Fall Quarter, 2022:

• Historical Roots in the Study of Religion (REL 200A).  Instructor: Allison Coudert.    Focuses on the disciplinary roots of studies of religion in the European Reformation and Scientific Revolution.
•  The Language of Orthodoxy/Heresy (REL 210C).  Instructor: Flagg Miller.    Focuses on the ways in which ideas of orthodoxy and heresy have acquired historical, spatial, and embodied force through culturally specific naming practices. 
  Amidst global struggles for cultural identity, the power to name constitutes an elemental means of discipline and exclusion.  This is especially apparent in religious discourse. This course focuses on the ways in which ideas of orthodoxy and heresy have acquired historical, spatial, and embodied force through culturally specific naming practices.  Part of the course will examine case studies of foundational heresy outbreaks, including those in medieval England, early modern France, and the 9th-12th century Islamic Middle East.  We will also investigate the legacies of such contexts for modern understandings of “right belief,” especially in the United States.  Special attention will be given to text production, authorship, gender, culturally situated notions of silence and censorship, intersections of religion and ethics, and relations between law and religion.  Emphasis will also be given to the work of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault.

Required textbooks (on reserve at Shields):

• Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

•John Henderson. The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.

• G.R. Evans, A Brief History of Heresy.  New York: Blackwell, 2003.

• R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250.  Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2007.

• Michel de Certeau. The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

• Excerpts from Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writings in Late Medieval England.  Sound Bend, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

• Frances Dolan. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture.  Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

Winter Quarter, 2023:

• Foundational Theories of Religion (REL 200B). Instructor: Mairaj Syed.   Mondays, 3:10-6:00.  Olson 159  
  This course is an analytical survey of some of the prominent theories and approaches scholars use in the study of religion. Recurring themes in this course include race, gender, reduction versus interpretation, normative versus descriptive approaches, insider versus outsider explanations, and idealism versus materialism.

Sample reading list:
Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System”

Talal Asad, “the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam”

Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddle of Culture

David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society

Richard Rorty, “the Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres”

Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, On Gadamer

Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality

Darlene M. Juschka, Political Bodies/Body Politic: the Semiotics of Gender

Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration

Stephen Bush, Visions of Religion

• American Religious Movements (REL 210A). Instructor: Meaghan O’Keefe. Mondays, 2:10-5:00.  Wellman Hall 25.
  Focuses on religion and conceptions of national identity including citizenship, enslavement, and immigration. Readings include Mark Noll, Christine Rosen, Manning Marable, Kim Tallbear, and Molly Worthen.

Spring Quarter, 2023:

• Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion (REL 200C).  Instructor: Naomi Janowitz.  Consideration of major themes, issues and methods in the contemporary study of religion. Perspectives from diverse cultural settings employed to consider modern historical, philosophical, and social contexts that inform understandings of religion.
• Medicine, Alchemy and Science (REL 230C).  Instructor: Lynna Dhanani.  Mondays 2:10-5:00                                                       This graduate seminar examines the widespread pre-modern science of alchemy in various periods across three major civilizations: Indian, Islamic, and European. Alchemy, currently labeled a pseudo-science or precursor to modern chemistry, involved a range of ideas and practices that went beyond transmuting base metals into gold. We will examine a range of alchemical texts that demonstrate a marked interest in medicine and other medieval sciences and will explore the views of self and the material world present in these readings. Towards the end of the course, we will situate our study within the larger context of the history of science and religion and changing theories of knowledge.
• CANCELED-Max Weber and his Literary Contemporaries (GER 297).  Instructor: Chunjie Zhang
  Course will discuss the eminent German sociologist Max Weber’s writing on world religions in dialogue with literary representations of spirituality by writers in Weber’s time.