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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This course surveys the development of Buddhism, from its origins in India to its subsequent expansion across the globe, including its presence in the United States.
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In this course we will examine how these different perspectives emerged and clashed—often violently—in the course of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.
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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 explores how ancient Indians answered these questions in the Mahābhārata, a foundational text of Indian civilization.
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This course invites students to engage the atheistic claim that “God is dead” and various responses to it by theologians, philosophers, religious thinkers, and cultural commentators.
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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 course, students will read the entire Pauline Corpus, along with other texts outside the Christian canon that help us understand Paul and his influence on the earliest Christians.
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This course explores the idea that religion, race, and ethnicity are not given or stable categories, but concepts that change over time, vary across contexts, and are often constructed in relation to one another.
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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 focuses on four American disasters and the artistic production they have spawned.
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In this course, students will gain a basic knowledge of Shinto, Buddhism, and folk religion, which combine and interact in various ways in Japanese religious culture.
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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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What is law? What is religion? How are they related? This class will consider the intersection of law and religion across time and space using literary, historical, anthropological, and theological/philosophical resources.
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This course will explore several issues under the broad topic of ‘death.’
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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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This course invites students to explore the intimate, almost symbiotic relationship between religion and war across various human cultures and historical time periods.
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In this course, we will consider questions such as: to what extent is our humanity linked to our capacity for work.
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The College of Arts