Religion Department

REL 121 - The Rise and Formation of Islam

An introduction to the rise and formation of Islam as a prophetic religious tradition, this course is intended to highlight the manifold expressions of Muslim life through diverse historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. We examine the emergence of Islam in late antiquity and study the development of Muslim intellectual traditions and sociopolitical institutions through the eleventh century. Two broad aims of the course: 1) to provide students with basic knowledge of Islamic history, belief, and ritual life; and 2) to equip students with knowledge for critically and actively analyzing discussions of Islam in media and contemporary world events.

REL 123 - Islam in the Modern World

Muslim-majority societies faced daunting social, political, and intellectual challenges after Europe's military and economic expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the modern period, Muslims have pursued various attempts at reimagining Islam and strengthening Muslim-majority polities through different agendas of reform and revival. The course will survey major early-modern Muslim empires (such as the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals) in relation to developments such as European colonialism, the rise of nation-states, and feminism. Readings include literary works and autobiographies of Muslims from different cultural backgrounds as well as ethnographies and historical studies of social groups and institutions

REL 131 - Introduction to Hinduism

This conference will explore the foundations and developments of the South Asian religion called Hinduism. Our sources draw from the vast corpus of mythic and epic literature: cosmogonic Vedas, philosophically speculative Upanishads, duty-focused (dharma) epics, and later devotional (bhakti) poetry. Through primary sources as well as ethnographic accounts of diverse lived traditions we will familiarize ourselves with several gods, goddesses, heroes, ideas, and practices that persist throughout South Asian history.

REL 132 - Introduction to South Asian Buddhism

This course is designed to explore the foundational "three jewels" of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma (the teaching), and the samgha (the Buddhist community). This survey of Buddhist thought and practice in its Indic context will introduce various philosophical and practical currents that have made an indelible mark on the variety of Buddhisms historically practiced throughout the world. The emic "three jewels" framework will organize our inquiry: special attention will be given to 1) the centrality of the idea of the Buddha and the Buddha biography; 2) the canonical teachings, didactic narratives, and ethical and philosophical systems of the Theravāda and Mahāyāna schools; and 3) the practical impact of the samgha in history, including Buddhist nationalism and activism today.

REL 141 - Christianity: The First Seven Centuries

The course serves as an introduction to the Christian religion in the ancient world until the rise of Islam. After an introduction to the earliest Christian writings, translated from the Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, the course traces the development of Christian institutional forms, the religion's manifold interpretive strategies and theological debates, its ritual practices and associated material cultures, and its expansion from its origin in Roman Iudaea eastward to the greater Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and China; southward to Egypt and the Horn of Africa; and westward to Europe and North Africa. The course assumes no prior knowledge of the Christian religion and is open to first-year students.

REL 151 - Introduction to Judaism

This course introduces students to the history, practices, and thought of Judaism. We will survey the history of the religion through representative texts, considering the features of the ancient, medieval, and modern communities of Judaism. In so doing, we will consider the ethnic/racialized representation of Jewish communities throughout the history of the religion. Furthermore, we will undertake our exploration in tandem with occasional field trips and guest lecturers to add an experiential dimension to our learning. We will ask, "What do Jewish communities have in common and in what ways do these communities diverge?"

REL 152 - Introduction to the Hebrew Bible

This course introduces the text and historical contexts of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretive approaches. We will read widely across 24 biblical books, considering the major features, themes, and genres of textual collections. Additionally, we will explore the reception of the biblical texts we read throughout history-seeking to understand these texts in conjunction with Jewish and Christian reading communities who claim them. We will ask, "What is in the Hebrew Bible and what is the function of its texts through time?" We will see a complex mosaic of biblical texts that interact with a myriad of historical circumstances, producing a wide array of interpretive traditions.

REL 201 - Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion

An introduction to various interpretive frameworks and methodological issues that inform religion as a critical, reflexive, academic discipline. Texts pertaining to the definition and scope of the inquiry and methods of investigation will be critically engaged and their applicability tested with an eye toward their utility for understanding religion and religious phenomena.

REL 215 - Religion, Race, and Ethnicity

In 1999 Charles H. Long noted that "there is a complex relationship between the meaning and nature of religion as a subject of academic study and the reality of the peoples and cultures who were colonized..." This course seeks to explore that complexity through critical reflection on religion and race in three contexts: religion and ethnic reasoning before modernity; the intertwined emergence of religion and race as elements of the modern social imaginary in Western Europe; and recent works on religion and race in the American context that directly engage religious studies research methodologies and critical theories.

REL 226 - Islam in America

This course will examine the history of Islam in America from the colonial period to the aftermath of 9/11. Through examination of select primary sources, the course will contextualize the phenomenon of American Islam at the intersection of American religious history and modern Islamic history. It will inquire into how the history of American Islam could enrich conventional understandings of religious pluralism in the United States and the relationship between Islam and modernity. Topics to be discussed include the relationship between race, ethnicity, and religion in the United States; the influence of comparative theology and religious studies on American conceptions of religious diversity; the relationship between missions, colonialism, and industrialization in the late nineteenth century; the role of Islam in the civil rights movement in the United States and in nationalist movements in Muslim-majority societies; and the rise of militant Islam as a matter of global concern.

REL 259 - American Studies Seminar: Jews across the Americas

See ENG 303 "Jews across the Americas" for description.

REL 327 - Erasure and Location of Muslims in Western Humanities

This course inquires into how the erasure and forgetting of the connections Muslims have historically created between Europe, Africa, and Asia have been central to the making of the idea of the West. Using Reed's iconic humanities program as a case study, in the first half of the course we explore the making of racialized and civilizational humanities "general education" courses as a framing mechanism for understanding and explaining the modern era. Here we work to theorize the concept of erasure and understand its significance in shaping contemporary conceptions of religious, racial, and cultural differences. In the second half of the course, we aim to locate Muslims within the context of the exchanges and rivalries that have historically and genealogically connected Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Drawing on recent advances made in the study of religion, we work to conceptualize a more cross-cultural and global approach to the humanities. Students who have previously taken REL 227 should not enroll in this course.

REL 328 - Muhammad and the Qur'an

This course introduces students to the Qur'an (Koran) through diverse perspectives, including through its revelation, its assembly as a text, its interpreters, and the Qur'an as a material object. Students will examine the life of the Prophet Muhammad in conjunction with the revelation of the Qur'an as well as the importance of the Prophet's own sayings and example in Islamic law and practice. We will examine interpretations of the Qur'an from different chronological, geographical, and gendered perspectives. Students will leave the class with an understanding of the role of the Qur'an for Muslims and Islam historically and in contemporary times, as well as debates surrounding it. We will also examine contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, considering how misunderstandings of the Qur'an and its contents contribute to fears of the text and Islam.

REL 331 - Lives of the Buddha

This course trains attention on the central story at the heart of the Buddhist tradition: the biography of the (historical) Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, as rendered in narrative and material forms. We will explore the role of hagiography, narrative, and epic poetry (kāvya) in creating and sustaining Buddhist thought and practice. Our sources include the early Sanskrit texts Buddhacarita and Lalitavistara Sūtra, the fifth-century Pāli Jātakanidāna, the twelfth-century Pāli Jinalankara, and the twentieth-century Nepal Bhasa Sugata Saurabha, as well as bountiful sculptural examples from Buddhist sites in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. We will ask, "What do the variety of retellings and representations reveal about the concerns and aspirations of their respective communities?" We will find that the category of "biography" extends beyond the representation of a singular life, in terms of both content (previous lives are included) and form, as biography is the vehicle that conveys Buddhism's central teachings, the dhamma.

REL 334 - Gender and Buddhism

In this conference, we will consider the ways in which categories such as "woman," "man," "ubhatovyanjañaka" ("intersex"), "paṇḍaka," "feminine," "masculine," "gender," "nun," and "monk" have been explained and imagined by Buddhist communities through various historical and cultural locations. We will begin with an examination of early Buddhist sources, including depictions of the Buddha as a sexualized "bull of a man," and the stories surrounding the founding of the nun's order and the songs of women saints (Pāli Therīgāthā). We will then explore gender(ed) imagery in Mahāyāna sources, with a focus on the gender transformation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in India to Guānyīn in China and Kannon in Japan, as well as the feminine principle envisioned by Tibetan Vajrayāna traditions. Key questions drive our inquiry: how do Buddhists, especially those who have taken vows, understand theoretical and practical tensions inherent in the Buddhist tradition? How do sacred images relate to social realities?

REL 335 - South Asian Religious Nationalisms

This conference will explore legends and legitimacy, specifically the use of Hindu theologies and mythologies in the formation and perpetuation of South Asian religious nationalisms. By examining how nationalist discourse invokes and applies historical and theological sources, we will question layers of legitimacy, and explore how and why religious narratives and mythically-infused histories are conceived, preserved, explained, and employed. Sources range from pre-independence novels to political treatises, classical religious texts to modern documentaries. Issues to consider include: How is religion used to explain or justify political action? How do images operate in augmenting the discourse? What is the broader context of postcolonial identity formation? What is the impact of Subaltern Studies on historiography and religion?

REL 336 - Buddhist Ethics

This conference will consider theoretical structures, patterns of behaviors, and societal norms operative in Buddhist communities of the past and present. We will begin with shared doctrinal foundations of Buddhist ethics, key elements and values that represent a thread of continuity among Buddhist traditions. Our focus will be on canonical formulations and examples from various genres of Buddhist literature, historical and contemporary accounts of Buddhist behaviors and motivations along thematic lines: Buddhist morality; foundational concepts (such as karma, four noble truths, the practical path or Middle Way); the three marks of existence-namely dis-ease, impermanence, no-self; key practical values; human rights; social ethics; sexuality; gender; abortion and contraception; medical ethics; war, terrorism, and peace; economic ethics; Engaged Buddhism; and animals and the environment. Our goal is to develop a sophisticated lexicon and confidence in our understanding that enables us to delve deeply into primary case examples, literary, documentary, scholarly, or other in nature. We seek to understand the ways Buddhist ethics shape, sustain, and reflect Buddhist worldviews and lives.

REL 341 - Ascesis in the Benedictine and Orthodox Monastic Traditions

The course focuses on a complex set of literary, communal, and embodied practices concerned with training and self-regulation, or ascesis, that promises the possibility of self-transformation and an experience of God. With an eye toward understanding contemporary Benedictine and Orthodox Christian monastic thought and practice, the literature of ascesis will be explored in a number of contexts: the late ancient Mediterranean; the medieval West and Byzantium; and the United States, Russia, and Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Academic theories of asceticism and works addressing social-historical contexts will provide the basis for critical reflection and sustained comparison.

REL 344 - Augustine of Hippo

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Augustine of Hippo for Western religious thought, political theory, and understandings of human interiority. This course is devoted to the careful reading of a limited number of his major works, supplemented by recent scholarship that addresses Augustine's social-historical context, philosophical and theological commitments, and anthropology.

REL 345 - The New Testament

Although the works comprising the canonical New Testament represent but a fraction of the extant ancient writings that attest to Christian origins, the task of understanding them has long been a discrete field for students of Christian antiquity. This course serves as an introduction to various modes of critical New Testament study and offers students the opportunity to explore the five major classes of works in the collection: the Epistles of Paul, the synoptic Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, the Deutero-Pauline epistles, the Catholic epistles, and the Johannine literature.

REL 348 - Works of Mercy in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Christian Traditions

This course focuses on historically important examples of Christian literature that are concerned with alleviating human suffering caused by poverty, disability, and various forms of social exclusion. With an eye toward an understanding of contemporary Roman Catholic and Eastern Christian thought and practice concerning works of mercy, contemporary scholarship addressing social-historical contexts and theoretical concerns will provide the basis for critical reflection and sustained comparison

REL 349 - Mysticism in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Traditions

Far from being a timeless, universal or near-universal feature of religion, "mysticism," a word that has its first known English usage in the early eighteenth century, has a history. One can at this point in time easily trace the rise and dramatic fall of mysticism as a central category for organizing scholarly knowledge and understandings of religion. "Mysticism" and its cognates and closely related terms, however, have also been and presently are used by some Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians to classify certain texts that treat ritual, theology, and structures of human interior organization and  movement. The course explores this Christian tradition and related scholarship and historically situates representative examples of mystical works drawn from late antiquity, medieval Europe, the Byzantine Commonwealth, and the twentieth century.

REL 351 - Bible and Ethnicity: Deuteronomy and Mestizaje

This course focuses on a key text of the Hebrew Bible: the book of Deuteronomy-a combination of narrative, poetic, and legal traditions. We will consider the literary and historical features of this text in light of the ways that Deuteronomy advocates for a particular ethnic worldview in the dispossessed, marginalized communities of ancient Israel. Furthermore, we will investigate its role in forming more recent ethno-religious communities. To aid our inquiry into ancient ethnicity, we will explore the contemporary contours of the study of ethnicity as well as Latinx theorization of racial/ethnic intermixture (mestizaje). We will ask, "What is the effect of Deuteronomy on the ethnic formation of its various communities of reception?" We will find that the text is deployed and redeployed in multiple ways through time, highlighting the nature of the Hebrew Bible as a part of a broader field of traditions that come to shape ethno-religious communities.

REL 354 - Bible, Race, and Empire

This course focuses on the role of biblical texts as deployed to support and/or resist the racialized colonial projects of "Western" empires. We will consider the literary and historical features of various biblical texts alongside historical analysis of biblical reception in colonial societies. To aid our exploration, we will chart the contemporary contours of research into race/racialization. We will ask, "What are the roles of biblical texts in the racialized realities of 'Western' colonial projects?" We will find that biblical texts are malleable traditions-able to empower both imperial racialized projects and localized forms of resistance.

REL 356 - Modern Jewish Thought

Hope for a future time of perfection constitutes a leading theme in modern Jewish thought. The idea of the future, whether construed in secular terms as utopia, communism, or Zionism or expressed as a traditional belief in the Messiah, whether Orthodox or Lubavitcher, is a feature shared by otherwise disparate sectors of Jewish thought, and therefore is a fruitful object of study in understanding the range of twentieth-century thinking as expressed in a Judaic idiom. Course materials will derive from Marxist, Zionist, neo-Kantian, Lubavitcher, and other sources, in addition to those of philosophers and theologians. What does this orientation to the future mean? Why is it a central feature not only of Jewish thought, but also of Jewish social organization? How do we make sense of our questions from the perspective of religious studies? What does this twentieth-century thought and action tell us about Jewish strategies for the twenty-first century, for understanding present Jewish thought in a post-9/11 world?

REL 363 - Holy Sh*t: Religious Things

What makes a thing, a place, or a person sacred? This course focuses on the tangible elements of religion: the materials, objects, spaces, art, blood and guts that inspire belief and community. We will explore the way "things" interact with humans in their processes of creation, interpretation and the (re)definition of the religious, the sacred, the natural and supernatural, the holy, the profane, the secular, the immaterial, and the transcendent, grounding our exploration in case studies. Our work will raise our awareness of the significance of materiality in religion across religious traditions and raise questions of authenticity, replication, and commodification. This course will include small-group discussions, field trips, and multimedia presentations

REL 365 - Understanding Religion

This course provides students with an opportunity to consider religion from a variety of perspectives employed in the contemporary study of religion. Evidence for religion and religions will be examined from multiple traditions, geographical locations, and historical periods, but the course is not intended to be a survey of "world religions" or a historical overview of classic books in the academic study of religion. Instead, exemplary humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of religion will provide a basis for empathetically exploring religious self-understandings while critically examining them within larger social, political, cultural, and epistemological contexts.

REL 374 - Entanglement: Environment, Ethics, and Religion

This course weaves together interconnected discourses to interrogate the premise, and obligations, of interconnectedness - environmental and social - in this age of climate crisis. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh wonders how future generations will frame this period of "derangement" - our willful ignorance of human responsibility for, and "imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of," the climate crisis. What roles have religions played in conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the environment? We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks, from Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, to Ian Hodder's entanglements, to Buddhist discourses on interconnectedness and codependent origination, paticcasamuppada. We will focus on Buddhist discourses on the first noble truth, dukkha (dis-ease, unease, suffering), in light of solastalgia ("the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape," coined by Glenn Albrecht) and related eco-anxiety. We will read the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder (Reed '51) as we imagine what the amelioration of suffering (social and environmental) might entail, and what the interdisciplinary study of religion might offer.

REL 402 - The Junior Seminar in Religion

This course offers intensive study of a particular topic, drawing on various methodologies in the study of religion. While the course is intended to prepare department majors for the senior program, it is open to all qualified students.

REL 470 - Thesis

REL 481 - Individual Work in Special Fields

REL 510 - Daoist Dao versus Buddhist Śūnyatā

The Daoist Dao is an argument about nondualism, about the ineffable blackness beyond our conventional A/not-A distinctions and definitions. Buddhist Śūnyatā or "emptiness" is an argument about impermanence, about all things ultimately being empty of independence in space and constancy in time. Are the Dao and Śūnyatā two separate ideas or one? In Chinese history, these ideas definitely talked to one another, Buddhism upon its arrival first using Daoist understandings to express itself; in Chinese religion, Laozi and the Buddha were (and still are) literally worshipped side by side. Yet their first axioms about the nature of reality are differently nuanced. They're like two trees that have naturally grafted into one another in places ("inosculation"), becoming a single organism and yet maintaining separate roots at the same time. This course will examine the two ideas individually using their respective masterpieces in Chinese philosophy - the Dao via Laozi and Zhuangzi and Śūnyatā via The Platform and Vimalakīrti sutras - but our goal is to foster a dialogue between them, using each to crystallize the other.