Religion-General Religion

What is religion? Why do people reach out to God(s) or other unseen powers? How are beliefs in spiritual entities expressed and perpetuated? Why do people come together to form religious communities? How does religion order people's lives, and what impact have religious visionaries and institutions had on societies through the ages? This is a co-taught seminar that introduces students to the rich and interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies.

Studies the major religious traditions of the Western world; Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam.

Introduces various aspects of the religious traditions of India, China, and Japan.

This course introduces key figures in early Chinese philosophy, and how they defined the good life, ethical ideals, and exemplary rulership. Through close readings, we will consider where these philosophers located what they called the Dao¿in human society, in the natural world, or in the cosmos¿and how they thought humans could best apprehend truths about their world. Intended for first and second year students.

This course explores human flourishing, well-being, and resiliency across academic, personal, and professional spheres. The course presents a balance of theory and practice, organized into five domains: self-awareness, well-being, connection, wisdom, and integration. Each week explores a single quality of flourishing through scientific research, humanistic reflection, and artistic expression, as well as a detailed set of contemplative practices.

These seminars introduce first- and second-year students to the academic study of religion through a close study of a particular theme or topic. Students will engage with material from a variety of methodological perspectives, and they will learn how to critically analyze sources and communicate their findings. The seminars allow for intensive reading and discussion of material. Not more than two Intro Seminars may count towards the Major.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Religious Studies.

This course will examine American religious life and thought prior to the Civil War, including but not limited to Puritanism, the "Great Awakening," slavery, the American Revolution, reform movements, and the Civil War.

Includes American religious pluralism, religious responses to social issues, and the character of contemporary American religious life.

Studies religious meanings in modern literature, emphasizing faith and doubt, evil and absurdity, and wholeness and transcendence in both secular fiction and fiction written from traditional religious perspectives.

This course interprets humanity's changing ecological relationships through religious and philosophical traditions. It takes up ethical questions presented by environmental problems, introduces frameworks for making sense of them, and examines the symbols and narratives that shape imaginations of nature.

Engaging commentary from a range of religious traditions and media sources, this course examines the enduring intellectual and political challenges of engaging religion in a pluralistic and democratic context. In addition to religious studies and theology, course readings will include material from media studies, law, political science, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.

Politics and religion are links to the exploration to culture, history, and current events. This course seeks to understand what is meant by religion and the multiple ways in which it is politically important by examining the world views of various religious traditions and their political implications.

Examines several contemporary moral problems from the perspective of ethical thought in the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions.

This course introduces undergraduates to seminal writings in modern Western thought that explore and question the meaning, truthfulness, and uses of religious belief. The goal is to develop a multi-storied narrative of the variety of interpretations given to the idea of God in modernity and to clarify the conditions of responsible religious belief in a pluralistic world. Requirements include two exams and a research paper.

This course examines how Latine religious traditions--including Latine Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Mainline Protestantism, Indigenous traditions, and religious "nones"--interact with political and democratic cultures in the United States.

If religious teachings so often focus on love and peace, why is so much violence committed in the name of religion? In this course, we will consider the ways in which religion and violence have intersected in Western religions (particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) over the past two millennia, from the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire to the modern world.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Religious Studies.

This course studies how to be a moral agent in a market society. It attends to how economic issues influence different spheres of human life, both public and private, and discusses the ethics of a professional career, the moral obligations of corporations, the nature of inequality, the economic ethics of major world traditions, and how to live a morally sane human life in a market system.

Analyzes various moral problems in medicine, health care, and global health from Christian (Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, and Islamic theological perspectives with reference to salient philosophical influences.

This course asks: what does "spiritual but not religious" mean, and why has it become such a pervasive idea in modern America? We'll study everything from AA to yoga to Zen meditation, with stops in Christian rock, Beat poetry, Abstract Expressionist painting and more. In the end, we'll come to see spirituality in America as a complex intermingling of the great world religions, modern psychology, and a crassly commercialized culture industry.

Seeing is believing. Or is it? In this course, we will examine the role of sensory perception in religious imagination. We will consider how religious practitioners think about the senses, utilize the senses to experience the world, and assign meaning to the senses. We will also probe the ways in which religious traditions deploy sensory metaphors to describe human experience of the sacred.

This course serves as an introduction to the religious beliefs and practices of China, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. The course covers several broad themes in Chinese religion, including ritual, self-cultivation, means of communicating with the gods, and the intersection of political authority and religion. We will engage with textual, material, and visual traditions.

This course traces the history of Jerusalem with a focus on its significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. How has Jerusalem been experienced and interpreted as sacred within these religious communities? How have they expressed their attachments to this contested space from antiquity to modern times? Discussion will be rooted in primary texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, with attention to their historical context.

The growing role of robots in society presents new challenges, but many of the ethical and philosophical issues raised by robots have long histories. This course will examine golems, automatons, robots, and cyborgs to consider what distinguishes humans, what it means to create other beings, what it means to be embodied, and what relationships we should have with the nonhuman.