recent interventions in the study of civil disobedience, racial capitalism, and Afro-modern political thought.

This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?

Explores the ways Mesoamericans understood the world and their place in it, and the ways they constructed history as these are reflected in the few books that have survived from the period before the European invasion. Examines the structure of writing and systems of notation, especially calendars, and considers their potential for illuminating Mesoamerican world views and approaches to history. Primary focus is detailed analysis of five precolumbian books: Codex Borgia, a central Mexican manual of divinatory ritual; Codex Boturini, a history of migration in central Mexico; Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec dynastic history; and two Maya books of astrology and divination, Codex Dresden and Codex Madrid.

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

What is religion, and how can we use material culture to investigate ancient beliefs and rituals? This course (1) explores major themes and problems in the archaeology of ancient Greek religion, and (2) compares and critiques selected theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeology of cult more generally. Students will consider and analyze ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation).