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Division of Religion Main PageContent: This course examines textual and nontextual performative traditions of West and South Asia as they are represented in recent ethnographies. We will examine the ways in which ethnographic and performance studies expand the boundaries of both "who and what counts" in the study of religion. The course will introduce theoretical frameworks and analytic tools from performance studies and ethnography with which to analyze both the traditions under consideration and the ethnographic enterprise of fieldwork and writing. Students will be required to conduct fieldwork at some level, dependent upon individual interests. This course is one of the four core seminars for students in the West and South Asia program, but is relevant to those interested in ethnographic and performative analyses of ritual and expressive culture.
Texts: May include: Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society; Flueckiger and Sears, Boundaries of the Text: Performing the Epics in South and Southeast Asia; Grima, The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women; Gold, Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims; Gold and Raheja, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India; Inhorn, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility and Egyptian Medical Traditions; Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo; Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching; Wadley, Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, Caldwell, Oh, Terrible Mother.
Content: This course will examine the ideas of apocalypse and apocalypticism in the Middle East during the period around the time of the rise of Islam. We will read original religious, historical, and literary texts (usually in translation) and secondary works from the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to gain a fuller understanding of the nature of apocalyptic writing and thinking in the period from roughly the fifth through the ninth centuries C.E. We will explore the apocalyptic nature of Quranic rhetoric with an eye to how its project transforms the apocalypticism of its period. We will also pay special attention to theories of apocalypticism, theories of social change, and theories of genre formation.
Texts: Texts for this course will be available in a photo-duplicated packet and on reserve.
Particulars: This course will be in seminar format. Students will be expected to attend regularly and participate in discussions. Students will give two or three short oral presentations and will write a final research paper on some aspect of the seminar.
Prerequisites: Permission of the Instructor
RLE 701R: Seminar in Social Ethics: Social Justice and Social Theory Gunnemann W 2:30 - 5:30 MAX: 12
Content: The seminar will read major texts in contemporary theories of justice with the purposes of (1) understanding the ways in which different ideas of justice draw on different social-theoretical conceptions of society and the human; (2) drawing connections to religious and theological ideas; and (3) engaging the arguments among them. The primary dialogue will be between Rawls and Habermas (liberalism and critical theory) with other texts chosen for critical engagement--e.g., communitarianism and feminism (Walzer, Young, perhaps one or two others depending on participant interest).
Particulars: Seminar presentation and response, 20-25 page paper
RLHB 720N: Leviticus Hayes W 1:00-4:00 MAX: 12
Content: An exegetical study of the Hebrew text of the book of Leviticus. Attention will be given to consideration of the social, cultural, and religious systems reflected in the text.
Content: The seminar will examine methods and approaches for interpreting the history of religious groups and movements in America. We will look at synthetic histories, influential interpretations, and various methods of understanding religion in America from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including recent essays in ethnography, lived religion, phenomenology, congregational studies, communication theory, race ideology, gender, class, social control theory, social psychology, role and status theories, proxemics, material culture, quantitative methods, popular religion, local history, and collective biography.
Particulars: The seminar will also discuss research papers written by members of the seminar.
RLHT 741M: Freud, Wittgenstein, and Barth Pacini Tu 2:30-5:30 MAX: 12
Content: A reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and Barth's Römerbrief as contentious assessments of Kant's Critical Philosophy.
RLL 701A: Akkadian Walls Tu/Th 9:30-11:00 MAX: 12
Content: Basic study of the language and grammar of Akkadian.
Content: The course will survey ancient texts either attributed to or about the apostle Paul (including canonical and extracanonical materials) and the modern interpretation of these texts, attending to issues of introduction, varieties of scholarly methodologies, and the significance of Paul's legacy for contemporary Christian thought and practice.
Particulars: Assignments will consist of short, weekly papers and in-class presentations. Greek and German required.
RLNT 770: History of the Interpretation of the New Testament O'Day Th 11:30 - 2:30 MAX: 12
Content: Beginning with the ways in which the New Testament itself interprets Torah and with Torah becomes the canon of the Christian religion, this seminar surveys the premises and processes of interpretation between the first and sixteenth centuries, with specific attention to patristic, medieval, and reformation.
Texts: May include: James Kugel and Rowan Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation; Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible; The Cambridge History of the Bible, vols. 1-2.
RLPC 730C: Toward Systematic Practical Theology Fowler Th 9:00 - 12:00 noon MAX: 12
Content: Explorations in method and substantive development of theological themes focusing on human beings' vocation to partnership in the PRAXIS of God. The seminar focuses on readings from contemporary theologians and invites constructive work by participants in developing ways to imagine and communicate coherent accounts of God's involvement in creation, governance, liberation and redemption, and of humans' callings to be in partnership with God. This is constructive systematic theological work, carried out in close proximity to and with reflective human experience.
RLPC 776A: Dynamics of Religious Community: Gender, Culture and Change Moore Tu 3:00 - 6:00 MAX: 12
Content: This seminar will explore social and theological dynamics of religious community life, with particular attention to gender, culture, and change. Focusing on case studies from different historical eras and parts of the world, we will engage in sociological, anthropological, and theological analysis. Students will have an opportunity to study one community in depth, drawing interpretive conclusions for anthropological theory and ethical practice, particularly as regards human communal life.
Texts: Some of the texts will be: Biographical studies (such as Diana Eck's Encountering God and Kathryn Spink's Mother Teresa); Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Building Sisterhood; Victor Turner, Ritual Process; Clyde Holler, Black Elk's Religion; Antionette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets; and George Tinker, Missionary Conquest.
Particulars: The seminar will explore diverse methods for studying religious community, drawing largely upon readings, two short reflection papers and seminar discussion. Students will also explore and employ a methodology of their choice-developing a proposal, collaborating with seminar colleagues, conducting a study, and analyzing and interpreting the research. The major paper will be the culmination of this work.
RLR 700: Mapping the Landscapes of
Theology and Religion Chopp/Jordan
Th 3:00 - 6:00
(Open only to first-year students in
the GDR)
Content: The "Mappings" seminar is designed to engage all first-year students of the GDR on a project that cuts across the seven doctoral programs. Sharing such a project accomplishes three things. First, it reminds incoming students of the startling diversity of methods and topics now deployed in religion and theology. Second, it starts to build a local community of inquiry, not least by offering the rudiments of a common language in texts and techniques. Third, it encourages students to situate their specialized interests within the range of resources available for the study of religion and theology at Emory. This fall, the seminar will take as its common project the question of genre. It will consider assumptions and limitations both in some of the approved academic genres and in our "primary" texts or other bodies of evidence.
Texts: The readings for the seminar will consist both of important works that explain genre or criticize particular genres and a selection of specimens, from different religious traditions and historical periods, in which genre seems particularly innovative or problematic.
Particulars: The members of the seminar will be asked to write both specific exercises in response to the weekly readings and a final paper of about 20 pages on a question arising from seminar.
Content: RLR 705 meets the TATTO course requirement for students in the Division of Religion and normally is taken in the first semester of the second year of class work. During the semester students will reflect on their teaching assistantships and explore a range of theoretical and praxis issues in the relationship of teaching context, theory, practice, and identity in the religion or theology classroom.
Content: What do religious phenomena mean to their participants, seen as members of society? The seminar explores answers to this question in the work of classical social thinkers (e.g. Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud) and contemporary theorists (Bellah, Geertz, Berger, Meyer, Bourdieu). Topics include the social functions of ritual, myth and religious experience; the culturally constitutive meaning of religion as symbolic representation, theodicy and soteriology; religious evolution, social modernization, and political revolution; contemporary religious fundamentalism, politicization, secularization, class differences, and cultural conflict.
Particulars: Required: term paper plus short paper and presentation for class discussion.
Content: The seminar is about the rigorous reading of texts that set the terms for Christian debates about the human will. The texts will include works by Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. They will provoke a number of questions, familiar and unfamiliar. Some questions will be of the kind put in narrative "histories": Is Augustine's notion of free choice a Christian discovery? Dose Anselm repeat Augustine's discovery? Does Bonaventure? If so, is the discovery lost with Aquinas's adaptation of Aristotelian notions of appetite and rational deliberation? Does Scotus return to Anselm or does he teach instead something that might plausibly be called "modern"? Other questions will seek clarity about central terms and their connections: free deliberation, rational appetite, sinful bondage, graced freedom. Yet others will concern the limits, intended and unintended, on attempts to take up these questions "theologically" or "philosophically." Attention will be paid to the competing vocabularies and authorities inherited by the texts, as well as to their interactions and their afterlife in contemporary debates.
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