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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.
TH 2:30-5:30 MAX: 12
Content: The seminar will examine the history of the intersections and transformations of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian traditions in the context of early British colonialism, 1765-1836, in India. Drawing up on various sources such as journals, memoirs, theological polemics, drawings, and architecture, the course will assess this critical period of cultural formation in the light of various theoretical frameworks for interpreting religious change, such as Orientalism, missiology, modernization theory, post-colonial theory, and comparative religion.
Texts: Works from the period such as the writings of Claudius Buchannan, James Mill, William Ward, Robert Grant, Rammohan Roy, Asiatick Researches, Calcutta newspapers, Church Missionary Society publications, etc. Secondary sources include: Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge; David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; and S. N. Mukherjee, Calcutta: Myths and History.
Particulars: Seminar format: students present summaries of readings and organize parts of class discussion; major research paper required. The course may be of interest to students in comparative studies in religion and the history of religious change.
F 1:00 - 3:00 MAX: 12
W 6:30-9:30 MAX: 12
Content: The seminar will engage in current arguments over the nature and the effects of justice. We will be concerned with comparing features of major alternatives (e.g., liberalism, communitarianism, feminist/mujerista, liberation, critical theory, postmodern) in terms of differing assumptions and traditions and in drawing connections to religious/theological ideas.
Texts: Rawls, Walzer, Habermas, Fraser, Young, Benhabib, MacIntyre, Sobrino, Isasi-Diaz, Lyotard, Derrida, McIntyre, others according to participant interests
Particulars: Seminar presentation and response, 20-25 page paper
TH 12:30-3:30 MAX: 12
Content: An exegetical study of the Hebrew text of the book of
Isaiah.
M 3:30-6:30 MAX: 12
Content: This seminar will meet weekly and focus on selected issues pertaining to the history of ancient Israel. It presupposes a general knowledge of ancient history and especially of Middle Eastern history during biblical times.
Particulars: There will be weekly assignments for all participants in the seminar, rather than a single research paper or final examination.
W 2:30-5:30 MAX: 12
Content: For the early church, Christianity has fundamentally to do with the development of human character for the living out of the Christian life. During the fourth and fifth centuries an enormous number of men and women believed that they could only realize this goal if they abandoned the ordinary life of the world. Nevertheless, these men and women were not cut off from their world. Appealing to the imagination of the Roman Empire, they assumed a place of central importance in it. Theirs was the ethos in which the great trinitarian and christological debates took place, and unless the perspectives of the monastics are understood, these debates will never make more than partial sense to the modern reader.
These questions will be addressed during the semester in the context of the discussion of the primary sources we shall use: (1) what is the goal of the Christian life? (2) what is its context? (3) how does the author think about the Christian life in relation to what he affirms about God, Christ, and the world? (4) what is the view of the self found in these documents? (5) what are the virtues and vices relevant to the Christian vision found in these texts?
Texts: Athanasius, The Life of St. Anthony; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses; Evagrius Pontikus, The Praktikos; Centuries on Prayer, The Macarian Homilies; Dorotheos of Gaza, Homilies and Sayings; Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Fathers; Peter Brown, The Body and Society, Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City, Andrew Louth, Vision of God in the Early Church; Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Mystical Theology and the Divine Names; Susanna Elm, Virgins of God.
Particulars: Short paper weekly and a research paper
TH 2:30 - 5:30 MAX: 12
Content: The role of Christ in Augustine's theological outlook, with particular reference to the Incarnation. In this connection, some consideration of his view of language.
Texts: Soliloquies, The Teacher, Of True Religion, On Christian Doctrine, Letter 187. Selections from Confessions, On Dialectic, Expositions on Psalms, On the Trinity, The Spirit and the Letter, Nature and Grace, The Grace of Christ and Original Sin, The City of God.
Particulars: 1 or 2 written discussion starters for the day's reading, term paper, presence and participation.
W 2:30 - 5:30 (or W 4:00 - 7:00) MAX: 12
Content: The focus of the seminar is exegetical: it provides an opportunity for close reading of the Greek text of Acts, giving attention to text-critical questions, especially the distinctive readings of the Western text, but also to historical and literary dimensions of the text. Attention is also given to the history of scholarship on Acts.
Particulars: Sessions will be devoted to translation and discussion of the Greek text, reports on assigned readings and topics, and presentations of student research projects.
TH 6:00 - 9:00 pm MAX: 12
Content: The course will examine different facets of the Hellenistic milieu of early Christianity, concentrating on historical, religious, philosophic, literary, and cultural issues. Our time will be roughly split between investigating primary and secondary materials. Besides extensive reading, students will be asked to make a variety of in-class
presentations and write several research papers, book reviews, etc. Knowledge of Greek, Latin, and German is required.
TU 2:30-5:30 MAX: 12
Content: This course explores and applies rhetorical criticism both in disciplinary and interdisciplinary form to writings that are considered sacred by some religious tradition. The course is guided by ancient, modern, and postmodern analysis and interpretation of discourse in its social, cultural, and ideological contexts.
The course will focus especially on wisdom, apocalyptic, and miracle discourse in Mediterranean literature, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. There will be additional attention to early Christian interweaving of death-resurrection and pre-creation discourse into these three discourses. Also the seminar will look at the reception of Gospel teachings by Muslims and the Sermon on the Mount by some Hindus.
Analysis of wisdom, apocalyptic, and miracle discourse will set a context for individual student projects, which may focus on writings in any religious tradition. Students with an interest or specialty in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions are invited to the seminar, since analysis of writings in these traditions is supported by other seminars in the Graduate Division of Religion.
Texts: Vernon K. Robbins, The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse; Vernon K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts; John J. Collins, Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age; John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination; Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount; Leonard L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation; Gerd Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition; Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self; Heikki Räisänen, Marcion, Muhammad, and the Mahatma: Exegetical Perspectives on the Encounter of Cultures and Faiths.
Particulars: Weekly projects will provide a context for students to learn specific strategies for analyzing the inner texture, intertexture, social and cultural texture, ideological texture, and sacred texture of texts. Students will have an opportunity to test a recently developed computer program for applying socio-rhetorical analysis to various kinds of religious texts. A research paper will be written in installments, including class presentations at each stage.
M 2:00-5:00 MAX: 10
Content: How do we end the targeting of human beings by other human beings without targeting the targeters, scapegoating scapegoaters, persecuting persecutors, terrorizing terrorists, murdering murderers? That is the millennial, transhistorical, perduring human predicament. It is the quintessential question of our humanity, more determinative than our rightly prized rationality (as homo sapiens) or our technical genius (as homo faber). On the answer to that question depend the authenticity and inauthenticity of our humanity as a species-wide, collective project--still under siege by malignant forces in our histories and in our psyches. (Not only do we chronically target-out, we also target-in, each individual compulsively scapegoating and attacking parts of the psyche internal to her/him; at the same time, colluding in social structures and processes that scapegoat and attack people external to him/her.)
This is a futuring course: Assume that a goal (like fully-realized humanization) has been achieved at some point in the future, however hopeless its actual achievement may seem under current conditions. Then speculate: How was that achievement possible? From the vantage point of a projected future solution, hypothesize: What changes in current conditions were (would have been) key shifts toward that goal? Finally, what are next steps along that trajectory? Central to our inquiries will be the theory of scapegoating and sacred violence developed by Rene Girard, and currently under research and critique by members of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) among other scholars/practitioners. The course anticipates the next annual meeting of COV&R, convening here at Emory University June 3-5, 1999, under the theme Violence Reduction in Theory & Practice: From Primates to Nations. In concert with that theme the course will feature practicums as well as theory (and critique of theory).
To summarize: we will explore the prospect of a violence-free future in view of our earliest processes of primate humanization after violence on the one hand, and in anticipation of our full humanization after (the end of systemic) violence on the other.
Texts: Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads; Christine Gudorf, Victimization: Examining Christian Complicity; Alice Miller, For Your Own Good : Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence;
Pearl Oliner, ed., Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism;
Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology; James Williams, ed. The Girard Reader;
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
Particulars: The course is designed as a cooperative seminar that depends on student initiative and commitment in reviewing the assigned readings, as well as in designing practicums, media presentations, and midterm/endterm presentations. Course requirements include (1) at least 2 class presentations on readings; (2) a midterm practicum or media presentation; (3) a final term paper incorporating elements of the above.
TH 9:00-12:00
Content: A reading of major sources in Niebuhr's published and unpublished writings, and some commentaries on his work, with special attention to the explicit and implicit systematic practical theology undergirding his theological ethics.
Texts: We will read parts of or all of the following of Niebuhr's books: The Social Sources of Denominationalism; The Kingdom of God in America; The Meaning of Revelation; Christ and Culture; Radical Monotheism and
Western Culture; Faith on Earth; Theology, History and Culture: Major Unpublished Works; and The Responsible Self. Selected articles and passages from notes on Niebuhr's lecture course on Christian Ethics will be drawn upon.
Particulars: Readings will average 200 pp. or less per week. Participants will prepare three brief review essays during the term (6 pp.) to present in class sessions, and a longer critical and constructive essay at the end. Prospective students who want to get a flavor of the instructor's approach to HRN should examine Fowler's To See the Kingdom: The Theological Vision of H. Richard Niebuhr. (Abingdon, 1974; Universities Press of America, 1985.)
F 2:30-5:30 MAX: 10
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.
TH 6:00-9:00 pm MAX: 12
Content: The seminar seeks to foster constructive theological reflection regarding various intersections of theology, philosophy and the social sciences. As presently conceived, the seminar will treat three conceptual/textual clusters - -
1) the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr viewed in relation to the Frankfurt School of critical theory; 2) John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1993) and the quest for a "radical orthodoxy"; 3) selected feminist theologians viewed in relation to the work of Luce Irigaray.
Particulars: Participants are asked to prepare three brief seminar presentations and to participate actively in discussion. In lieu of a final paper, participant will write three position papers of moderate length, each sketching and supporting a theological position vis-a-vis one of the reading clusters.
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