REL 100: Religion and the Public Conversation
(CDSA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment 30
Professor(s): Jenny Wiley Legath
1:30pm – 2:50pm TTH Class
Department Area Requirement: Does NOT satisfy sub-field requirement; does count as departmental.
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of religion and its engagement with society and culture. We will identify where and how religion operates in the public conversation, especially in, but not limited to, the United States. Classes will be focused around topics that intersect with religion in the public conversation such as place, media, race, body, art, and ethics. Students will develop recognition of the different ways people use religion to construct meaning, boundaries, and identity and will demonstrate the ability to engage in informed dialogue around issues of religion.
REL 236/NES 236: Introduction to Islam
(SA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Rebecca Faulkner
11:00am – 11:50am TTH Lecture/Precept
Department Area Requirement: Islam
This course is an introduction to Islam survey for undergraduates. The course is framed in terms of Muslims’ self-understanding and includes pre-modern, modern, and contemporary sources. It begins in pre-Islamic Arabia and ends with contemporary material. We will use a variety of media, including art, music, and film to emphasize the varieties of Muslim experience and explore the contestations and adaptations of what it means to be Muslim.
REL 246/JDS246: Ancient Judaism from Alexander to the Rise of Islam
(HA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Martha Himmelfarb
10:00am – 10:50am THF Lecture/Precept
Department Area Requirement: Ancient Mediterranean
This course offers an introduction to the development of ancient Judaism during the eventful millennium from the establishment of the Torah as the constitution of the Jewish people in the fifth century BCE–an event that some have seen as marking the transition from biblical religion to Judaism–to the completion of the other great canonical Jewish document, the Babylonian Talmud, in perhaps the sixth century CE.
REL 251/HLS 251/MED 251: The New Testament and Christian Origins
(HA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Jonathan Henry
10:00am – 10:50am MW Lecture/Precept
Department Area Requirement: Ancient Mediterranean
How did Jesus’ earliest followers interpret his life and death? What were secret initiation rites and love feast gatherings about? How did women participate in leadership? How did the Roman government react to this movement and why did Jesus’ followers suffer martyrdom? How did early Christians think about the end of the world, and what did they do when it did not happen? This course is an introduction to the Jesus movement in the context of the Roman Empire and early Judaism. We examine texts in the New Testament (the Christian Bible) and other relevant sources, such as lost gospels, Dead Sea scrolls, and aspects of material culture.
REL 254: Modern Evangelicalism in the United States
(HA) No Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Wallace Best
11:00am – 11:50am MW Lecture Precept
Department Area Requirement: Religion in America
This course will trace the history of American Evangelicalism from its roots in the early nineteenth century to rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s and birth of “right wing politics” of the twenty-first century. We will note key figures, events, and institutional expressions of evangelicalism, as well as its large impact on American politics and popular culture.
REL 263: Religion and its Modern Critics
(EC) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Gabriel Citron
3:30pm – 4:20pm MW Lecture/Precept
Department Area Requirement: Critical Thought
Satisfies Critical Approaches (CA) Requirement for Majors
The most penetrating critiques of Christianity have the power to unsettle our sense of self and disrupt our most natural ways of being – for Christians and non-Christians alike. For these critiques don’t focus on attacking religious beliefs alone; rather, they target many of the deepest values, attitudes, and tendencies at the core of Christianity and Christian-molded cultures, and perhaps even at the core of our humanity. This course explores some of the key 19th and 20th century critiques of Christianity. It will involve opening ourselves up to the self-reckoning demanded by the likes of Kierkegaard, Emerson, Nietzsche, Baldwin, and Butler.
REL 352: Who Was or Is Jesus?
(HA) No Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Elaine Pagels
1:30pm – 4:20pm M Seminar
Department Area Requirement: Ancient Mediterranean
Who Was – or is – Jesus In History, Art, Film, Music, Politics? What do we actually know about Jesus of Nazarcth? We start by looking at the earliest known sources-accounts in the New Testament; what Jewish, Roman, Greek contemporaries said of him, and also ancient gospels not in the NT (like the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary Magdalene), Next, we’ll explore an amazing range of interpretations of Jesus in art, poetry, music, theology, and politics, throughout 2000 years to the present, including newly emerging views.
REL 357/HIS 310: Religion in Colonial America and the New Nation
(HA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment No Limit
Professor(s): Seth Perry
11:00am – 11:50am TTH Lecture/Precept
Department Area Requirement: Religion in America
This class covers the history of religion in America from European contact through the 1840s or so. Emphasis will be on primary readings, organized chronologically around a few recurrent themes: contact and exchange; authority and dissent; the relationship between theological reasoning and everyday life. We’ll pay particular attention to changing conceptions of religion’s role in social organization and competing religious views of human nature over time.
REL 373/AAS 320: Studies in Religion: Spirit Possession in Caribbean Religions
(SA) Graded na, npdf Total Course Enrollment 15
Professor(s): Eziaku Nwokocha
1:30pm – 4:20pm W Seminar
Department Area Requirement: Does NOT satisfy sub-field requirement; does NOT count as departmental.
This course is designed to explore the possession experiences in Caribbean Religions. Through historical, ethnographic, autobiographical, literary and visual texts this course examines complex, gendered practices within the possession process, the vibrant spiritual energy that sustains communal connections during religious ceremonies, and the transnational imaginations that animate Caribbean religious practices in the Americas. Special attention will be given to Santeria, Candomble, Vodou, Myal, Palo Monte, and Revival Zion in the Americas.
REL394/CHV 394: Environmental Ethics and Modern Religious Thought
(EM) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment 15
Professor(s): Ryan Darr
1:30pm – 4:20pm T Seminar
Department Area Requirement: Critical Thought
The current ecological crisis is often attributed to the effects of religion, especially Christianity. Focusing primarily on Christian theology and ethics (with some significant attention to Jewish thought as well), this course surveys and critically analyzes the emergence of religious discourses around environmental and animal ethics. The first half of the course considers recent works in “ecotheology.” The second half of the course turns to particular ethical topics: climate change, environmental racism, biodiversity conservation, animal welfare, and food.
REL 399: Junior Colloquium
Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment 25
Professor(s): Seth Perry
11:00am – 12:20pm WF Class
Required Colloquium for Junior Majors
First semester junior majors participate in a colloquium with a member or members of the faculty. In addition to assignments throughout the term that prepare majors to research and write a junior paper (JP), students are expected to produce a five to seven-page JP proposal.
Cross-Listed Courses:
SAS 345/REL 345: Islam in South Asia through Literature and Film
(LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit Total Course Enrollment 20
Professor(s): Sadaf Jaffer
3:00pm – 4:20pm TTH Class
Department Area Requirement: Does NOT satisfy sub-field requirement; does NOT count as departmental.
This course is a survey of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. We begin with the earliest Muslim descriptions of India and the rise of Persian poetry to understand how Muslims negotiated life at the frontiers of the Islamic world. Next we trace patterns of patronage and production at the Mughal court and the development of Urdu as a vehicle of literary composition including a discussion of the Progressive Writer’s Movement and the “Muslim Social” genre of Hindi cinema. The course concludes with an examination of contemporary novels from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Students will gain an informed perspective on Islam beyond the headlines.
HIS 423/AFS 424/REL 423: The History of Christianity in Africa: From St. Mark to Desmond Tutu
(HA) Graded No Pass/D/Fail Total Course Enrollment 12
Professor(s): Jacob Dlamini and Jack Tannous
1:30pm – 4:20pm T Seminar
Department Area Requirement: Does NOT satisfy sub-field requirement; does NOT count as departmental.
This course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?