Religion and the History of Hip Hop
Religion and Hip Hop Hist
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 (circa 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.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Josef Sorett
CULPA: 4
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
Religion and the History of Hip Hop - Di
Reli and Hip Hop History-
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 (circa 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.
- W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Emily M Fitzgerald
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Instructor:
Saila Sri Kambhatla
Info - 0 points
ISLAM-DISCUSSION
- R 2 p.m.-3 p.m.
- R 4 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Mehreen Z Jiwan
Info - 0 points
ISLAM
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.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Shanazarova
Info - 4 points
The Scientific Buddha : Buddhism an
Buddhism & Science in Chi
The relationship between religion and science, and by extension between Buddhism and science, have been long investigated by scholars and practitioners attempting to understand questions regarding the nature of reality, knowledge, and experience. While the meeting of Buddhism and Western science dates back to the nineteenth century, the discourse of “encounter” between these two systems of knowledge intensified with the Dalai Lama’s suggestion to institutionalize a dialogue between Buddhist practitioners and Western scientists in 1987. This seminar examines this on-going dialogue from its beginning in China about 200 years ago through today.
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Nataly Shahaf
Info - 4 points
Climate, Religion, and the Anthropocene
Climate & Religion
This course examines intersections between religious life and climate change in a comparative and global perspective. In recent years, the idea of the Anthropocene—the period of geological time during which human activity has become the primary force shaping the Earth’s climate—has abounded in both academic and popular literature. This focus on human agency over the climate raises questions about the extent to which humans share equally responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change, as well as differing understandings of human relationships and responsibilities toward the environment. This course uses religion as a lens to examine the role of humans in both creating ecological destruction and efforts to repair and rework relationships with the natural world. We will draw on primary texts from religious traditions around the world in a bid to unsettle human-centric and universalist narratives of the Anthropocene. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of the notoriously vexed categories of religion and the Anthropocene, and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour
Info - 4 points
BUDDHIST ETHICS
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Thomas F Yarnall
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
Queer Theory Meets Religion
Within religious traditions there are lively discourses of queering these traditions and while religious studies had to catch up, by now there are sizable bodies of queer studies in religion. But theological and religious studies queer discourses rarely reach queer theory in general. Moreover, when queerness and religion are studied together, we usually take queerness primarily as a quality of lives, bodies, and desires and then study how religious traditions and discourses succeed or fail in targeting or supporting queer lives or studies articulate how religious traditions can be recovered through queer readings. We will inquire into the shapes and logics animating queer theory’s religion trouble and wonder about what ways of thinking we preempt when queerness and religion are confined to pertaining to lived bodies and traditions respectively. What happens when we think with “queerness” and “religion” as dimensions irreducible to bodies or traditions? How is it that in the interdisciplinarity of queer theory, religion and religious studies remain largely unthought?
To think through some of these questions, we will ask how religion and queerness might be understood as methodologies for examining how truth and affect converge and sediment in the sensibilities and infrastructures orienting how we experience the world around us. We will turn to both religious studies and queer theory to examine two interrelated sets of questions: 1) How are meaning-making and investments with value bound up with gender, race, sexual desires, ability, coloniality, class, age, climate and environmental factors? And 2) what potentials for knowing, acting, living differently are afforded by differing practices, rituals, architectures, and aesthetics of transmitting, refashioning, and institutionalizing knowledge systems?
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 Info - 4 points
Dreams
This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is an interdisciplinary investigation of how dreams are viewed and understood across a range of the historical, sociocultural, political, and scholarly environments in which they are experienced and interpreted. Eclectic in approach, we will focus on close readings of a selection of dream texts, beginning with Freud’s “The Dream of Irma’s Injection.” We will aim to open out the text over several weeks. To facilitate this process, the syllabus will include an array of suggested readings linked to each week’s focus of inquiry. Students are expected to make a selection from these readings (or other readings that you find relevant) in order to prepare your own close reading of the dream text to discuss in class.
We will then turn to other dreamers who draw on different aspects of the Islamic tradition to understand their own dreams, with supplementary readings drawn form history, anthropology, and religious studies to provide contexts for interpreting these dreams.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Katherine Ewing
CULPA: 1 h-index: 22 Info - 4 points
Time
Concepts and sensibilities surrounding time and temporality are major aspects of people’s sense of reality and “how the world works.” Questions that we will explore in this course include such as the following: How are concepts and senses of time shaped in different contexts? How do they change? What role do ritual practices as well as distinctions such as between sacred and profane times play in shaping senses of time? In what ways are times and temporalities experienceable and in what ways do they elude perception? How are concepts of time and space connected? How is time political and how do its political valences become tangible or remain elusive? In our inquiries we will pay attention to where practices and concepts that seem obviously associated with religion make their appearance and what assumptions make that classification seem obvious. We will also examine how conceptual tools of religious studies might aid us in understanding how conceptions and sensibilities regarding time and temporality emerge, are transmitted, and transformed in and through communities of practice.
While this seminar is open to interested students from all disciplines, our work in this course specifically 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 deepen our conceptual and analytical acumen and expand our theoretical resources at the intersection of religious studies and theories of time and temporality.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Yannik Thiem
h-index: 1 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 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Zhaohua Yang
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
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 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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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.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Gil Anidjar
CULPA: 22 Info - 3 points
RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Clemence C Boulouque
CULPA: 4
Info
- 4 points
FIELD MTHDS FOR RELIG STUDIES
This course will introduce graduate students in Religion to several qualitative, empirical research methods and related epistemological and ethical issues. In addition to introducing basic research techniques, we will also deal with several issues of central importance to many scholars who conduct ethnographic research in religion, including representations of religious agents in ethnographic writing, interpreting testimony and conversion narratives, and integrating historical and textual material and interpretations into ethnographic writing.
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Courtney Bender
CULPA: 10
Info
- 3 points
READINGS IN JAPANESE RELIGION
This course is designed for advanced graduate students in need of introduction to non-Buddhist as well as Buddhist sources for the study of pre-modern Japanese religion. The following represents a sample syllabus centering upon the themes of astrology and divination in early Japanese religion.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Michael Como
CULPA: 20
Info
- 3 points