Losing My Religion

The R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe explained that the phrase “losing my religion” in the song of the same title does not refer to what we might commonly understand by “religion.” Rather it cites the expression used in the Southern U.S. for losing one’s temper, feeling frustrated, exasperated, and desperate. The loss present in John Legend and Common’s song “Glory” from the movie
Selma
are the lives lost to the unattenuated history of racist violence and in the struggle against structural white supremacy. In this context, for Blacks “freedom is like religion.”
Like
religion. Even if the song does not shy away from Christian theological tropes, “religion” here too remains elusive. Living through a major global pandemic as we are (although arguably, racism and capitalism are also ongoing—albeit mostly unacknowledged—global pandemics), we are witnessing the losses attributable to Covid-19 precipitating changing practices and rituals of marking losses, mourning, and building community in the present. Apart from impacting practices that we generally term “religious,” loss and living with losses also reveal what may have been our individual and collective “religion” lost and what may emerge as the “religions” we hew to newly or nonetheless. In this course we will explore how various meanings of “religion” might offer us conceptual tools for thinking about loss, community, and damaged life. We will examine how religious practices change in relation to losses and reflect on losses of religion both personally (e.g., because one’s hitherto familiar value system breaks down) and collectively (e.g., the forced conversions and suppression of religious traditions by colonialism). We will track how loss and rituals surrounding loss can change how history, time, space, and meaning are experienced. We will ask what if anything comes after or alongside loss, especially given the perdurance of loss that is brought about by centuries of systemic violence. Given the circumstances of our moment, we will also take time to reflect on the (hopefully only temporary) loss of face-to-face communal learning in a shared classroom and what new rituals of virtual learning mean for building communities and relating to others and 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 encou

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• 3 points

BUDDHISM: EAST ASIAN

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.

• MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 4 points

BUDDHISM: EAST ASIAN-DISC

• W 11:10 a.m.-noon
• W 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• R 9 a.m.-9:50 a.m.
• R 10 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
• F 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• F 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 0 points

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

This course in the Philosophy of Religion will consider the relationship between faith and reason, religion and morality, religion and art, and religion and technology. Attention will be devoted to an exploration of comparative interpretations of God or the divine in the western philosophical and theological traditions and Zen Buddhism as well as the interrelation of interpretations of God, self, and world. The course will conclude with a consideration of the question of life after death in philosophy, literature, and information technology.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Mark C Taylor
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

GUIDED READING AND RESEARCH

Prerequisites: the instructors permission.

• Instructor: Gil Anidjar
  CULPA: 22 Info
• Instructor: Courtney Bender
  CULPA: 10 Info
• Instructor: Clemence C Boulouque
  CULPA: 4 Info
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 Info
• Instructor: Matthew Engelke
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info
• Instructor: Katherine Ewing
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 22 Info
• Instructor: Bernard Faure
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Rachel McDermott
  CULPA: 37 Info
• Instructor: David L Moerman
  CULPA: 18 Info
• Instructor: Aziza Shanazarova
  Info
• Instructor: Josef Sorett
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Mark C Taylor
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  Info
• 1-4 points

Religion and Capitalism: Faith and the A

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.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Andrew E Jungclaus
  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.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Courtney Bender
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Empire and Decolonization in North Afric

The course examines crucial debates in colonial and decolonial studies from a North African point of view, with a particular focus on Algeria. What does it mean to rethink conceptually and globally about empire and decoloniality from the point of view of North Africa ; a region which is often marginalized in both postcolonial and decolonial theory? The questions that will guide us throughout the class read as follows:
1) How is one to rethink the Maghreb without either reducing it to the history of French colonialism or downplaying the impact of colonialism on North Africa? How can binaries of direct rule and indirect rule, settler colonialism in Algeria and protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia be challenged in order to understand the postcolonial Maghreb as a unit?
2) Can one think about the historicity of the Maghreb without taking the destruction of Al-Andalus and its influence on the birth of race as a point of departure? Does the Christian racialization of Jews and Muslims through the notion of a purity of blood permeate the French colonization of the Maghreb? Is French colonialism in North Africa secular or Christian? How does secularity emerge in the midst of this history by reconfiguring the legacy of the Crusades?
3) How are Muslims and particularly Sufi orders involved in the practices of resistance against French colonial violence? How are traditional Islamic languages and practices of sainthood or the longing of the Mahdi redeployed in this situation? How do these practices and languages of resistance transform themselves with the construction of anticolonial nationalism? How can one rethink decolonization by analyzing how Algiers became the capital of Third World resistance at a global scale?
4) How do contemporary debates about Islam, tradition and modernity deploy themselves in the Maghreb and particularly in Morocco? How do these debates shape our understanding of decolonization?

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Mohamed Ait Amer Meziane
  Info
• 4 points

BUDDHISM & DAOISM IN CHINA

In recent decades, the study of the so-called “Buddho-Daoism” has become a burgeoning field that breaks down the traditional boundary lines drawn between the two Chinese religious traditions. In this course we will read secondary scholarship in English that probes the complex relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in the past two millennia. Students are required not only to be aware of the tensions and complementarity between them, but to be alert to the nature of claims to either religious purity or mixing and the ways those claims were put forward under specific religio-historical circumstances. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. We will address topics on terminology, doctrine, cosmology, eschatology, soteriology, exorcism, scriptural productions, ritual performance, miracle tales and visual representations that arose in the interactions of the two religions, with particular attention paid to critiquing terms such as “influence,”  “encounter,” “dialogue,” “hybridity,” “syncretism,” and “repertoire.” The course is designed for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of East Asian religion, literature, history, art history, sociology and anthropology. One course on Buddhism or Chinese religious traditions is recommended, but not required, as background.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  Info
• 4 points

Islam in Southeast Asia

Despite the fact that a fifth of the world’s Muslim population lives in Southeast Asia, the region is often considered peripheral to or insignificant for the study of Islam more broadly. In this course, we will not only learn about Islamic thought and practice in the history and present of this important part of the Islamic world; we will also reflect on issues that, while grounded in the Southeast Asian context, illustrate a variety of key Islamic Studies issues. The first half of the course will provide a historical overview over the development of Islam in Southeast Asia while the second half will focus on contemporary issues. The Malay-Indonesian world, home to 90% of Southeast Asia’s Muslims, will be our primary focus. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, incorporating anthropological, historical, and media studies approaches. Students in this class are expected to have some prior knowledge of Islam.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Verena H Meyer
  Info
• 4 points

American Scriptures

What is scripture? How is cannon created? How do particular communities find meaning in varying works of literature? In this seminar, we will explore a number of influential American texts not simply in order to understand how they address questions of the holy and divine presence but also for how they provide creative ways of considering questions that have dogged Americans for centuries. In so doing, we will place literary works in conversation with contemporary theological trends and present-day scholarship on these connections. The course’s main thematic focus will be on government and collective rights; racial difference and questions of theodicy; children’s literature and disciplinary formation; the American libertarian streak; how best to care for the self; and humanity’s connection to nature. Students will examine a variety of texts – from the Declaration of Independence to Carl Sagan and Moby Dick – to better understand what matters to Americans and what do the literary artifacts we leave behind say about our current civilizational moment. This course will have succeeded in its goals if by its end your operative definition of religion has been significantly jumbled, challenged, and complicated. While many of our historical actors will use the term in different ways, this course is invested not in identifying what is or is not properly “religious,” but rather in examining how ideas operate in the world for the people to whom they’re important. To a certain extent, we must take seriously the claims made by religious actors of God acting in their lives. But in terms of analysis, religion for us will be a fluid concept, one that evades simple definition, and that is always “real” in terms of its effects on belief, action, and identity.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Andrew E Jungclaus
  Info
• 4 points

SUFISM IN SOUTH ASIA

Sufism or
tassawuf
has misleadingly been described as the mystical side of Islam, implying that it is somehow detached from the material world.  Throughout the history of Islam, Sufi ideas, practices, and institutions have borne a complex, intimate, and sometimes fraught relationship with other aspects of Islamic tradition and practice, a relationship that has also been profoundly impacted by Orientalist scholarship in the colonial period and by global reformist currents in the postcolonial period.  This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is an interdisciplinary investigation of how Sufism has been affected by the historical, sociocultural, political, and everyday environments in which is it experienced and practiced, with a particular focus on South Asia.  Eclectic in approach, we will begin by considering how Sufism has been construed and even constructed by scholars, considering how modern notions of the self, religion, and the political have shaped scholarly understandings of what Sufism is. Focusing on bodily practices and well known individual Sufis who lived in South Asia during different historical periods, we will use them as a vehicle for understanding Sufi experience within the context of the evolving Sufi orders within specific local spaces. We will consider why Sufism has become such a target of controversy and ambivalence among Muslims in the modern world and trace some of the changing controversies and tensions that Sufis have struggled with over time, focusing on their understandings of self, society and reality.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Quinn A Clark
  Info
• 4 points

AFR AM PROPHETIC POL TRADITION

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.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Obery Hendricks
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

RELIGION,MIND&SCIENCE FICTION

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.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Bernard Faure
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

After the Human

The advent of high-speed computing, Big Data, new forms of Artificial Intelligence, and global networking is rapidly transforming all aspects of life.  Implants, transplants, genetic engineering, cloning, nanotechnology, cyborgs, hybrids, prostheses, mobile phones, tracking devices and wearable devices. The Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies are becoming interconnected to transform what once was known as human being.  These developments raise fundamental questions about what comes after the human.  This course considers the philosophical and theological implications of this question by addressing the following issues: Natural vs. Artificial, Treatment vs. Enhancement, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution, Ubiquitous Computing, the Internet of Things, the Singularity, Extended Mind and Superintelligence, Internet of Bodies and Superorganisms, Death and After Life.  Students will have the option of writing a term paper or doing a project related to the course readings.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Mark C Taylor
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Religion and the Sexed Body

This seminar will examine how bodily practices associated with gender and sexualities are cultivated, regulated, and articulated within various religious traditions and how these practices have been influenced by global processes, including colonialism, the accelerating movement of people and technologies, and modern secularism and identity politics. Throughout the course we will tack back and forth between theoretical works and ethnographic/historical writing, in order to articulate what is probably the most difficult aspect of original research: how to bring together “high theory” and primary sources ranging from field research to data drawn from a variety of media.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Verena H Meyer
  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.
• Instructor: Thomas F Yarnall
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

TECHNOLOGY,RELIGION,FUTURE

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. Well 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 Kurzweils Singularity; and what will become of karma when carbon-based persons merge with silicon-based entities and other advanced technologies.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: David R Kittay
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

READING (IN THEORY)

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.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Gil Anidjar
  CULPA: 22 Info
• 3 points

THESIS RESEARCH & WRITING SEMINAR

Course description: This seminar is intended for masters students in Religion who are writing and completing a thesis or other paper of similar length and scope. Enrolled students will work with the instructor, their advisor or second faculty reader, and seminar participants to develop, research, and write a thesis. Preparation and prerequisites: Instructor’s permission is required to enroll. Students are strongly encouraged to discuss the feasibility of potential thesis topics with a faculty member in Religion (preferably their advisor or other suitable faculty member), and if relevant also strive to identify key primary texts or sources, in advance of the semester. Course structure: The seminar will meet weekly. The first part of the term will focus on thesis development including scholarly scope, “fit” between theory and methodological approach, and the organization of a literature review and bibliography. The second part of the term will focus on workshopping drafts and sections in development, and ultimately full drafts.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Quinn A Clark
  Info
• 4 points

Religious, Secular, and Other Temporalit

Reli, Secular & Temporali

Concepts and sensibilities surrounding time, temporality, and history are major aspects of peoples’ “lived everyday metaphysics,” which is to say the myths, concepts, affects, values, rituals, and practices by which we orient ourselves in the world. Religious studies in the broadest sense examines these lived and material metaphysics and their emergence, transmission, and transformation in and through communities of practice. Our work falls into the “zone of inquiry” of “time and history” of the Religion Department’s graduate programs. “Zones of inquiry” seek to introduce students to a particular cluster of key concepts and various theoretical elaborations of those concepts, in order to aid students in honing their ability to reflect critically on and develop further the central concepts that they derive from and bring to the specific traditions and phenomena that they study in their own research. A main goal of this course will therefore be to expand our conceptual resources at the intersection of religious studies and theories of time and history. This course will explore how time and history, their structures and their relationships to meaning making have been theorized in different traditions at various points in time. We will study how rituals of time, calendars, and chronologies give shape to imaginaries of history and space and how these differences influence the place of religion and religious experience. As a case study of sorts, we will examine the profound changes of metaphysics of time that the rise of capitalism effected in early modern Europe and the continued impact on social imaginaries of secular time, impending apocalyptic times, and possibilities and impossibilities of utopias and redemption.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

Mothers

It might be an exaggeration to say that religion begins with mothers. More accurate, perhaps, would be the suggestion that birth being paradigmatic of all origins and beginnings, all creation stories, mothers might serve as the ultimate metaphorical resource to think religion (and a few other things). And then there is of course the Great Mother, the matriarchal origins of the divine, as well as the contested matriarchy at the origins of human society. We will consider as many mothers as we can, beginning with specific mothers, mothers like Eve and Hagar, and “Mother India” too. We will attend to Mary, Mother of God, and we will consider matricide and maternal infanticide too. We will learn about the “mother tongue” and African matriarchy. Throughout we will explore the mother and the maternal as religious and theoretical questions — with a little help from psychoanalysis’ mothers.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Gil Anidjar
  CULPA: 22 Info
• 4 points

RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Clemence C Boulouque
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

Theories of Materiality and Media

Theories of Materiality&

This seminar is intended as a general introduction to a series of conversations that have been taking place across the humanities with regard to the role of inanimate objects in the construction of human subjectivities and social behavior. By calling into question methodological and theoretical dispositions rooted in deeply entrenched dichotomies between subject and object, spirit and matter, social and natural, animal and human, text and artifact, scholars in such diverse fields as philosophy, anthropology, economics, art history, and literary theory have been highlighting the manifold ways in which humans live with and through the fabricated and natural objects that shape our world, our identities and our social behavior. This course is also designed to aid students preparing for the Religion Department Zones exam in media.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 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).

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  Info
• 4 points

RESEARCH IN RELIGION I

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Guided individual research.

• Instructor: Gil Anidjar
  CULPA: 22 Info
• Instructor: Courtney Bender
  CULPA: 10 Info
• Instructor: Beth A Berkowitz
  CULPA: 2 h-index: 6 Info
• Instructor: Clemence C Boulouque
  CULPA: 4 Info
• Instructor: Euan Cameron
  Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Castelli
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 Info
• Instructor: Gary Dorrien
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Matthew Engelke
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia h-index: 25 Info
• Instructor: Katherine Ewing
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 22 Info
• Instructor: Bernard Faure
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Najam I Haider
  CULPA: 8 Info
• Instructor: Tiffany Hale
  CULPA: 4 Info
• Instructor: John S Hawley
  CULPA: 28 Info
• Instructor: Gale L Kenny
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Rachel McDermott
  CULPA: 37 Info
• Instructor: David L Moerman
  CULPA: 18 Info
• Instructor: Aziza Shanazarova
  Info
• Instructor: Josef Sorett
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Mark C Taylor
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• Instructor: Timothy Vasko
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  Info
• 1-6 points