CHRISTIANITY
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.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth F Dolfi
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
Religion and Nasty Women
Used in 2016 by then presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in reference to his female opponent, Hillary Clinton, the phrase “nasty woman” has become a badge of honor and a rallying cry for women’s empowerment.
The origin of the word “nasty,” attested in the 14th century, indicates highly unpleasant qualities- nauseating or unclean, in a literal or figurative way. It also came to evoke indecency and obscenity- and religious traditions have a long history of such depiction of women.
After introducing some key texts on the otherness and objectification of women (including by Aristotle, Beauvoir, Kristeva, Nussbaum, and Butler), we will examine a number of female characters- goddesses, prostitutes, and virgins - in the Mesopotamian, Greek, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic corpus that fit the definition of nasty. We will also analyze some of the underlying tropes of impurity and danger that characterize nastiness involving bodily fluids, sexuality, and knowledge. Spanning theology, literature, movies, and popular culture the course aims to be a survey of religious-based misogyny as well as women’s responses in their pursuit of agency.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Clemence C Boulouque
CULPA: 4
Info
- 4 points
Religion and Nasty Women - Discussion
Religion and Nasty Women-
Used in 2016 by then presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in reference to his female opponent, Hillary Clinton, the phrase “nasty woman” has become a badge of honor and a rallying cry for women’s empowerment.
The origin of the word “nasty,” attested in the 14th century, indicates highly unpleasant qualities- nauseating or unclean, in a literal or figurative way. It also came to evoke indecency and obscenity- and religious traditions have a long history of such depiction of women.
After introducing some key texts on the otherness and objectification of women (including by Aristotle, Beauvoir, Kristeva, Nussbaum, and Butler), we will examine a number of female characters- goddesses, prostitutes, and virgins - in the Mesopotamian, Greek, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic corpus that fit the definition of nasty. We will also analyze some of the underlying tropes of impurity and danger that characterize nastiness involving bodily fluids, sexuality, and knowledge. Spanning theology, literature, movies, and popular culture the course aims to be a survey of religious-based misogyny as well as women’s responses in their pursuit of agency.
- R 4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m.
- M 4 p.m.-5 p.m.
- R 1 p.m.-2 p.m.
- T 4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m.
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Instructor:
Lucilla Ines Martorana
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Instructor:
Erez Degolan
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Instructor:
Emily N Renteria
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Instructor:
Shweta Radhakrishnan
Info - 0 points
CHINESE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS
This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Zhaohua Yang
Info - 4 points
Chinese Religious Traditions - Discussio
Chinese Religious Trad -
This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion.
- M 11:10 a.m.-noon
- W 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- R 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Mehreen Z Jiwan
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Instructor:
Qichen Qian
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Instructor:
Stephanie A Bell
Info - 0 points
Hippie Physics, Counterculture, Cybercul
The world inside your smartphone may not be all that it seems. Everything from your e-banking app to your TikTok algorithm can be traced back to the Woodstock-going, acid-taking, love (not war)-making attitude that permeated the youth (in spite of the generations before) in counterculture America. Today’s technosphere grew out of the convergence of the post-World War II and Cold War military-industrial complex and the 1960s counterculture. Resistance to the war in Viet Nam, the Civil Rights movement, and the spread of Buddhist thought created social unrest and political disorder. (Almost) simultaneously, a counter counterculture emerged – conservative Christians joined forces with right wing and libertarian politicians to resist sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and promote a religiously, politically, and racially “purified” America. Sound familiar?
In the midst of this turmoil, groups of physicists who had dropped out (but not necessarily tuned in) gathered in San Francisco and Palo Alto garages to create a technological revolution that continues to transform the world. This course will explore this seminal period through a consideration of music, films, and books of this era, as well as the technological and philosophical implications that quantum physics has on our society and culture today.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Mark C Taylor
CULPA: 17 Wikipedia Info - 3 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.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Andrew E Jungclaus
Info - 4 points
Hegel, Information, Artificial Intelli
Hegel, Information, AI
The development of high-speed computers, artificial neural networks, miniaturized sensors, mobile phones, and Big Data has created the conditions for the transformation of artificial intelligence. These changes are not only transforming the world but are also recasting long-standing distinctions like nature/culture, natural/artificial, body/mind, complexity/ simplicity, and organism/machine that have shaped human thought and life for centuries. This refiguring of opposites as irreducibly interrelated was anticipated by Kant’s notion of self-organization and developed systematically by Hegel.
This course will approach current forms of artificial intelligence through Kant’s interpretation of self-organization and Hegel’s dialectical logic and will reread Hegel’s system through “natural” and “artificial” neural networks, complex systems, and information theory. If nature and culture are inextricably interrelated, then is “artificial” intelligence really artificial, and is “nature” every merely natural? What are the implications of these developments for the understanding of human “nature” that has shaped the Anthropocene since the time of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes?
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Mark C Taylor
CULPA: 17 Wikipedia 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.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Quinn A Clark
Info - 4 points
AFRICAN AMERICAN PROPHETIC POL TRAD
AFR AMER PROPHTC 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.
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Instructor:
Obery Hendricks
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
BUDDHISM AND NEUROSCIENCE
With the Dalai Lamas 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.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Bernard Faure
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Women and Islam
This course is a comprehensive engagement with Islamic perspectives on women with a specific focus on the debates about woman’s role and status in Muslim societies. Students will learn how historical, religious, socio-economic and political factors influence the lives and experiences of Muslim women. A variety of source materials (the foundational texts of Islam, historical and ethnographic accounts, women’s and gender studies scholarship) will serve as the framework for lectures. Students will be introduced to women’s religious lives and a variety of women’s issues as they are reported and represented in the works written by women themselves and scholars chronicling women’s religious experiences.
We will begin with an overview of the history and context of the emergence of Islam from a gendered perspective. We will explore differing interpretations of the core Islamic texts concerning women, and the relationship between men and women: who speaks about and for women in Islam? In the second part of the course we will discuss women’s religious experiences in different parts of the Muslim world. Students will examine the interrelationship between women and religion with special emphasis on the ways in which the practices of religion in women’s daily lives impact contemporary societies.
All readings will be in English. Prior course work in Islam or women’s studies is recommended, but not required.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Shanazarova
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 4:10 p.m.-6:40 p.m.
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Instructor:
David R Kittay
CULPA: 6
Info
- 4 points
INDO-TIBETAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
Examination of topics in the religious philosophy of Tibet.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Thomas F Yarnall
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
THESIS RESEARCH & WRITING SEMINAR
THESIS RES & WRITING SEM
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 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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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 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 4 points
RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 4 points
Walter Benjamin: Thinking In a Damaged W
Thinking In a Damaged Wor
In this seminar we will examine the thought of the early 20th-century German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in light of his commitment to the task of philosophy (broadly understood) as a form of
Erkenntniskritik,
epistemological critique, that takes up questions of experience, history, culture, and politics in a damaged world. Paying special attention to Benjamin’s deployment and reshaping of theological tropes and figures, our considerations will be shaped around the following thematics: (1) the transformations of theorizing experience in relation to philosophies of history;
(2) the critique of culture and modernity; and (3) the aesthetics of rhetoric and affect in relation to social criticism.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 4 points