Religion-General Religion

Tutorial on important themes, topics, and figures in religious ethics, both historically and in the present moment.

This seminar provides some philosophic disciplines needed for theological study today: resources in logic, philosophic reasoning, metaphysics, and epistemology, from classic Greek sources through the contemporary period. Students will examine how these resources inform works in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theology: medieval, modern and contemporary. For 2018, the seminar will focus on sources and uses of claims about the "universal," the "true."

This course analyzes how theology and black studies intersect with psychoanalysis, structuralism, and phenomenology. It examines how conceptions of blackness, social death, and fugitivity relate to theorizations of completeness, conceptuality, givenness, revelation, libidinal economy, abyss, apocalypse, and difference. Authors include Fanon, Marriott, Wilderson, Marion, Spillers, Fink, Moten, Levi-Strauss, and Malabou.

What is "spirituality" and why has it become such a pervasive term in contemporary American culture? This course explores this question through historical interrogation of the category and its development since the early nineteenth century. The encounter of historic religious traditions, especially Protestant Christianity, with the intellectual, cultural, economic, and social currents of modernity will form the larger background for our analysis.

Modern thought has been captivated by reflection on the problem of evil. This tutorial studies modern thinkers' efforts to understand evil, to help us understand evil and to understand the challenge that evil presents to the modern world's self-understanding. Focus will be on theoretical efforts both to understand the phenomenon and to explain and reframe the question of why we seek to understand it.

This interdisciplinary research collaboration explores religious ways of sensing and sense-making. In recent decades, cultural anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, literature, and religious studies, among others, have taken a sensory turn, resulting in the emergent field of sensory studies. Students will read and analyze sensory theory, case studies in sensory religion, and contribute original research on a topic of their choice.

This tutorial examines Black Religious Studies and Black Studies scholarship that utilizes apocalyptic ideas to analyze Black religion, thought, politics, culture, and metaphysics.

This tutorial investigates the ethical dimensions of colonialism, neocolonialism, and resistance in Latin America. Through foundational and contemporary sources -- including Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and feminist voices -- students will analyze ethical frameworks that critique violence and extractivism, and explore concepts of healing, restitution, and decolonial thought.

This individualized graduate tutorial provides an introduction to the relationship between Religion and Poetry across a number of traditions, exploring the concept of "poetic knowledge" and the relationship between poetry and spiritual realization.

This is an advanced graduate seminar meant to acquaint graduate students with contemporary work on political theology in the larger field of religious thought. We will study several major contemporary writers with an eye to understanding the theological and philosophical visions informing their work, and assessing the political and ethical implications thereof.

The focus for our seminar is Mormonism, meaning, primarily, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest Mormon body. The tutorial allows graduate students to move beyond the introductory knowledge of Mormonism to focus particular attention on issues of gender and sexuality, performance and popular culture, race, and economic concerns as they have played out over the history of the tradition.