Undergraduate Course Descriptions

RELI UN2205 Buddhism: Indo-Tibetan. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Historical introduction to Buddhist thought, scriptures, practices, and institutions. Attention given to Theravada, Mahayana, and Tantric Buddhism in India, as well as selected non-Indian forms.

RELI UN2304 Christianity. 3 points.
Survey of Christianity from its beginnings through the Reformation. Based on lectures and discussions of readings in primary source translations, this course will cover prominent developments in the history of Christianity. The structure will allow students to rethink commonly held notions about the evolution of modern Christianity with the texture of historical influence.

RELI UN2305 Islam. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
An introduction to the Islamic religion in its premodern and modern manifestations.  The first half of the course concentrates on “classical” Islam, beginning with the life of the Prophet, and extending to ritual, jurisprudence, theology, and mysticism.  The second half examines how Muslims have articulated Islam in light of colonization and the rise of a secular modernity.  The course ends with a discussion of American and European Muslim attempts at carving out distinct spheres of identity in the larger global Muslim community.  

RELI UN2306 Intro to Judaism. 3 points.
A historical overview of Jewish belief and practice as these have crystallized and changed over the centuries. Special attention to ritual and worship, the forms of religious literature, central concepts, religious leadership and institutions, Israel among the nations.

RELI UN2307 Chinese Religious Traditions. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Historical survey highlighting major developments in Chinese religion: includes selections from the "Warring States" classics, developments in popular Daoism, and an overview of the golden age of Chinese Buddhism. Touches on "Neo-Confucianism," popular literature of the late imperial period, and the impact of Western ideas.

RELI UN2308 Buddhism: East Asian. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Lecture and discussion. An introductory survey that studies East Asian Buddhism as an integral , living religious tradition. Emphasis on the reading of original treatises and historiographies in translation, while historical events are discussed in terms of their relevance to contemporary problems confronted by Buddhism.  There is a mandatory weekly discussion session.

RELI UN2309 Hinduism. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Considers efforts since 1900 to synthesize a coherent understanding of what "Hinduism" entails, sometimes under the heading of sanatana dharma. Using a rubric provided by the Bhagavad Gita, explores philosophical/theological (jnana), ritual (karma), and devotional (bhakti) aspects of Hindu life and thought.

RELI UN2315 Japanese Religious Traditions. 3 points.
Study of the development of the Japanese religious tradition in the premodern period. Attention given to the thought and practices of Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism; the interaction among these religions in Japanese history; the first encounter with Christianity.

RELI UN2335 Religion in Black America: An Introduction. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Undergraduate lecture course introducing students to the study of African American religion. While there are no required prerequisites for the course, prior coursework in religious studies or African American history is helpful. This course progresses as a historical survey and is intended to introduce students to important themes in African American (thus American) religious history (i.e. migration, urbanization, nationalism) through a rich engagement with the religious practices and traditions of black communities. Primary attention is given to Afro-Protestantism in North America; however, throughout the course attention is directed to religious diversity and varying religious traditions/practices in different diasporic locales. While this is a lecture course, students are expected to arrive each week having completed assigned readings and prepared to make informed contributions to class discussions (as class size allows). By the end of the semester students will be expected to possess a working knowledge of major themes/figures/traditions in African American religious life, as well as key questions that have shaped the study thereof.

RELI UN2415 Religions of Harlem. 3 points.
Through a range of field exercises and classroom guests, this course will introduce students to the rich religious history of Harlem, while also challenging them to document and analyze the diversity of Harlem's contemporary religious scene.

RELI UN2670 Magic and Modernity. 3 points.
This course introduces students to the cultural history of magic: as an idea, as a practice, and as a tool with which to wield power and induce wonder. Magic, as we will explore, is a modern concept, the contours of which have been shaped by its relations with religion and science, always against larger backdrops—of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, (post) colonialism, and (post) secularism. Readings are drawn from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, drama, literature, history, history of science, and political theory.

RELI UN3199 Theory. 3 points.
An exploration of alternative theoretical approaches to the study of religion as well as other areas of humanistic inquiry.  The methods considered include: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy, and deconstruction.  (Previous title: Juniors Colloquium)

RELI UN3202 Religion in America I. 3 points.
This course offers a survey of American religions from the 1500s through the mid-1800s. We examine the politics of conversion in different kinds of colonialisms; the different strands of Christianity in early America and their cultural contexts; the emergence of evangelical Protestantism; the effects of religious disestablishment in the early republic; and the relationship between religion and social movements.

RELI UN3203 Religion in America II. 3 points.
Survey of American religion from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on the ways religion has shaped American history, culture, and identity.

RELI UN3204 Religion, Sexuality, and Truth. 3 points.
The extent of Michel Foucault engagement with Christianity has only recently came to light with the publication of his lectures from the early 1980s. These lectures constitute, in many ways, the culmination of Foucault’s work on power, sexuality, subjectivity and the discursive operations whereby knowledge is produced.  In this course, we will appreciate the depth and originality of Foucault’s critical account of Christianity and examine the major role it occupied in his thought on subjects such as sexuality, governmentality, truth telling, confession, and judicial forms. We will understand Foucault’s work along with the crucial role he ascribed to Christianity in forming the history of the present.

RELI UN3206 Religion in the Archive. 4 points.
In Religion in the Archive, students will conduct archival research and create digital humanities projects that “remix” and decolonize a missionary archive: the Papers of Matilda Calder Thurston (1875-1958), an American missionary who helped establish the first four-year women’s college in China, Ginling College in Nanjing. Thurston’s papers belong to the Missionary Research Library housed at Burke Library. The class will meet twice a week for lectures addressing the history of American and Chinese religions and focused on theoretical questions of imperialism, gender, conversion, and modernization. Students will also engage with debates about the archive/archiving, the digital humanities, and what it means to present scholarly research to a public audience. During the Friday recitation, students will conduct archival research and scan archival documents, to embed metadata, to work with a database program, and to design a website and/or produce a podcast.

RELI UN3210 Millennium: Apocalypse and Utopia. 3 points.
Study of apocalyptic thinking and practice in the western religious tradition, with a focus on American apocalyptic religious movements and their relation to contemporary cultural productions, as well as notions of history and politics.

RELI UN3225 Religion and Capitalism: Faith and the American Market. 3 points.
Is the market a religious system? Can we consider "capitalism" to be a key arena in which the relationship between the religious and the secular is both negotiated and performed? In this course, students will explore the complicated relationship between faith and the market, the religious and the secular, and the evolution of vice and virtue as they relate to economic thriving in the United States. While no hard and fast rules for thinking about the relationship between right conduct and material interests cut across all religious and philosophical traditions, human agents invest real faith into currency, into markets, and into the reigning economic order to bring about increased opportunities, wealth, and freedom to people across the globe. Throughout this semester, we will chart both the long shadows and the future trajectories of these beliefs from our American perspective.

In this course, students will develop a strong foundational knowledge of the key theorists who have defined these relationships for generations before applying a critical lens to a number of global themes (the construction of race, the power of class, and the policing of gender) in an American context. To this end, our syllabus will be split into three units, each anchored by a particular theorist central to the academic study of religion (Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault) and followed by a number of case study texts that will bring their constructs and lenses into more lively debate and discussion.

RELI UN3260 Sociology of Religion. 3 points.
Prerequisites: prior coursework in religion or sociology is highly encouraged.
This course introduces classical and contemporary theoretical and empirical approaches to the sociological study of religion, including secularization and secularity, religious identity formation, and sociological approaches to religious practice and meaning. Special focus will be on contemporary American topics, including religion and transnationalism, the role of religious actors and discourses in American politics, law and economics, and everyday religious practice.

RELI UN3303 Judaism and Translation in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
The course explores both the practice of translation (the rendering of texts from one language to another) and the idea of translation (as a medium of cultural transmission) in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.

RELI UN3315 Readings in Kabbalah. 3 points.
This course will serve to provide a wide but detailed exploration of Jewish Mysticism, raising questions about its connection to other Jewish traditions, the kind of symbolism and hermeneutics at stake, and the conception of God, man and world we are dealing with, amongst other major ideas.

RELI UN3340 Early Christianity. 3 points.
Examines the competing currents within early Christianity, with emphasis placed on the literary and social expressions of Christian belief and identity. Topics to be covered include persecution and martyrdom, debates over authority and religious experience, orthodoxy and heresy, and asceticism and monasticism, among others.

RELI UN3357 I and We in the Christian East: The Making of Identity. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
This course will provide a survey of Christian history in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East from roughly the fourth to the eleventh centuries with particular attention to religion and identity. How would the various Christians in this era answer the questions: “Who am I?” “Who are we?” How did their understanding of the divine influence their understanding of themselves and how was this identity enacted through writing and ritual? Though our focus will be on this period, we will also consider the framing of the history of “Eastern” Christianity into the modern period. No prerequisites.

RELI UN3406 Space, Narrative, and Religion in India. 3 points.
This course is fundamentally about sacred places and the stories that people tell about and within them. We will explore the role that narratives – mythological, historical, personal, and academic – have played in the creation, maintenance and conceptualization of sacred spaces in South Asia. Each class in the first section of the course is devoted to a particular site or category of sites, and examines the roles that religious texts and iconography play in the traditions with which the sites are associated. In the second section of the course, we will consider ethnographic perspectives on religious journeys. Finally, in the third section, we will focus on the idealization of region or nation as a sacred space, and examines the manner in which narratives are invoked to formulate identities and to negotiate conflicts and differentials of power.

As we navigate these topics, we will explore answers to the following questions: How are spaces made “sacred”? What are the multiple types of narratives that come to be associated with sacred spaces, and what roles do they play in their production? How are such narratives transmitted, and for whom? How do religious practitioners utilize these spaces and their narratives in order to negotiate various facets of daily life, and in order to situate themselves within the religious landscape of South Asia?

RELI UN3407 Muslims in Diaspora. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Consideration of controversies surrounding mosque-building, headscarves, honor killing, and other publicized issues that expose tensions surrounding citizenship and belonging for Muslims in North America and Europe. Exploration of film and other media representations of Muslims in the West. There will be additional meeting times for film screenings

RELI UN3425 Judaism and Courtly Literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and Italy. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
The course explores secular Jewish literature composed in the medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean in the context of its Arabic and Romance-language counterparts. After examining the literary, linguistic and philosophical backdrop of Jews in the Islamic Empire, we will focus on poetry and prose of al-Andalus, Christian Spain and Italy. We will look at examples of how Jews depicted themselves and how Christian and converso thinkers portrayed Jews. In addition, we will consider two crossover writers, one Jew in Spain and one in Italy, whose compositions in Castilian and Italian were accepted and integrated into Christian society. Historical materials will accompany textual examples, which span the eleventh through sixteenth centuries.  

RELI UN3430 Indigenous Religious Histories. 4 points.
Nomads, natives, peasants, hill people, aboriginals, hunter-gatherers, First Nations—these are just a handful of the terms in use to define indigenous peoples globally. The names these groups use to describe themselves, as well as the varying religious practices, attitudes, and beliefs among these populations are far more numerous and complex. For much of recorded history however, colonial centers of power have defined indigenous peoples racially and often in terms of lacking religion; as pagan, barbarian, non-modern, and without history or civilization.

Despite this conundrum of identity and classification, indigenous religious traditions often have well-documented and observable pasts. This course considers the challenges associated with studying indigenous religious history, as well as the changing social, political, and legal dimensions of religious practice among native groups over time and in relationship to the state. Organized thematically and geographically, we will engage with classic works of ethnohistory, environmental history, indigenous studies, the history of anthropology, and religious studies as well as primary sources that include legal documentation, military records, personal testimony, and oral narrative.

RELI UN3511 Tantra in South Asia, East Asia & the West. 3 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
An introduction to the history, literature, and ideology of Tantra and Tantric texts, deities, rituals, and traditions, proceeding chronologically from the early centuries C.E. to current forms of Tantric practice, and primarily covering India, China, and Japan.  Attention will also be given to contemporary iterations of Tantra in the West.  Questions of definition, transmission, patronage, gender, and appropriation link the various sections of the course.  Readings include primary texts, secondary sources, local case studies, and art historical material.

RELI UN3517: Queer Theory, Religion, and Their Discontents. 3 points.
For the most part queer studies and religious studies have met each other with great suspicion and little interest in the conceptual resources of the respectively other field. Our guiding questions will be: What does religion have to do with queerness? What does queerness have to do with religion? Queer theory and activists, unless they already identify as religious, often have little or little good to say about religion. Conversely, many religious traditions intensively regulate gender, sex, sexuality, and especially queerness. Beyond the mutual disinterest, anxieties, and animosities, this course will explore how religious studies can enrich queer theory and how queer theory can reshape our thinking about religious studies.

Our course will examine how our questions about religion shift once we start paying attention to queerness, gender, sexuality, pleasure, pain, and desire. Equally, we will examine how queer discourses mobilize religious and theological images and ideas, especially where these images and ideas are no longer clearly recognizable as having religious origins. Together we will wonder about a variety of core issues in queer studies and religion, such as embodiment, sexuality, gender-variability, coloniality, race appearing as religious identity and religious identity as gendered, as well as the role of catastrophe, utopia, and redemption in our experience of the world.

Rather than trying to settle on definitive answers, this course will cultivate a process of open-ended collective inquiry in which students will be encouraged to think autonomously and challenge facile solutions. Students should come away from the course with an expanded sense of how we grapple with issues related to gender, sexuality, desire, and embodiment in our everyday lives and how religion and religious formations are entangled with these issues well beyond religious communities. Moreover, students should experience this course as enlarging the set of critical tools at their hands for creative and rigorous thinking.

RELI UN3518 Buddhism in East Asian Medical Cultures. 3 points.
This seminar introduces students to the intersections between Buddhism and medicine in East Asia in the premodern period. The course begins with Buddhist ideas and practices concerning health and disease in ancient India over two millennia ago, and follows the eastward transmission of these concerns and activities into China, Korea, and Japan until roughly the 16^th century. In addition to secondary studies representing the latest research in this burgeoning field, this course gives special attention to critical readings of shorter selections of primary sources translated into English, including sutras, monastic regulations, recipe collections, liturgical documents, and longevity manuals. Reading these selections through multiple methodological frameworks—social history, history of the body, and material culture, students will gain an appreciation of the rich diversity that characterized Buddhist healthcare practices before the introduction of Western medicine. A fundamental premise of this course is that different currents of Buddhism constituted medical cultures in their own right, a perspective that will help us to complicate conventional notions of both “religion” and “medicine.” We will aim to achieve a nuanced understanding of the ways that healing concerns shaped how monks and nuns related to actors of other therapeutic communities, and therefore emphasis is placed on the social and cultural contexts in which Buddhist medical practices were embedded. Students will thereby acquire a basic grounding in East Asian Buddhism to complement our particular concern with the dynamics of medical history. Previous coursework in Buddhism or East Asian religion is thus recommended but not required.

RELI UN3521 Muslim Masculinities. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
This interdisciplinary course explores a variety of Muslim modes of masculinity as they have developed over time and as they have varied across different regions of the Islamic World. Students examine and problematize the social and cultural construction of masculinity in various parts of the Islamic world, including in the Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Muslim diasporas of Europe and the Americas. In trying to understand the complex ways in which men and manhood are made in Islamic societies we will center our attention on the perceptions of bodily and social differences in Muslims’ larger articulations of gender and sexuality. A particular focus will be on the relationship between masculinity and violence against women and non-Muslims.

RELI UN3575 Evangelicalism: Sex, Media, and Religion in America. 3 points.
Crossing denominations and encompassing a range of theological commitments, evangelical Christianity can be described as a theological disposition, a mode of hermeneutical practice, a theological-aesthetic sensibility, a mass spiritual movement, a practice of cultivating sacred affect, an errand to the world, and a genre of revivalism. This multidisciplinary seminar will emphasize the role of popular media in constituting an evangelical public, the gendered nature of evangelical subjectivity, the role of sex and sexuality in evangelical self-definition, and the ways that evangelical theological categories have shaped what we think of as "the secular" in the United States.

RELI UN3606 Religion and Media in America. 3 points.
This course examines the role of media in shaping religious identities, beliefs, practices, and institutions using case studies from American history and contemporary American culture. For the purpose of this course, the term media will be interpreted broadly to mean any technique or technology designed to communicate information such as verbal discourses, written texts, visual representations, ritual gestures, sacred objects, and telecommunication technologies. In foregrounding media, we will examine how religious beliefs and practices have been remembered, disseminated, translated, and contested in the American context. Just as important, we will examine how religious groups have negotiated their American identity through media practices and their narrative content.

As we will see, acts of transmission such as writing, mapping, broadcasting, and televising play essential parts in drawing and erasing communal boundaries from both within and without. With this in mind, we will not be attempting to identify what religion is, so much as the ways in which historical actors understood themselves to be religious. We will find that what counts as religion varies, sometimes dramatically, across times, spaces, and cultures; “America” is similarly unstable and contested. Our job, then, will be to understand the role of media and mediation in constituting their contours.

RELI UN3612 The Religious History of Hip Hop. 3 points.
This is an undergraduate lecture course introducing students to the study of religion through an engagement with the history of hip hop music. More specifically, this course is organized chronologically to narrate a history of religion in the United States (from 1970 to the present day) by mapping the ways that a variety of religious ideas and practices have animated rap music’s evolution and expansion during this time period. While there are no required prerequisites for the course, prior coursework in religious studies, African American studies, and/or popular music is helpful.

RELI UN3630 Religion and Black Popular Cultures. 3 points.
As an exploration of the relationship between religion, race, and popular culture, the course will begin with theoretical readings that expose students to a variety of definitions of and approaches to each of these categories. After tackling these theoretical concerns, the remainder of the course will entail a cross genre and thematic engagement with the terrain of black popular culture(s) in which students will be challenged to apply new theoretical resources in order to interpret a wide range of "religious" phenomena.

RELI UN3901 Guided Reading and Research. 1-4 points.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

RELI UN3902 Guided Reading and Research. 1-3 points.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

RELI GU4105 Religion Lab. 4 points.
Discussion Section Required
In their research, scholars of religion employ a variety of methods to analyze "texts" ranging from historical documents to objects of visual culture. This course acquaints students with both the methods and the materials utilized in the field of religious studies. Through guided exercises, they acquire research skills for utilizing sources and become familiarized with dominant modes of scholarly discourse. The class is organized around a series of research "scavenger hunts" that are due at the start of each week's class and assigned during the discussion section (to be scheduled on the first day of class). Additional class meeting on Thursdays.

RELI GU4170 History of Christianity: Topics in Pre-Modern Papal History. 4 points.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
An examination of a series of episodes that are of special consequence for papal history in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Readings in both primary and secondary sources in English translation.

RELI GU4202 Time, Modernity, Death. 4 points.
The notion of modernity in the West implies a distinctive interpretation of temporality and subjectivity, which grows out of theological and philosophical traditions.  Lutheran Protestantism, as developed by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, created the conditions for both the construction and the deconstruction of modernism and its extension in postmodernism.  The course will examine these two trajectories by considering their contrasting interpretations of the relationship of human selfhood to time and death.  On the one hand, the death of God leads to a radical immanence in which human subjectivity either is absolutized as the will to power or mastery that dominates or negates all difference and otherness, or is repressed by universal structures and infrastructures for which individual subjects are unknowing and unwitting vehicles.  On the other hand, human subjectivity appears to be finite because its irreducible singularity is always given by another that can be neither known nor controlled.  The course will conclude by considering the alternative psychological, political, and ethical implications of these two contrasting positions.

RELI GU 4206. 4 points.
In Refashioning Futures, David Scott asks if the accurate reconstruction of the past of an identity is the crucial point of a theoretical intervention. He ponders, instead, if such a historicist analysis should be followed by an emphatic “But so what?” The importance of asking “so what” is that it allows us to begin to refuse, Scott writes, “history its subjectivity, its constancy, its eternity” and “interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sovereign claim to determinacy” (105).  The question “so what?” requires, in other words, we answer for history’s prominence and providence as well as consider other possible formations of community, temporality, and inheritance not anchored by the weight of ‘history’.

This seminar examines the overwhelming hold of “history” in the present by considering Scott’s poignant “But so what?” We will begin by examining the problem-space of ‘history’ itself and how ‘history’ emerged as the foundation to understanding and ordering religious life globally.

We will explore the wide-ranging effects of Enlightenment rationality and Orientalist knowledge production as well as consider the imbrication of history with theology and the secular. This section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts and problematics, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then examine how scholars have troubled this historical conscription, reorienting our understandings of temporality, tradition, and the past. The last half of the course, therefore, considers a range of different methods and theories that undo the importance of ‘history’ while remaining attuned to questions of the past, time, and inheritance.

RELI GU4212 Modern Buddhism. 4 points.
What most Americans and Europeans call ‘Buddhism’ today is in fact a hybrid tradition dating back to the 19th century. It owes as much to European philosophy and esoteric thought as to Asian traditions themselves and appeared in the context of decolonization. This course will survey the history of this recent tradition, identifying cultural and political trends that contributed to its creation in various geographical areas. Readings include several primary texts by important proponents of Modern Buddhism. The texts should also be read in comparison with the appropriate scholarly works on the Asian traditions they supposedly draw on. One course on Buddhism or East Asian Religions is recommended, but not required, as background.

RELI GU4218 Heidegger and the Jews. 4 points.
The conundrum of Martin Heidegger and the Jews continues. The recent publications of Heidegger’s Black-Notebooks reignited the debate over his ties to the National Socialist party and his personal anti-Semitism. These notebooks reveal that Heidegger establishes a philosophical case for his prejudices against Jews, one which arguably cuts to the very heart of his thinking. And yet, many of his closest and most brilliant students were Jewish, and it is becoming increasingly clear that his philosophy has left an indelible mark on twentieth century Jewish thought. This course is divided into two units: In the first unit we will become familiar with some central themes of Heidegger’s thought and explore the question of the philosophical grounding of his political failing. In the second unit we will examine a variety of responses to Heidegger by Jewish thinkers who, in different ways and for different purposes, both profited greatly from his philosophical innovations and levelled profound criticism of his thought and actions. The animating question the course will attempt to answer is: Is it possible, as one student of Heidegger’s had suggested, to think with and against Heidegger?

RELI GU4219 Colonialism and religion in South Asia. 4 points.
This course examines the conceptual trouble wrought by colonial rule in relation to boundaries, both of tradition and identity. We will begin by examining the category of ‘religion’ and how it emerged as an object of inquiry to understand and order life in the South Asian subcontinent. By exploring the wide-ranging effects of Orientalist knowledge production premised on secular historicity, this section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then question the role of this knowledge/power nexus in creating and reifying both notions of ‘fluid’ and ‘communal’ boundaries by studying the internal coherence and colonial inflection of several religious traditions in the subcontinent (Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Buddhism). In concluding, we will consider how colonialism shifted the parameters of selfhood, creating new grounds, as well as reifying old ones, from which subjects came to contest the parameters of a given tradition.

RELI GU4220 Political Theology. 4 points.
Prerequisites: Prior coursework in Religion, MESAAS, political theory, or related field is advised.
This reading-intensive course will engage the notion of “political theology,” a phrase that emerges within the Western tradition (Varro, Augustine) and has become instrumental in thinking and institutionalizing the distinction between religion and politics over the course of the twentieth century.  We will take as our point of departure the key texts that have revived this notion (Schmitt, Kantorowicz), and engage their interpretation of the Bible and of Augustine and medieval followers. We will then examine the role of Spinoza and Moses Mendelsohn, the extension of the notion of religion to “the East” (Said, Grosrichard, Asad), and conclude with some of the current debates over secularization in the colonizing and colonized world.

The main part of the course will be dedicated to the question of religion as it informs our thinking of disciplinary divisions.  Is religion a sphere than can be isolated? How did it become so? What are the effects of this isolation?

RELI GU4228 South Asia and the Secular. 4 points.
This seminar explores different contestations and inflections of the secular in South Asia.We will begin by tracing a genealogy of the secular, which gave rise to a particular discursive grammar. Grounding ourselves in this formative space of the secular, we will study the constitutive nature of imperialism within the secular by examining the disciplining and conscripting role of Orientalism and the colonial state. Though noting these changes produced by colonial rule, this course also explores the arguments scholars of South Asia have made distinguishing between “secularisms” and the production of a tolerant and cosmopolitan South Asian orientation. In conjunction and against these possibilities, rather than consider the religious retrograde or communal, we will consider the continual striving toward political autonomy through disputation in the parameters of a given tradition—which resist incorporation into a broader pluralist or syncretic Indic model.

RELI GU4304 Krishna. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Study of a single deity in the Hindu pantheon as illuminated in art, music, dance, drama, theological treatises, patterns of ritual, and texts both classic and modern. Special attention to Krishna's consort Radha, to Krishna's reception in the West, and to his portrayal on Indian television.

RELI GU4305 Secular and Spiritual America. 4 points.
Prerequisites: Majors and concentrators receive first priority.
Are Americans becoming more secular or more spiritual (not religious), or both? What are the connections between secularism and what is typically called non-organized religion or the spiritual in the United States? We will address these questions by looking at some of the historical trajectories that shape contemporary debates and designations (differences) between spiritual, secular and religious.

RELI GU4307 Interactions of Buddhism and Daoism in China. 4 points.
Prerequisites: one course on Buddhism or Chinese religious traditions is recommended, but not required, as background.
In this course we will read English scholarship that probes the complex relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in the past two millennia. Students are required not only to be aware of the complementarity and tensions between them, but to be alert to the nature of claims to religious distinction or mixing and the ways those claims were put forward under specific religio-historical circumstances. The course is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in East Asian religion, literature, history, art history and anthropology.

RELI GU4308 Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah. 4 points.
The purpose of this seminar is to study the interactions between two major intellectual trends in Jewish History, the philosophical and the mystical ones. From the medieval period to the twenty-first century, we will discuss their interactions, polemics and influences. We will compare Philosophy and Kabbalah in light of their understanding of divine representation and in light of their respective Theology and conception of God.

RELI GU4311 Fanon: Religion, Race, Philosophy in Africa and Beyond. 4 points.
This class will examine the work of Fanon through its sources, its context and its contemporary interpretations. 

RELI GU4315 Sufis and the Qur'an. 4 points.
This course is a seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who wish to gain an understanding of the complexity and richness of the Sufi exegetical tradition. The Qur'an has been the main source of inspiration and contemplation for Sufis for centuries....

RELI GU4318 Interpreting Buddhist Yoga: Hermeneutics East West Quantum. 4 points.
A seminar exploring the meanings of Buddhist Tantra and being, time, space, gender, technology, and mysticism through traditional religious, modern, post-modern, digital, quantum, and Buddhist "hermeneutics," the science and art of interpretation. We will read ancient and modern classics on hermeneutics, by Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Heidegger, Barthes, and Ricouer; Indian and Tibetan works on their systems of interpretation, at least as sophisticated as anything from Europe; and contemporary works on how digital technology brings us into a world of new meaning for everything, including Buddhist yoga.  

RELI GU4322 Exploring the Sharia: Topics in Islamic Law. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
The platform of every modern Islamist political party calls for the implementation of the sharia. This term is invariably (and incorrectly) interpreted as an unchanging legal code dating back to 7th century Arabia. In reality, Islamic law is an organic and constantly evolving human project aimed at ascertaining God's will in a given historical and cultural context. This course offers a detailed and nuanced look at the Islamic legal methodology and its evolution over the last 1400 years. The first part of the semester is dedicated to classical Islamic jurisprudence, concentrating on the manner in which jurists used the Qur'an, the Sunna (the model of the Prophet), and rationality to articulate a coherent legal system. The second part of the course focuses on those areas of the law that engender passionate debate and controversy in the contemporary world. Specifically, we examine the discourse surrounding Islamic family (medical ethics, marriage, divorce, women's rights) and criminal (capital punishment, apostasy, suicide/martyrdom) law. The course concludes by discussing the legal implications of Muslims living as minorities in non-Islamic countries and the effects of modernity on the foundations of Islamic jurisprudence.

RELI GU4325 Sufism. 4 points.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.
This is a seminar for advanced undergraduate and graduate students who wish to gain an understanding of the richness of Sufism (Islamic mysticism). We will examine the historical origins, development and institutionalization of Sufism, including long-standing debates over its place within the wider Islamic tradition. By way of a close reading of a wide range of primary and secondary sources, we will examine Sufi attitudes toward the body, Sufi understandings of lineage, power and religious authority, as well as the continued importance of Sufism in the modern world

RELI GU4326 Sufism in South Asia. 4 points.
Sufism has been described as the mystical side of Islam. This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students will examine Sufism in South Asia as a spiritual, ethical and self-forming activity that has been profoundly affected by the historical, sociocultural, political, and everyday environments in which is it experienced and practiced.

RELI GU4355 The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama. 4 points.
Through a wide range of readings and classroom discussions, this course will introduce students to the crucial role that the unique African-American appropriation of the Judeo-Christian prophetic biblical tradition has played -- and continues to play -- in the lives of black people in America.

RELI GU4365 Revolutionary Women and Political Islam. 4 points.
Muslim female reformers and revolutionaries were at the forefront of many of the 20th and early 21st centuries’ historic socio-political and religious movements across the Global South. Members of diverse classes, families, and ethnic communities, many worked within the tenets of Islam in multiple ways to construct religious identity and work towards achieving and demanding civil and political rights. Yet the myriad theoretical and popular discourses underpinning emergent and longstanding women’s movements within revolutionary contexts are frequently overlooked. Moreover, representations of Muslim women too often rely on essentialist, ahistorical, static, victim-centered, and Orientalist descriptions and analyses. As a result, shades of difference in interpretation, ideology, practice, and culture are minimized. This course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles. We will read key texts and analyses from scholars and activists writing on religion, gender, sexuality, family planning, and women’s status in the contemporary Global South. The following questions will emerge in our discussions: “When is a hejab just a hejab?,” “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” and “What is an ‘Islamic Feminist’ and Should We Care?” Readings include memoirs, editorials, ethnographies, and political treatises, as well as historical scholarship from North Africa, the Gulf, the Levant, and Southeast Asia.

RELI GU4411 Religion, Mind, and Science Fiction. 4 points.
While not yet fully recognized as a literary or philosophical genre, science fiction, through the “dislocation” it operates, raises (or amplifies) questions that have long been the preserve of religion, metaphysics, or philosophy, and it has brought some of these questions into the realm of popular culture. Science fiction is often perceived as hostile to religion, yet it often blurs the boundaries between science and religion. Recent SF, unlike the traditional “space opera,” revolves around the relations between the human mind and Artificial Intelligence — a challenge that our fast-evolving technoscientific society is confronting with a new sense of urgency. This course examines overlapping issues and questions shared by religion and SF.

RELI GU4416 Empire and Secularization in Africa: Reform, Mission, Islam. 4 points.
This course examines how Empires paved the way to a new form of domination in Africa. Secularizing processes will be analyzed in relation to imperial histories in Africa. From the Expedition in Egypt to the Berlin Conference, Empires in Africa were both secular and religious. We will examine the multiple ways in which Empires colonized Africa by encountering, regulating or transforming African religious traditions. The class will compare historical geographies of ‘‘North Western’’ and ‘‘North Eastern’’ Africa by focusing on the Maghreb and West Africa but also on Egypt and Sudan. We will examine the relations of Empires with Islam and Christian missions in Africa. We will also examine how African uprisings challenge and challenged Imperial and State powers both before and during the Panafrican movement. We will eventually look at both Imperial and Anti-Imperial legacies in Africa today.

RELI GU4418 On African Theory: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology. 4 points.
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
What is African Theory? Is a theory African simply because it is rooted in the political present of the continent? Is it African because it corresponds to an African cultural singularity or simply because his authors and inventors come from or live in Africa? This class will examine some central aspects of both African and Africana philosophy. We will study a) how religious traditions shape African theory b) how the influence of colonial anthropology on concepts of African culture and tradition can be challenged c) how African theory relates to African politics of decolonization, in North and "subsaharan" Africa. The major dialectical problem we will examine during the class is the ongoing contradiction between claims of authenticity and demands of liberation, traditionalism and modernism, religion and secularism, culturalism and Marxism.

RELI GU4509 Crime and Punishment in Jewish Culture. 4 points.
Explores ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of Jewish criminal punishment from the Bible through modernity, with focus on death penalty and running reference to Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Topics include: interaction between law and narrative; Jewish power to punish; Sanhedrin trial of Jesus; ritualization of execution; prison; torture; martyrdom.

RELI GU4513 Buddhism and Neuroscience. 4 points.
With the Dalai Lama's marked interest in recent advances in neuroscience, the question of the compatibility between Buddhist psychology and neuroscience has been raised in a number of conferences and studies. This course will examine the state of the question, look at claims made on both sides, and discuss whether or not there is a convergence between Buddhist discourse about the mind and scientific discourse about the brain.

RELI GU4514 Defining Marriage. 4 points.
This seminar examines the changing purpose and meaning of marriage in the history of the United States from European colonization through contemporary debates over gay marriage. Topics include religious views of marriage, interracial marriage, and the political uses of the institution.

RELI GU4515 Reincarnation and Technology. 4 points.
A seminar exploring reincarnation, resurrection, and their contemporary cyber-relatives, uploading and simulation.  We'll explore Abrahamic, Amerind, Chinese, Greek, and Indian accounts, the Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation tradition and methodology in detail, and contemporary research on reincarnation, near-death, and out-of-body experiences. We will then turn to contemporary developments in science, religion, and philosophy concerning uploading consciousness to computer media and the probability that we are living a simulation.  We will investigate whether religious traditions are consistent with or expressive of simulated reality, and the application of karma to all of the above.  

RELI GU4516 The Politics of Freud in the Postcolony. 4 points.
This seminar examines the legacies of psychoanalysis through a critical exploration of how its concepts, practices and institutes have operated in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Weekly discussions will look at how practicing therapists, activists, anthropologists and others have extended, subverted and displaced psychoanalytic thought within non-European histories and imaginaries. Topics include challenges to the universality of the Oedipus emerging from early 20^th century anthropologist’s studies of kinship in Papua New Guinea, legacies of a self-made South Asian psychoanalyst’s challenges to Freudian orthodoxies, and the study of a psychoanalysis of racism forged out of a Martinican psychiatrist’s encounters with colonial neuroses in Algeria. We will also explore how psychoanalytic concepts have been deployed in debates about repression and sexuality in daily life during the Cultural Revolution and the psychic legacies of Maoism in contemporary China. In addition to reading the work of Freud and his critics, we will encounter primary materials—religious texts, movies, novels—that have been subjected to psychoanalytically-inflected interpretations. While attending to the cultural, racial and political assumptions suffusing psychoanalysis, our seminar will also show how variously situated authors have given this tradition new applications and meanings

RELI GU4526 Food and Sex in Premodern Chinese Buddhism. 4 points.
This course is an upper-level seminar on appetite and its management, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Our focus will be on the appetites of food hunger and sexual desire, and how Chinese Buddhist teachings propose to manage these. Food and sex are separate domains of experience, but as the primary objects of bodily appetites, they are analogous. Eating and sex both involve a direct and substantive interaction with the material world that is driven by powerful desires. In Buddhist teachings, these desires are said to bind us to the cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) and to shape the actions (karma), both mental and corporeal, that constitute our moral engagement with the phenomenal world. Hence it is important to know how a Buddhist on the path out of suffering is to manage these activities. What do monastic codes stipulate? What disciplines did lay Buddhists undertake? How are transgressions identified and handled? How do ancient Chinese and Daoist ideas inform the development of Chinese Buddhist attitudes toward sex and diet? How did Chinese Buddhist monastics come to adopt a meatless diet? How do religions use food and sex as tools for determining one's ritual purity (i.e., moral worth)? We will explore these and related topics. Despite the common perception of Buddhism as a world-denying religion focused on transcending bodily needs, Chinese Buddhists (and their Indian or Central Asian counterparts) engaged in numerous body practices with worldly benefit, while at the same time mitigating the dangers of desire through various doctrinal and practical means. This course is an exploration of those means.

RELI GU4535 Buddhist Contemplative Sciences. 4 points.
This course will explore key Buddhist contemplative sciences, including: stabilizing meditation; analytic insight meditation; the four immeasurables; form and formless trances; mind training; and the subtle body-mind states activated and transformed through advanced Tantric yoga techniques. These will be explored both within their traditional interdisciplinary frameworks, as well as in dialog with related contemporary arts and sciences.

RELI GU4562 Wittgenstein and Religion. 4 points.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and probably one of the most widely read by non-philosophers. His influence on a number of intellectual disciplines (philosophy, politics, theology, social science, history, etc.) has been considerable. This course will focus on Wittgenstein’s own writings and their reception, with a focus on the study of religion and anthropology.

RELI GU4611 The Lotus Sutra in East Asian Buddhism. 4 points.
Prerequisites: open to students who have taken one previous course in either Buddhism, Chinese religions, or a history course on China or East Asian.
The course examines some central Mahayana Buddhist beliefs and practices through an in-depth study of the Lotus sutra. Schools (Tiantai/Tendai, Nichiren) and cultic practices such as sutra-chanting, meditation, confessional rites, and Guanyin worship based on the scripture. East Asian art and literature inspired by it.

RELI GU4613 Silence. 4 points.
We live in a world of noise where incessant buzz and endless chatter are used as strategies of distraction deployed for political and economic purposes. Increasingly invasive technologies leave little time for quiet reflection and thoughtful deliberation. As the volume rises, silence becomes either a tactic for repression or a means of resistance.

This course will consider the question of silence from the perspectives of theology, philosophy, literature, politics, and art. Special attention will be paid to the role silence plays in different religious traditions. An effort will be made to create a dialogue among philosophical, theological literary, artistic, and film treatments of silence.

Questions to be considered include: How does the importance of silence change with time and place? What are the theological and metaphysical presuppositions of different interpretations of silence? What is the relation of changing technologies to the cultivation of, or resistance to silence? What are the psychological dimensions of different kinds of silence? What is the pedagogical value of silence? How can silence be expressed in music, the visual arts, and architecture? How does the importance of silence change in different social, political, and economic circumstances? Do we need more or less silence today?

RELI GU4615 Media and Religion. 4 points.
Typewriters, trains, electricity, telephones, telegraph, stock tickers, plate glass, shop windows, radio, television, computers, Internet, World Wide Web, cell phones, tablets, search engines, big data, social networks, GPS, virtual reality, Google glass.  The technologies turn back on their creators to transform them into their own image.  This course will consider the relationship between mechanical, electronic, and digital technologies and different forms of twentieth-century capitalism.  The regimes of industrial, consumer, and financial shape the conditions of cultural production and reproduction in different ways.  The exploration of different theoretical perspectives will provide alternative interpretations of the interplay of media, technology, and religion that make it possible to chart the trajectory from modernity to postmodernity and beyond.

RELI GU4616 Technology, Religion, Future. 4 points.
This seminar will examine the history of the impact of technology and media on religion and vice versa before bringing into focus the main event: religion today and in the future. We'll read the classics as well as review current writing, video and other media, bringing thinkers such as Eliade, McLuhan, Mumford and Weber into dialogue with the current writing of Kurzweil, Lanier and Taylor, and look at, among other things: ethics in a Virtual World; the relationship between Burning Man, a potential new religion, and technology; the relevance of God and The Rapture in Kurzweil's Singularity; and what will become of karma when carbon-based persons merge with silicon-based entities and other advanced technologies.

RELI GU4617 Image Theories in Chinese Religions. 4 points.
What does “image” mean in Chinese intellectual traditions? How did proponents of different religious persuasions construe the relationship between images and their referents differently and how did such construal change over time? Why did the practice of fashioning images often give rise to controversies in Chinese history? What makes images the object of adoration as well as destruction? Throughout the course, we will tackle these questions from diverse perspectives. The first half of the course examines a variety of accounts from Chinese indigenous classics and treatises. The second half looks at how discourses of the image further diversified after the arrival of Buddhism in China.

RELI GU4626 Reading (In Theory). 4 points.
This reading-intensive course will engage, over time with essential texts of the current critical canon. Offered over a series of semesters, it is aimed at developing a practice of reading: close or distant, and always attentive. Let us say: slow reading. What does it mean to read? Where and when does reading start? Where does it founder? What does reading this author (Freud, for example) or that author (say, Foucault) do to the practice of reading? Can we read without misreading? Can we read for content or information without missing the essential? Is there such a thing as essential reading? Favoring a demanding and strenuous exposure to the text at hand, this course promises just that: a demanding and strenuous exposure to reading. The course can be repeated for credit.

RELI GU4630 Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy. 4 points.
Examination of topics in the religious philosophy of Tibet.

RELI GU4637 Talmudic Narrative. 4 points.
This course examines the rich world of Talmudic narrative and the way it mediates between conflicting perspectives on a range of topics: life and death; love and sexuality; beauty and superficiality; politics and legal theory; religion and society; community and non-conformity; decision-making and the nature of certainty.  While we examine each text closely, we will consider different scholars’ answers – and our own answers – to the questions, how are we to view Talmudic narrative generally, both as literature and as cultural artifact?