Graduate Division of Religion Course Atlas


Graduate Division of Religion

Fall 2024 Course Atlas
 

(Please check back for changes and updates - last update 3.27.2024)

 

ICIVS 735/RLR 700 - Urdu for Research
Scott Kugle
Wednesday, 2:30-5:15

This seminar is for students who already have reading capacity in the Urdu language. It is designed to expand student's capability to read, translate, annotate and analyze Urdu literary sources to deepen their research skills. The seminar will present students with readings in prose and poetry, focusing on Sufi and Sufi-influenced texts about love, longing and desire. The seminar will give students experience in various poetic genres (masnavi, ghazal, ruba'i, mukhammas and musaddas), consider how poems are rendered in song as well as print, and teach how dates are encoded in texts (abjad). The seminar will also consider issues of transliteration and translation. As their final project, students will select an Urdu text, then select, translate and annotate a passage, and write a critical introduction and reflection. 

RLNT 745 - Social History of the New Testament
Susan Hylen
Wednesday, 1:00-4:00

This course surveys the social history of the world that shaped the New Testament. It familiarizes students with the social, philosophical, and religious environment in which early Christianity emerged and within which the language of the NT may be interpreted. Although the subject of the course is the Greco-Roman world itself, the categories and questions studied are formulated with an eye to what is useful or important for the interpretation of the NT.

RLR 700 - Religion, Christian Theology, and Ecological Collapse
Jennifer Ayres
Thursday, 1:00-4:00

Of what good is religion in an age of climate collapse, environmental injustice, and the alternating poles of crippling eco-anxiety and dissociative denial and despair? If ecology is the science of knowledgeable inhabitance, how do religious ideas and practices inspire, impede, and even reimagine human action in light of the ecological challenges we face? In this seminar, students will:

  • describe contexts of ecological collapse from historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives;
  • evaluate the influence of religion, with particular attention to Christianity, in human beings’ relationship to the environment; 
  • analyze religious responses to ecological challenges; and 
  • develop original theological or theoretical frameworks addressing fundamental questions in ecological thought, such as: place, environmental justice, water, climate, food, animals. 

Readings come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and may include works by: Carolyn Merchant, Arne Naess, Bron Taylor, Christopher Carter, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Elizabeth McAnally, Jawanza Eric Clark, Robert Bullard, Ashley Cunsolo, and Sallie McFague.


RLR 700R - Engaging Moral Lifeworlds

Wednesday, 2:00 - 5:00
Liz Bounds

This course engages recent scholarship across several disciplinary areas (including anthropology of ethics, study of lived religion, moral philosophy, and theology/Christian ethics) exploring ordinary human meaning-making or moral work, asking a set of crosscutting questions of the texts:

--What are the assumptions about the nature of morality and/or ethics?
And is there attention to religion, subjectivity, narrative/discourse/story, experience and/or agency?

--What are the genealogies shaping the approach? How are institutional formations engaged?

--What conceptual framework and method is used to engaged “lived-ness”—e.g., experience, story, practice, performance, etc.

--What are the relations of power and accountability at work, both acknowledged and unacknowledged (including the relations among scholar, audience, and subject)?

--What is the normative position of the author (stated or inferred)?

The questions posed to the texts point to further questions of the nature and transmission of morality, particularly in relation to religious practices.

The central assignments will be a project/paper developed in stages over the semester which may include qualitative and digital elements.

Texts may include:
Michael Banner, The Ethics of Everyday Life
Lorraine Cuddeback-Gedeon
Veena Das, Affliction
Marla Frederick, Between Sundays
Webb Keane, Ethical Life
Cheryl Mattingly, Moral Laboratories
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety
Samuli Schielke, Egypt in the Future Tense
Todd Whitmore, Christ in Magawi

RLR 700R/ICIVS 713 - Islamic Theology and Philosophy
Vincent Cornell
Wednesday, 2:30-5:15

Major themes and schools of thought in Islamic Theology and Philosophy.

RLR 700 - Globalization, Religious Nationalism & Extremism
Jehu Hanciles
Tuesday, 1:00-4:00

RLR 700 - Ethnographies of Islam
Jim Hoesterey
Monday, 9:30 - 12:00

In this seminar, we will learn about the development of “an idea of the anthropology of Islam” (cf. Asad 1984) through a careful reading of recent ethnographies about Islam as a lived religion. Beginning with Geertz and Gellner, and moving through Asad, Mahmood and their recent critics, we will examine the theoretical and epistemological fault lines within the study of Islam more broadly, thinking about where ethnography and anthropological theory fit within the wider field of Islamic studies (if at all). We will discuss themes of ethical discipline and moral cultivation, while also attending to the roles of anxiety, doubt, and ambivalence – the pious as well as those who have “strayed from the straight path” (cf Beekers and Kloos). Through a careful reading of several recent ethnographies, we will also think through issues such as religious authority, texts and traditions, contested practices, embodied affects, and the modern nation-state.


RLR 700R  -Theology and Ethnography
Susan Reynolds
Wednesday, 9:00-12:00

This class will examine the ethnographic and anthropological turn in the field of theological studies. During the first part of the course, we will examine and practice methods in ethnographic fieldwork, with an eye toward the interpretive challenges and opportunities afforded by religious commitment. During the second part of the course, we will trace debates about the disciplinary relationship between theology, anthropology, and the social sciences. Finally, we will attend to examples of rich theological ethnographic writing, with an eye toward the development and refinement of our own authorial voices.

RLR 700 - The Ethics of Beauty: Appraising the South Asian Arts
Shiv Subramaniam and Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
Wednesday, 10:00-1:00

This course investigates how far the enchanting effects of art are compatible with ethical projects of various kinds. While we will focus primarily on south Asian dance and music, the questions we wish to raise are broad, and include the following: What is beauty, and how is it related to neighboring concepts, such as the aesthetic and rasa? How socially determined, and how spontaneous, are our affective responses to art? What kind of re-education is required to develop new tastes—to find new things beautiful or wondrous? Are concepts such as beauty and rasa outmoded? Should we encourage art that aims at other effects—for instance, disturbance, disorientation, or education? Is beauty an ally of ethics—does it reliably kindle our noblest sentiments—or does it rather distract us from the world's injustices? The readings represent a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, art criticism, history, and anthropology, and feature the writings of Iris Murdoch, Alexander Nehamas, Sara Ahmed, Pallabi Chakravorty, Davesh Soneji, T.M. Krishna, Yashoda Thakore, and Nrithya Pillai. This course will count for the GDR’s Performance, Arts, and Religion Concentration.