Religion Program Courses

Taiwanese nuns who incorporate business management classes into their traditional Buddhist seminary curriculum, a seventh-century Chinese empress who claimed to be none other than the buddha of the future, wandering monks in the forests of northern Thailand: these examples are indicative of the diversity found within Buddhism.  And yet there are also themes and recurring patterns that tie the various periods and cultural settings of Buddhism together.  In this course we will begin by examining some of the concepts at the heart of Buddhist psychology and philosophy; this is what Buddhism looks like on paper, so to speak.  We will then turn to how Buddhists have practiced and to the institutions they have developed; this is how Buddhism actually looks on the ground.  In the final section of the course we will focus more intently on some of the cultural settings in which Buddhism has developed (including the West), asking how Buddhism changed (or did not change) as it grew increasingly distant from its Indian origins.  Students should come away from the course with an understanding of a handful of ideas and institutions central to Buddhist thought and practice, a rough idea as to the historical transmission of Buddhist (e.g., it went from India to China), and a sense of why this religion has enjoyed such a positive reputation in the West during the past century-and-a-half. 
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The Hebrew Bible is arguably one of the most important works of Western culture. This course will survey the text, meaning, historical background and ancient near eastern literary and cultural context of the Hebrew Bible, and will provide a crucial introduction to all further studies of the three Abrahamic faiths. We will examine the interplay between history and myth, the various forms and purposes of biblical law, the phenomenon of biblical prophecy, and the diverse literary genres that are found within the Bible. Our goal will be to understand the work as a religious, historical, legal, and narrative work that reflected the society from which all of later Judaism, Christianity and Islam grew.
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This theology course, which provides an overview of the New Testament, is open to students without prior knowledge of the Bible. Topics covered include the historical and political issues of the New Testament, with special attention given to its major themes. The diversity of the different books is also considered.
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An examination of the intellectual and lived traditions of Islam. In addition to early Muslim political history this course will also familiarize students with the major disciplines in Islam including the Qur’an, Hadith, theology, Islamic law, Islamic philosophy, and Sufism. The concluding segments of this course interrogate the interruptions of modernity in these traditions through the study of contemporary Muslim reform movements, Muslim modernism, and Islamism. We will utilize a variety of sources including primary sources (in translation), historical works, anthropological and literary sources, and films to guide our discussion. Through the study of Islam, this course will also provide students a solid theoretical foundation in larger conceptual questions and categories pertinent to the academic study of religion and to the humanities more broadly.
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This is an in-depth first course in the study of Jewish religious life. We will explore in depth the process by which the historical transition period of the first few centuries of the common era produced a substantially new religious system (quite unlike that described in the Bible) that later generations think of simply as "Judaism." Throughout our comprehensive examination of Jewish ritual practice, we will pay special attention to how the absence of Temple cult led to a new system of religious practice, a new canon of Jewish literature, and a new landscape of philosophical positions that came to characterize "Rabbinic" Judaism. No prior familiarity with the topic is required.
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This course is intended to offer an entry into the academic study of religion. We will examine the major religions of the world as they have developed over the course of world history, utilizing two approaches. The first will be comparative: we will consider the formative ideas and practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The second approach is historical: we will explore some of the roles religious ideas and institutions have played within struggles for political power, from the time of Alexander the Great up to the present.
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This course examines the mystical tradition of Islam or Sufism. We will cover a range of topics including Sufism and Orientalism, the intellectual and institutional history of Sufism, Sufi textual traditions, Sufi orders and the master-disciple relationship, gender and Sufism, Sufism and modernity, and online Sufism. A major focus of this class will be on the close reading of primary texts from multiple intellectual disciplines, time periods, and regions (all in translation).
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Bhakti means "participation in" or "devotion to" God. From 700 C.E. to 1700 C.E., in every region of India, bhakti poet-saints sang songs and lived lives of intense, emotional devotion to their chosen gods. The songs, legends, and theologies of these saints and the communities they established permeate the religious life of India. This course explores the world of bhakti through its poetry. We examine issues of poetics and theology, bhakti and opposition to orthodox social conventions, bhakti and gender, the interactions of Hindu devotionalism and Islamic Sufism, the role of bhakti in Indian music, and the problem of bhakti in twentieth-century Indian literature. This is a writing intensive course. The general goals of the writing component of the course are to improve the development, composition, organization, and revision of analytical prose; the use of evidence to support an argument; strategies of interpretation and analysis of texts; and the mechanics of grammar and documentation. Regular short writing assignments will be required.
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Traditional Judaism is often seen as a highly patriarchal system in which women have little access to public ritual roles or community leadership. It enforces a strict separation between men and women in many social situations, and prohibits even casual physical contact between husband and wife during the wife’s menstrual period. It defines some sexual acts between two men as an “abomination” for which capital punishment is prescribed. What are the origins of these practices, and the social, theological, and psychological attitudes that they reflect? This course will examine a broad sweep of issues relating to gender and sexuality in the earliest strata of Jewish historical development, that is, the biblical and rabbinic periods. Topics to be covered will include public and private gender roles; power dynamics between men and women; views of sexuality, marriage and its variants; homosexuality; etc. We will read both narrative and legal primary texts, as well as current scholarship on the development of these issues in the ancient world. Our goal will be to gain an understanding of some of the beliefs and values that drove the development of early Judaism.
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Liberation became a major theme within theology, and contributed to movements of national and class revolution in several parts of the Western hemisphere after Vatican II. Despite enduring a systematic effort during the pontificate of John Paul II to silence them, liberation theologians have persisted, and there approach has been embraced on an interfaith basis. The seminar will engage both the thought and the practice of Liberation Theology.
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This course introduces students to the religious and cultural diversity of Iran, both historically and in the contemporary moment. The focus of this course will be on the narratives, texts, and spaces that have characterized the religious and cultural landscape of Iran. The topics we will discuss include the history of Islam in Iran, the emergence and eventual consolidation of Shi'ism and Shi'i practices, sacred spaces and rituals of shrine visitation, travel narratives and Persian poetry, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and religious institutions of education and learning in the country. We will also explore various forms of art and literature that serve as media for cultural expression, both traditionally and in contemporary transnational contexts. A central feature of this course will be the utilization of primary sources in translation and that of films drawn from the burgeoning Iranian cinema industry. The primary objective of this course is to wrestle with and explore the complexity, dynamism, and tensions that characterize the religion and culture of Iran both as an idea and as a territorial construct.
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This course will examine a number of important, contemporary issues at the intersection between religion and science. Scientific thinking about God, religious responses to cosmology and evolution, and the writings of both scientists on religion and religionists on science will be included. We will focus on attempts to learn about religion from science, and about science from religion, and on the different methodologies, assumptions, and entailments of the two disciplines. No significant background in either field is required.
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The Revelation of John has shaped how people in the West see their future. Yet readings of the Apocalypse have produced fundamentally different views of the future. Major teachers in the Christian tradition have championed each of these views, and they have also influenced Jewish and Muslim interpreters. The course looks at these radical differences that remain in reading the Revelation.
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Mohandas Gandhi was among the most radical, revered, controversial, and influential political and religious figures of the 20th century. His strategies of nonviolent satyagraha were widely and successfully adopted during the Indian independence movement, and have since been adapted by others, with varying degrees of success. This seminar examines Gandhi’s life and the development of his philosophy. The course includes a series of films that provide different perspectives on Gandhi’s legacy, from the hagiographical to the deeply critical.
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This course will involve a close reading of the Qur’anic text and a study of different translations. We will explore the history of the Qur’an’s compilation and codification, its major themes, structure, and literary aspects. This course will also go beyond approaching scripture as a bounded, collected, literary text, by examining the ritual, experiential and material encounters between the Qur’an and Muslim communities. Some of the questions that we will address in this class are: How does the Qur’an operate within societies and what are its multiple functions? How are the controversial verses often associated with the Qur’an interpreted? How do modern understandings of “scripture,” “sacrality,” “text,” and “meaning” determine, dominate, and perhaps limit the way we engage with premodern sacred material?

The many contemporary religions in Latin American and the Caribbean that draw upon African theology and practice testify to the vitality of the African heritage in the New World. The course examines these religions within their historical context as dimensions of the African diaspora and as they are currently practiced. We will be particularly concerned with issues of identity, empowerment, and appropriation. In this light will explore the religious and symbolic dimensions of these religions, from those that claim African orthodoxy to those that have embraced innovation and heterodoxy, and their sociopolitical structures. Issues concerning the race, class, gender, and politics of the leaders who guide these religions and the followers attracted to them will be examined in relation to the degree to which such affiliations may strengthen African identities and foster movements for cultural and racial political empowerment or may represent appropriations of the African heritage serving the interests of dominant groups. Throughout, the class will be attentive to the ways in which these religions are represented in ethnography and film. Religions examined include Candomble, Umbanda, and Batuque in Brazil; Santeria in Cuba and the Dominican Republic; Maria Lionza in Venezuela; Shango in Trinidad; and Vodun in Haiti.
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This course examines the ways in which polytheism was practiced and conceptualized by the ancient Greeks from the Mycenaean period into the Hellenistic era. It will emphasize the ritual aspects of Greek polytheism through the analysis of religious institutions, beliefs, and rites in their wider socio-cultural contexts. We will explore the literary expressions of Greek religion (the connection between myth and religion, e.g.), and the ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices profoundly affected the development of Greek culture and history, in particular in the classical city state of Athens, and also in the syncretistic Hellenistic world that came afterwards.
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Buddhism began in India around the sixth century B.C.E. with the philosophical meditations of the historic Buddha. Self-reliance and discipline were the primary means to achieve release from suffering. Within five hundred years the philosophy, responding to external forces, evolved into a religion incorporating new ideologies of eschatology of the Buddha of the Future and of paradisiacal cults. A new pantheon of deities appeared with the powers to aid mankind in its search for immortality. Buddhist pictorial art begins with auspicious emblems representing key ideas of the doctrine and anthropomorphic images of the Buddha; later, the new pantheon is formulated and employed in the art. This course analyzes the development of Buddhist art in India from its earliest depictions and its transmission through Southeast Asia, Central Asia, to China and Japan.
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In spite of repeated announcements of its demise, religion remains a vibrant and powerful force in the modern world.  Whether one considers oneself religious or not, religious literacy is a basic requirement for citizens of a modern society.  This is all the more true in a global context where religion often stands in as a marker for significant cultural differences.  In these workshops, which will be offered throughout the academic year, students will encounter various living religious traditions.  While each workshop will be devoted to a different religious tradition and will be taught by its own instructor, they will all follow a parallel structure, with attention given to both the theory and the practice of the tradition and with an examination at the end of the session. Each one-credit module will meet for four weeks. Students may choose to enroll in just one module, or they may take several modules. A student who successfully completes four modules will satisfy the Rethinking Difference requirement.
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Secularization is often understood as a story of subtraction: once we believed in gods, spirits, mana, miracles, or providential agency, now we don’t. This brief course will complicate that story by looking at secularism, not as what is “left over” once the world has been disenchanted, but as a way of actively constructing that world. The course will touch on a number of questions: What is secularism’s relation to the religious contexts out of which it emerged? How does it tend to conceptualize the self, the world, and knowledge? What are its animating moral and political norms? Along the way we will try to make distinctions between the historical process of “secularization” and “secularism” as a distinct system of belief. This course meets for the first four weeks of the semester.
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This course is designed to introduce students to witchcraft as it was practiced and, even more, as it was believed to be practiced in Western Europe and North America from the classical period to the present day. We will be studying theologians’ treatises on the operations of witchcraft, inquisitors’ handbooks on the prosecution of witches, notaries’ transcriptions of witches’ trials, and philosophers’ denials of the existence of sorcery. Why did so many people in Europe and America believe for so long that witches existed? Why did they cease to believe that they existed? Why do witches still occupy such a prominent place in our cultural imaginary?
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This short course will examine the fundamentals of Jewish history, belief, thought, and life. Our readings will be from primary sources spanning 2500 years of Jewish literature. Students with or without prior knowledge will gain a historically contextualized understanding of Torah, the cycle of the year, the development and functioning of the synagogue, the purposes of daily Jewish religious practice, the importance of story-telling and argument, and the beliefs that unite – and divide – the Jewish people. 
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