RELIGION & THE MOVIES

This class is an introduction to both film and religious studies and aims to explore their interaction. Ranging from auteurs to blockbusters, the course will analyze movies that make use of the sacred and of religious themes, figures or metaphors. The course will probe the definitions and boundaries of religion -as theology, myth, ideology- and will show students how religion remains a critical presence in the arts, even in a secular guise. We will look at the ways in which popular culture can serve religious functions in contemporary society and examine how faith is represented in popular culture.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Clemence C Boulouque
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

Religion and the Climate Crisis

Religion & the Climate Cr

This course examines the work of religious ideas—and ideas about religion—in creating, mediating, and responding to climate change. We will use religion as a lens for examining the role of humans in creating ecological destruction and efforts to repair and rework relationships with the natural world. The course draws on primary texts from and literature about a wide range of religious traditions in a bid to unsettle universalist narratives about both the environment and climate change. Students will encounter a variety of religious philosophies of the environment and interrogate the role that shifting ideas about religion have played in the emergence of the climate crisis. Throughout the course, questions of colonialism will be central in understanding how we think about religion and cultivating attitudes toward the environment. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of the notoriously vexed category of religion and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Overall, this course will provide a strong grounding in both the study of religion and the environmental humanities.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Raffaella Taylor-Seymour
  Info
• 3 points

BUDDHISM: INDO-TIBETAN-DISC

BUDDHISM: INDO-TIBETAN-DISCUSS

The course introduces the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, its essential primary textual source materials translated from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, and the philosophical insights of some of the traditions’ outstanding individuals.

• F 1 p.m.-1:50 p.m.
• R 1 p.m.-1:50 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• F 10 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
• 0 points

BUDDHISM: INDO-TIBETAN

Buddhist teachings came to Tibet relatively late in the history of Buddhism’s travels through Asia. Tibetan emperors adopted Buddhism from India around the eighth century, which sounds like a long time ago now, but by that time Buddhism was already well established in parts of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. In addition to being known as a tradition of renunciants and forest dwelling philosophers, Buddhism was associated with cosmopolitanism—literacy, the arts, architecture, higher education and beyond. Tibetan rulers, like so many rulers before them, turned to Buddhism after amassing power through warfare and violence, and they became interested in Buddhism’s methods for cultivating wisdom and compassion as antidotes to ignorance and selfishness. They were also curious about whether Buddhism could help justify and support their claims to power. Because Buddhism was already a complex system, Tibetans were able to uniquely integrate all three of the major traditions of Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism. Thanks to the hard work of Tibetan and Indian translators and artists with imperial support, monks and nuns followed the rules of the earliest disciples of Buddha, philosophers pored over Indian Buddhist treatises, and ritualists fine-tuned the tantric, esoteric, intensive path to liberation from dissatisfaction and suffering. The new expressions of Buddhism that emerged in Tibet have shaped religion, education, literary production, the arts, and language across a massive and diverse swath of Asia, from northern India to Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and areas of Western China. More recently, Tibetan Buddhism has spread across the globe. In this course, by analyzing primary textual sources in translation as well as visual and material culture, we will investigate the history and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in all its complexity, from its earliest origins to the present. There are no prerequisites for this introductory lecture

• MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Dominique Townsend
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

Psychoanalysis and the Eew Factor

Psychoanalysis & 'Eew' Fa

Curious about ambivalences and how we might attend to what we would rather not know, the late psychoanalyst Muriel Dimen took an interest in what she called the “eew! factor,” the visceral reaction of disgust and revulsion that is usually far more ambivalent than we like to think. Laced with attraction and excitement, relegated often to the unconscious, the “eew! factor” will provide us a lens for thinking with psychoanalysis about desires, bodies, social and moral boundaries, power, violence, ethics, and their ambivalences. Conceptions of purity and pollution, taboo and transgression work to establish norms and boundaries, while also rendering the forbidden exceptional, threatening, alluring, and powerful. We will attend to the dynamics of transference and countertransference to think through the ambivalences of attraction, pleasure, embarrassment, revulsion, and shame that surround investments in and rejections of queerness, racialization, religion, and institutions. We will examine how value and power do and don’t accrue around taboos and transgressions and to secrecy and revelations. In light of the affective intensities of the “eew! factor” that seems never far in our everyday negotiations of social, moral, and bodily boundaries, we will also ask what ordinariness and a lack of exceptionality in relation to the “eew!” might look like, if it is even possible.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• 3 points

Museums and Sacred Things

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Courtney Bender
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Museums and Sacred Things - Discussion

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

• F 11 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• M 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
• 0 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.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Andrew E Jungclaus
  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.
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  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 p.m.
• Instructor: David R Kittay
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

INDO-TIBETAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Examination of topics in the religious philosophy of Tibet.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 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.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  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.

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

RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE

There is no shortage of spilled ink, popular media coverage, scholarly inquiry, and academic institutes—including right here at Columbia University—dedicated to examining the intersection of religion and public life. From narratives of religion’s predicted decline during the twentieth century to its much-discussed global resurgence at the turn of the twenty-first, the concept of public religion continues to occupy popular imagination. Through the lens of public religion, we are able to examine pressing issues such as the revitalization of, or disillusionment toward, institutional forms and political establishments in our questionably secular age. What happens when religion “goes public”? Correspondingly, what assumptions about the category of religion and its role in public places do discussions of public religion promote?  Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the possibilities, pitfalls, and practicalities of understanding religion in terms of public life.  

The coursework will draw from scholarship, policy documents, and real-world case studies on issues ranging from climate crisis to conspiracy. Focusing on examples of advocacy, considerations of democratic renewal and decline, and competing claims of power and authority, this seminar considers the ways in which our definitions of religion impact lived, embodied, and practiced forms of religion and secularism in our current moment.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Justine E Ellis
  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 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Yannik Thiem
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 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.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael Como
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 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.
• Instructor: Zhaohua Yang
  Info
• 4 points