THEORY
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)
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
MUSLIMS IN DIASPORA-DISC
Corequisites: RELI UN3407 Discussion section associated with RELI UN3407-MUSLIMS IN DIASPORA.
- T 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- T 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
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Instructor:
Ebadur Rahman
Info - 0 points
MUSLIMS IN DIASPORA
This course is an exploration of the varieties of Muslim experiences in Europe and North America, with particular attention to local debates and controversies focused on Muslims, especially post-9/11. How do these controversies expose tensions in prevailing notions of cultural citizenship and nationhood? How do such tensions affect the life possibilities of Muslims in diasporic communities? What perspectives can the varied situations of Muslim minorities contribute to understandings of identity, ethnicity, and diaspora? How can an examination of Muslim practices denaturalize Western understandings of the notions of religion, secularism, and the nature of human rights? The course will include primary sources throughout, including the Quran and Hadith, writings by important Muslim thinkers, newspapers, and other media sources to be analyzed as primary sources.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ebadur Rahman
Info - 4 points
Queer Theory, Religion, and Their Discon
QUEER THEORY AND RELIGION
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. this course will explore how religious studies can enrich queer theory and how queer theory can reshape our thinking about religious studies. But beyond the mutual disinterest, anxieties, and animosities, queer studies and religious studies share actually a whole range of core interests and questions, 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.
We will examine questions about religion come to the fore when we paying especially 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.
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. Ideally, students should experience this course as enlarging the set of critical tools at their hands for creative and rigorous thinking.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 3 points
Embodiment: (Re)Defining the Human
Embodiment: Re-Defining H
Please note this course is for a GSAS Teaching Scholar
With the rise of climate change, technological advances, and an abundance of everyday existential crises, you might be wondering what it means to be human in 2023. In this course, we begin with the claim that in order to understand “human being” in a time of critical discourse regarding the Anthropocene, we must explore embodiment. Starting with Cartesian Dualism and its legacy, we will progress to contemporary critiques and move into speculative understandings of embodiment and its role in human being in religious studies, philosophy, literature, and anthropology. We will think about how we define what it means to be human, who exactly this “we” is who gets to do the defining, and what happens to us and our worlds when we forget about or attempt to overcome embodiment. This course has several interactive components and utilizes media such as podcasts, films, comics, and practical engagement in addition to a wide variety of academic reading assignments.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Emily M Fitzgerald
Info - 4 points
REINCARNATION & TECHNOLOGY
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
David R Kittay
CULPA: 6
Info
- 4 points
American Religions in extremis
This seminar focuses on historical, sociological, and first-hand accounts of a diverse set of American non-conformist religious and spiritual groups (including MOVE, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Father Divine's International Peace Mission, the Oneida Perfectionists, and Occupy and others). Diverse in their historical origins, their activities, and their ends, each of the groups sought or seeks to offer radically news ways of living, subverting American gender, sexuality, racial, or economic norms. The title of this seminar highlights the ways that these groups explain their reasons for existing (to themselves or others) not as a choice but as a response to a system or society out of whack, at odds with the plans of the divine, or at odds with nature and survival. Likewise, it considers the numerous ways that these same groups have often found themselves the targets of state surveillance and violence.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
SUFISM
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
- M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Shanazarova
Info - 4 points
A Political Introduction to the Christia
Pol Intro Christian Scrip
In this course we will examine the New Testament canon and the twenty-seven texts that comprise it in light of their respective literary genres, their Jewish antecedents and Greco-Roman influences, which will include their historical, social, cultural, political and economic contexts, and the ways these factors impinged upon their various dimensions of meaning. Various modes of biblical interpretation, both ancient and contemporary, will be explored. A major emphasis will be on the ways select texts are utilized, misconstrued and weaponized in the public sphere in this contemporary moment.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Obery Hendricks
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
BUDDHIST CONTEMPLATIVE SCIENCES
Buddhist arts and sciences traditionally are divided into the interconnected disciplines of ethics (śīla), wisdom/philosophy (prajñā), and “meditation” or experiential cultivation (samādhi/bhāvanā). This seminar course introduces the latter discipline, thus complementing and completing Prof. Yarnall’s Columbia seminars on Buddhist Ethics (RELI UN3500) and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy (RELI GU4630), either of which—in addition to his introductory lecture course on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (RELI UN2205)—are encouraged as prerequisites. This course will provide a detailed presentation of key Buddhist contemplative sciences, including: stabilizing meditation (śamatha); analytic insight meditation (vipaśyanā); cultivation of the four immeasurables, and form and formless trances; mind cultivation (lo jong); mindfulness meditation; Zen meditation; great perfection (dzogchen); and the subtle body-mind states activated and transformed through advanced tantric yoga techniques. These arts and sciences will be explored both within their traditional interdisciplinary frameworks, as well as in dialog with related contemporary disciplines, including: cognitive sciences, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, epistemology, and so forth. To be conducted in a mixed lecture/seminar format (active, prepared participation required).
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Thomas F Yarnall
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
Sacrifice
This seminar provides an overview of sacrifice in both theory and practice. The concept of sacrifice, and its contestation, allows us to explore a range of issues and institutions related to the (often violent) act of “giving up,” or exchange. What must a sacrifice be, and how do its instantiations—for God; for country; for kin; for love; for rain; etc.—take shape? Readings are drawn from a range of sources, including Biblical texts and commentaries, the anthropological record, critical theory, comparative literature, and work on race and gender. The seminar aims to provide students with a strong foundation for relating sacrifice to broader concerns with the body, media/mediation, religion, politics, and kinship.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew Engelke
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info - 4 points
THEORY & METHOD-STUDY OF RELIG
“Theories and Methods” courses in any field are commonly unwieldy beasts. They cannot but be a compromise-formation between contemporary questions and texts, ideas, and definitions (alongside a whole lot of problems) that we have inherited as “canonical” in a field. In the best case, such a course is a passageway into deeper engagement with a field, its histories, its complexities, and its possibilities from which we might wrest and build viable futures. Disciplinary fields are structures where power and knowledge are produced and reproduced. The study of religion is no exception. The questions of “how is ‘religion’ constructed as a category here?” and “what work does the designation of something or someone as ‘religious’ do?” will, therefore, accompany us throughout our work over the course of this semester. We will also examine how different methodological commitments shape what objects of study and which questions come to the fore for the study of religion. This course will explore how the study of religion is not reducible to the study of traditions and communities that are readily recognized as “religious.” However, the vexed histories of the construction of “religion” as a category of knowledge production does also not negate that there are large, varied, and flourishing communities of practice beyond the university for whom whether or not “religion” exists is not at all a question. Holding these layers of complexity in play, this course seeks to introduce students exemplarily to key texts and concepts that have shaped the study of religion as we encounter it today as an academic discipline.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 3 points
ISSUES-STUDY OF S ASIAN RELIG
CRIT STUDIES-RELIGIONS-S ASIA
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Rachel McDermott
CULPA: 37
Info
- 3 points
The PhD Dissertation
This course provides a forum for advanced PhD students at all stages of dissertation work, from designing the dissertation prospectus and grant proposals to organizing and writing the dissertation. Emphasis is on clear formulation of a research project, sources and methodology, the mechanics of research, and strategies for turning research into prose with a clear argument and well-designed structure. Class requirements include reading and responding to other students’ work and presenting one’s own work (however fragmentary) in a workshop setting. Throughout the course, you should also be in regular communication with your dissertation supervisor and other committee members as appropriate. Registration is by permission of the instructor only.
- W 7 p.m.-9 p.m.
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Instructor:
Katherine Ewing
CULPA: 1 h-index: 22 Info - 4 points
READINGS IN CHINESE RELIGION
This course is designed for graduate students in need of introduction to non-Buddhist as well as Buddhist sources for the study of pre-modern Chinese religion. The course may be repeated for credit.
Prerequisites
: Knowledge of a Sinitic language (Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese).
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Zhaohua Yang
Info - 4 points