Global Arc

This course introduces students to the Tantric traditions of premodern India through a close study of the idealized religious careers of Tantric initiates. It uses primary sources (in translation) to reconstruct the milestones, practices, and experiences that defined what it meant to be a member of a Hindu or Buddhist Tantric community. We will consider especially the broader religious context, Tantric initiation, and post-initiatory rituals involving yogic exercises, sexual practices, and violent sorcery. Students will also gain an understanding of the relationship between Hindu and Buddhist forms of Tantric scripture and practice.

This course will explore the phenomenon of mysticism in Spanish America and early modern Spain. Visions, trances, witchcraft, ecstatic religiosity, miracles, religious authority, and ecclesiastical discipline all play important roles in this history. Issues of gender, race, ideas about the body, nature, and the supernatural are important themes in the scholarship and primary sources we will read together.

Suffering is a fundamental feature of the human condition. But it has been a central aim of many religious and philosophical thinkers to eliminate it altogether. We will examine the grounds of suffering and investigate the three basic ways in which various thinkers have sought to eradicate it: (1) by avoiding life's problems (from Netflix to suicide); (2) by fixing life's problems (from personal saintliness to political utopianism); or (3) by ceasing to judge anything to be problematic in the first place (from Buddhist spiritual practices to Stoic ones). Finally, we will look at those who insist that suffering should not be eliminated at all.

An examination of the meaning of Christian ethics through a study of selected contemporary moral and political issues: bioethics, capital punishment, sex and marriage, pluralism, race, class, gender, the environment, the morality of warfare, torture, and the role of religion in public life. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The most penetrating critiques of religion have the power to challenge our whole way of being and are often just as unsettling to atheists as to believers. After all, religions are more than just sets of beliefs - they are complex weaves of values, practices, narratives, social structures, and more - which tend to leave their stamp long after people have deserted their explicit creeds. This course explores some of the key critiques of Christianity - and Christian-moulded culture - to emerge in post-Enlightenment Europe, and will involve opening ourselves up to the painfully sharp critical scalpels of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and others.

An examination of the most influential theoretical, pragmatic, and moral arguments regarding the existence and nature of God (or gods). Along the way, we consider debates about whether and how we can talk or think about such a being, and about whether mystical experience, miracles, and the afterlife are intelligible notions. Finally, we consider whether religious commitment might be rationally acceptable without any proof or evidence, and whether the real-world fact of religious diversity has philosophical implications. Course readings will be taken from both historical and contemporary sources.

In this course we will examine the historical and current place of the Bible in America, from Puritans' use of the Geneva Bible to nineteenth-century Hebrew printing to twenty- first century bible apps. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which different communities have read, referred to, presented, translated, and interpreted the Bible over time. Our readings will encompass both secondary sources addressing these questions and a variety of American bibles, from eighteenth-century pulpit bibles to contemporary comic books.

In this course we examine a variety of new religious movements that tested the boundaries of acceptable religion at various moments in American history. We pay particular attention to government and media constructions of the religious mainstream and margin, to the politics of labels such as "cult" and "sect," to race, gender, and sexuality within new religions, and to the role of American law in constructing categories and shaping religious expressions. We also consider what draws people to new religions and examine the distinctive beliefs, practices, and social organizations of groups labeled by outsiders as "cults."

An introductory exploration of the history of religious change and the Catholic Church in Latin America during the dramatic years of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, from 1492 to the beginning of mainland independence in the early nineteenth century. Through primary sources, secondary readings, lectures, and discussion, students will grapple with such subjects as: the role of the church in "the conquest"; the complexities of religious change in indigenous populations; women and men's daily encounters with the church and devotional culture; and changes in religious expression and the role of the church in colonial society.

An introductory exploration of women's experience of and participation in the Catholic Church and colonial Christianity in Spanish America. Through primary sources, secondary readings, lectures, and discussion, we will look at women's roles in the processes of conquest and colonization; how conversion and religious change affected gender ideologies and gender relations within indigenous communities; women's daily encounters with the church and participation in devotional culture; and the ways women's complex relationships with the colonial church was shaped by race and social status.