This course provides an introduction to the vocabulary, methods, and theoretical assumptions of the academic study of religion. By examining several diverse religious communities and traditions--including Lakota Sioux, Southern Pentecostal, Nation of Islam, and Zen Buddhist--we examine patterns, themes, and issues that scholars commonly encounter across world religions. We also examine how specific communities give voice to themes found within the larger world religion from which they emerge.

All the writings of the New Testament are studied, in order to understand both the critical scholarly questions of date, authorship, purpose, and the impact of these writings and their authors on the emerging Christian community.

The modern human is fully immersed in a seemingly immanent technological world. Although the instrumentalization of technology in forms of state and non-state violence in the modern era -- including war, colonialization, concentration camps, detention centers, IEDs, and so on -- cannot be denied or underestimated, the psychic violence and ontological deformation of the human through the technology of the quotidian remains undertheorized. The event, results and veiled contradictions of this quotidian technological capture remain largely mystified, unseen, and unexamined.

This course examines and engages influential theories and approaches to the study of religion developed by scholars with diverse intellectual views. Through theoretical readings and case studies, students receive a broad grounding in classical and contemporary theories of religion, including comparative psychoanalytic, anthropological, feminist, and postmodern approaches. In addition to locating religious studies within wider intellectual movements, the course is designed to help students articulate the values and assumptions they bring to their own studies of religion.

This course explores the relationships between conceptions of humanity, non-human nature, and religion from the vantage point of our era of climate change and environmental destruction. Proceeding from the insight that this era troubles easy notions of human separateness and superiority, students in the course ask how communities of religious practitioners and theorists understand this moment and seek to reorient human life amongst the earthlings.

This course surveys the major developments in Christian history from its origins up to the current day. In the first half of the course, the focus is on patterns of Christian thought including institutional changes and social context up to 1500 CE. Although this is largely a story of the clerical hierarchy in the Latin West, wherever possible the course emphasizes the role of lay persons, women and Eastern Christianity.

Mysticism describes a variety of ways in which humans endeavor to encounter the divine directly. The Christian tradition has a long history of mystical encounters, which are founded in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. As a text-based religion, Christianity has a complicated relationship with mysticism, since mysticism tends to focus on the directly experiential rather than the textual. And, even as they claimed that such experiences transcended language and expression, mystics often sought to express their experiences.

Many of the distinctive features of the modern Western legal tradition can be traced to medieval Europe and itd religious beliefs and practices. International law, law on the European continent, and law in nations following the Anglo-American tradition have been deeply colored by the assumptions and arguments of medieval canon law, the law regulating the Latin Catholic Church. This courses discusses legal developments in Europe during the medieval period. Topics covered include sin and crime, natural law, and law governing marriage and sexual norms.

"Know thyself" is a maxim central to the religious quest, but individuals who are intensely and urgently driven to know themselves often occupy the outskirts of ordinary society. Although these "outsiders" are a part of their culture and contribute to their culture, they no longer share the common values of their society. The course seeks to explore the role of outsiders (those who desire inner freedom and transformation) in the context of bourgeois society.

This course teaches students to understand Islamophobia and antisemitism as historical, social, and cultural phenomena. It takes up both local and global examples of these phenomena. As students encounter the materials about the separate and entwined histories of these two phenomena, they will be asked to reflect on the degree to which antisemitism and Islamophobia should be considered under a shared rubric or in the same course.