Why is it that the ways of thinking and living that people call “religious” are often judged by outsiders to be potentially harmful forms of delusion, while those who adhere to those lifeways understand them instead as providing access to what scholar Robert Orsi calls “the really real”? The story of the ideas and events that led to this stark difference of opinion is deeply tied up with European notions of racial and civilizational superiority. This course explores that story and counter-narratives to it in order to assess the consequences both for the lives of people who identify as “religious” and for the ongoing power struggle over who gets to define reality and what forms of knowledge are granted legitimacy. (5T) Offered every year. Prerequisite: first-year or sophomore standing or consent of instructor.

This course challenges students to develop an empathic imagination by striving to understand the feelings of another across different social identities and experiences. Questions the course will explore include: How might we use our discomfort to grapple with and learn from our biases? How might we use our new understandings to become intellectually and professionally agile? How can we increase our ability to compassionately solve problems by prioritizing our shared humanity? Students will approach this topic through readings, daily reflections, film, and a final project to create alternative ways of seeing and interacting humanely across our differences. Offered every other fall semester. (5T) Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

This course reframes and decolonizes the study of the anthropology of religion by prioritizing how descendant communities organize their understanding of the sacred not as a bounded life category but rather as intimate to shaping their humanity and daily life practices. To accomplish this, students use writings of past and contemporary social thinkers who focus on “religion,” along with ethnographies, films, and class discussions. The evaluation is based on in-class participation, including active participation in class discussion, daily writing assignments, group presentations, and a final paper based on library research. (3B) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101, Critical Identity Studies 101, or Anthropology 100.

This course explores how Buddhist narratives preserved in both the Theravada and the Mahayana literary traditions seek to create and transform worlds, with particular attention to the ritual cosmologies in which they developed and circulated. The course approaches this body of texts not only by examining the ways in which the interpretation of Buddhist sutras has been shaped by their diverse audiences, past and present, but also the ways in which these sutras actively seek to reshape audiences’ conceptions of themselves and the worlds in which they live, including ourselves and our world(s). Through this investigation of literary, performative, and historical approaches to the interpretation of Buddhist literature, the course will also look to the texts themselves as resources for expanding our conceptions of language and interpretive skills. (5T) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

Topics important to the field of religious studies will be offered by the department to take advantage of faculty or student interest. May be repeated for credit if topic is different. Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: varies with topic.

This advanced-level course is structured to guide students in understanding the complexities of how sacred lifeways inspire social transformation within the Black Atlantic. African descendants, along with others who have marginalized social positions, have used such lifeways to inform strategies that assert identities which present alternative narratives to individual and collective subjugation. The course covers select geographic locations throughout the Atlantic as a way to expand how we think about the formation and implementation of national and racial projects and sustained efforts to resist social exclusions. (3B) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Critical Identity Studies 101.

This seminar investigates the relationship between secularism and colonial systems of domination. Recent scholarship on secularism reveals its historical foundations in the colonial construction of religiosity as inferior to and opposed to modernity, rationality, progress, freedom, and a whole host of other “secular” values. Students explore the theoretical underpinnings of these arguments in order not only to better understand the construction of political, social, and personal realities, but also to recognize and critique their own assumptions through comparative study. In the process, students use these theoretical tools to analyze media representations, political documents, polemical writings, and campus norms. (Also listed as Anthropology 257.) Prerequisite: Critical Identity Studies 101 or Religious Studies 101 or Anthropology 100.

This course focuses on the way different communities conceptualize illness and health, and the types of strategies they pursue to realign individual and community well-being. Students explore curative systems and the cosmic orientations that inform such practices through ethnographies, articles, book chapters, and videos. Some curative systems of focus include African-inspired traditions, Hindu-inspired traditions of the science of yoga and Ayurveda, Latin American variants of Curanderismo, and others. This course is not intended to be an exhaustive study of a full range of communities’ healing traditions. (5T) Offered every other year. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

If “enlightenment” is a “cognitive” or “spiritual” state or achievement, why is it that it is strongly and repeatedly associated with particular forms of embodiment? This course explores this question cross-culturally, focusing on the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment and its intersection with “the Enlightenment” in modern Europe. The transformations of the Buddha biography make an especially compelling case study for this path of inquiry because the body of the Buddha has constituted such a central focus of the vastly different stories told about him in different places and times, including Modern Europe. As a result, students learn a lot about how ideals of embodiment are produced by looking at the ways in which stories of the Buddha’s enlightenment are intertwined with the triumphal story of white European Enlightenment and related colonial projects. (5T) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

This course is designed to engage concepts and theories associated with perspectives used to understand the complexities of the socio-historical, political, and sacred contexts that inform African-inspired expressive forms, with an emphasis on ritual and culture as related to the construction of religious realities. The course guides students to think critically about Africa and its diaspora, the forced and semi-forced dispersal of Africans and their descendants throughout the globe over time. The selections of readings, lectures, class discussions, films, and/or other materials are intended to assist students in expanding their understanding of the complexities of the topic. (3B) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

This course examines how identity and race have been created within Cuba’s nation-making project from conquest to the twenty-first century. The course prioritizes studying identity creation by African descendants and others who have shared their social status. By focusing on the practices of these marginalized social actors, students have an opportunity to engage how distinct sacred lifeways provide alternative sites of social empowerment through identity-affirming practices. Students become familiar with different concepts and theoretical perspectives associated with examining Cuba as a multiracial society and how these insights assist with understanding race in a more complex and non-binary fashion. (3B) Offered occasionally. Prerequisite: Religious Studies 101 or Critical Identity Studies 101.

Prerequisite: sophomore standing.

Work with faculty in classroom instruction. Graded credit/no credit. Prerequisite: at least junior standing and consent of instructor.