What makes culture popular? Is religion different from culture? Can the popular be religious? This course analyzes the complex relationship between human beings and the material worlds they create, redesign, deconstruct, and critique.
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What is religion? Where does it come from? What does it do? How should we study it? This course introduces students to the many different ways that theorists and scholars of religion have tried to answer these questions.
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This introductory class explores Islam, Christianity, and Judaism through three major themes: scripture, religion and the state, and gender.
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This course will introduce students to the religious traditions of Asia. More specifically it will examine Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto.
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This course considers the ways that religion and sports are alike and argues that you can learn a great deal about one through careful attention to the other.
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This course will equip students with working knowledge of the contents of the Hebrew Bible, and the historical contexts of its composition and will introduce students to the diverse claims and concerns of the ancient Jewish communities who produced, edited, and interpreted this collection.
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What is Christianity? What does it mean to be Christian? How should a Christian act in the world? In asking these questions, this course draws upon key texts, themes, concepts, and practices. In doing so, it reveals that Christianity might just be both a possibility and an impossibility.
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This course will explore the diverse regulations and values around marriage, sex, economics, and violence represented in ancient Jewish literature from the mid-to-late first millennium BCE.
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This course will consider the intriguing diversity of Christian views about sex and gender by focusing on the time of the Reformation, when new movements challenged the spiritual value of virginity, celibacy, and marriage; when devotion was often both hetero and homoerotic; and when witchcraft accusations revealed the deadly effects of misogyny.
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Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. She was accused of heresy and war crimes, and was feared by both the French and English kings.
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This course considers African American literature through the prism of religion, with special attention to race, gender, sexuality, and politics.
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This course asks what superheroes can tell us about religion, spirituality, and science—as well as race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and class and age—in American culture.
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In this class we will explore the origins of yoga in ancient Indian philosophy through close reading of selected Upanishads, excerpts from the Upanishads, Sāmkhya, and Patañjali’s Yogasūtra.
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Who are evangelicals? What do they believe, and how do they behave? Should non-evangelicals be worried about them? This course explores the causes, nature, and implications of evangelical influence through the lenses of history, literature, and religious studies.
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This course introduces students to the major concepts, texts, customs, and movements of the Jewish mystical tradition called Kabbalah.
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Love and friendship seem crucial to any good human life—but what are they, exactly? In this course we examine these and related ideas by reading classic and contemporary works from different cultures and eras.
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In this class we will attempt to make sense of our understanding of nuns who under the guise of obedience also proclaim their right to resist.
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This course provides an introduction to the early development of Chinese thought, concentrating on early debates over human nature and the best practices of self-cultivation, the general nature of the cosmos and the human role in it, and the proper ordering of society.
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In this course, we will look at the development of ideologies and mythologies surrounding the development, practice, and meaning of the martial arts in Chinese and Japanese thought, from the early medical practices of the Han dynasty to the development of modern martial arts, as well as the role of the East Asian martial arts in contemporary global culture.
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By engaging hip-hop culture, as well as its deeper history in spirituals, gospel, and R&B, this course introduces students to the critical study of religion and culture.
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This course explores the history of an idea—the existence and nature of God and gods/goddesses—in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world (e.g. Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylonia) and the reception and transformation of those ideas in the 19 and 20 centuries.
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Are we born bad? Selfish and greedy? Do we have a difficult time understanding why we do what we do? In this class we’ll demonstrate the enduring relevance of religious texts to contemporary questions of human psychology.
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The College of Arts