An exploration of religious concepts, practices and issues as addressed in African literature and film. We will examine how various African authors and filmmakers weave aspects of Muslim, Christian and/or traditional religious cultures into the stories they tell. Course materials will be drawn from novels, memoirs, short stories, creation myths, poetry, feature-length movies, documentaries and short films.

This course offers third- and fourth-year Religious Studies majors resources for conceiving and executing a major research project. As a follow-up, students usually take RELG 4900 ("Distinguished Major Thesis"), which affords them an opportunity to write the research project they have conceived in this course. Whether you plan to write a thesis or not, RELG 4800 offers an accessible introduction to the craft of research in Religious Studies.

Systematic readings in a selected topic under detailed supervision. Prerequisite: Permission of departmental advisor and instructor.

An examination of religion and culture of the rabbinic movement (c. 70-600 CE) in the social and cultural contexts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Among the issues to be examined: rituals and institutions of the rabbis, social organizations within the rabbinic movement, engagement with other sectors of Jewish and gentile society.

As yoga has risen to global prominence, the scholarly study of yoga has flourished. This course offers an introduction to this scholarship, as well as an overview of the theory and practice of yoga from its ancient past to the present day. The course will focus primarily on historically Hindu traditions, though some attention will devoted to parallel traditions from Buddhism and Jainism.

How do, might, or ought the aesthetic dimensions of human experience inform engagement with religion in the public life of a pluralistic society? Employing the theological aesthetic principles of foregrounding and interlacing to structure our investigation, our study examines philosophical, theological, and ethical (both religious and theological) responses to this question.

Studies the Middle Way School of Madhyamika, including Nagarjuna's reasoning and its intent and place in the spiritual path.

Advanced study in the philosophical and spiritual language of Tibet, past and present. Prerequisite: RELB 5000, 5010, 5350, 5360, or equivalent.

Intensive consideration of a selected issue, movement or figure in Christian thought of the second through fifth centuries. Prerequisite: RELC 2050 or instructor permission.

By reading ethnographic accounts of ritual performances in West Africa and its Atlantic diaspora, the seminar considers theories of ritual, discursive and non-discursive forms of remembrance, and the production, malleability and politics of memory amidst the particular challenges that the histories of slavery, colonialism, and collective trauma pose to the development of collective identities in the Afro-Atlantic World.