| REL 100 M001 |
Religion and Money
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MW |
2:15-3:35PM |
Jeanette Jouili |
HL 214 |
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This lecture course explores the complex relationships and tensions between religion, economy, and money.
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| REL 103 M001 |
Religion and Sports
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TTH |
8:00-9:20AM |
Philip Arnold |
HL 207 |
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This class explores the religious/ceremonial dimensions of sports in human culture; issues of how sacred space, athletic “gifts,” civic and ethical values connected with sports, and how identity, gender, race, ethnicity are amplified through sports. Special emphasis is on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) origins of lacrosse.
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| REL 103 M800 |
Religion and Sports
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ONLINE ASYNC |
ONLINE ASYNC |
Philip Arnold |
ASYNC |
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| REL 103 M801 |
Religion and Sports
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ONLINE ASYNC |
ONLINE ASYNC |
Philip Arnold |
ASYNC |
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| REL 130 M001 |
A Dramatic Intro to Studying Rel
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MW |
12:45-2:45PM |
William Robert |
MSQ 205B |
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This course studies religion by studying plays: dramatic texts that animate religion and our study of it. To be really dramatic, we’ll use performance as a way of generating learning that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
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| REL 191 M001 |
Religion, Meaning, Knowledge
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MW |
2:15-3:35PM |
Marcia Robinson |
HL 215 |
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This course addresses the age-old question of wisdom or the best way for humans to live and the role of religion in it.
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| REL 222 M001 |
Atheism and Agnosticism
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TTH |
9:30-10:50AM |
Gareth Fisher |
FALK 104 |
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This course surveys atheists and agnostics from their emergence during the Enlightenment to the present day, including reasoning behind their doubt or denial of God's existence, efforts to find meaning and purpose in a world without God, and struggles to find community with like-minded others.
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| REL 239 M001 |
Jewish Humor and Satire
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TTH |
2:00-3:20PM |
Ken Frieden |
HL 211 |
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Comedy in Three Acts-Act 1: Theories of humor, illustrated by Freud’s Jewish and Yiddish jokes from Vienna. Act 2: Reading Yiddish monologues and studying stand-up comedy performances. Act 3: Writing and performing Jewish stories and stand-up comedy. On the night before every Tuesday class, students post analyses of an assigned text or performance and write a short draft in the style of that source. For every Thursday class starting in week 4, students write, revise, post, and perform their own material.Throughout the semester, we read Stephen Rosenfield's Mastering Stand-Up and use it as a guide to researching, writing, and performing stand-up comedy. Students learn about specific genres (e.g., anecdotal, observational, self-deprecating) and techniques (e.g., act-outs, figures of speech, misdirect) that are used by stand-up comedians. After the Spring Break, students will compile and revise their drafts into a stand-up comedy set and prepare for the final performance. To succeed in this marathon of more than 26 writing tasks and courageous stand-up performances requires stamina and ongoing commitment.
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| REL 260 M001 |
Love & War in Hindu Myth
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TTH |
11:00AM-12:20PM |
Arun Brahmbhatt |
HL115 |
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About ten times the length of the Odyssey and the Iliad combined, the Mahabharata is a compendious ancient epic. We will familiarize ourselves with the complex narrative that has captivated South Asians for over 2,000 years: 100 babies gestating in earthen pots; a queen who inexplicably drowns her newborn children; a king who loses everything in a game of dice; the manifestation of the divine in the middle of a battlefield; a cataclysmic war between feuding cousins. We will pay close attention to the multiple registers through which the text is refracted: the social, the historical, the political, the sacred. The course culminates in an examination of the life of the Mahābhārata in classical and contemporary times, focusing on how it is retold in diverse mediums: art, dance, literature, film, and comics/graphic novels.
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| REL 300 M001 |
Illness, Performance and Religion
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MW |
2:15-3:35PM |
William Robert |
HL 504 |
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What does it mean, how does it feel, to be ill? How might religion address and affect illness—especially final, fatal illness? How might medicine and humanities intersect and interact in these interdisciplinary ways? And how might performance stage all of these things together? Join us for a discussion-based undergraduate seminar that will explore these questions by studying specific cases.
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| REL 300 M002 |
The Prison as American Religious History
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TTH |
2:00-3:20PM |
Alexandra Sokolow |
HL 115 |
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The history of the U.S. prison has long troubled the boundaries between religion and governance, church and state. In this engaged course, you will:
Investigate the relationship between religion and the U.S. prison system
Engage with writing and artwork by incarcerated people
Speak with volunteer prison chaplains
Examine prison museums’ digital exhibits
Create a media project, in partnership with Project Mend, that centers incarcerated people’s stories about religious practice & experience inside.
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| REL 300 M003 |
Love & Friendship in Antiquity
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TTH |
3:30-4:50PM |
Matthieu Herman van der Meer |
MSQ 202B |
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| REL 331 M001 |
European & American Jewish Lit
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TTH |
9:30-10:50AM |
Ken Frieden |
MSQ 206C |
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We begin by reading Franz Kafka’s texts, which often seem to be mysterious allegories. Influenced by Hasidic tales, Kafka brought that world in contact with European modernism. Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi shows the fragile position of Jews in Vienna around 1900. After analyzing the representation of anti-Semitism in that play, we will turn to works by Stefan Zweig. Primo Levi’s stories provide a post-Holocaust perspective. These European precedents serve as background to discussions of fiction by American-Jewish writers. Works by Abe Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, I. B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, and Philip Roth, and Irena Klepfisz refer to issues including assimilation, displacements from Europe and Yiddish, and contemporary American-Jewish life. The Norton Anthology of American Jewish Literature provides a wide selection of short fiction and poetry. Stories and poems by Yiddish authors show psychological and theological repercussions of war and the Nazi genocide. We will also watch clips from pertinent films such as His People, The Jazz Singer, The Imported Bridegroom, Hester Street, and Brainwashed (The Royal Game). Students write short posts, due before every class session, and participate in a group project.
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| REL 337 M001 |
Shoah: Responding to the Holocaust
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TTH |
12:30-1:50PM |
Zachary Braiterman |
HL 105 |
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Historical, literary, and philosophical representations of, and responses to, the Nazi genocide. Philosophical, theological, and ethical challenges raised by the Holocaust.
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| REL 341 M001 |
Women, Abolition, and Religion
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T |
3:30-6:15PM |
Marcia Robinson |
LYMAN 115A |
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This course addresses the role of religion in black and white women social reformers' understandings of themselves as women and as abolitionists in slaveholding America.
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| REL 347 M001 |
Religion and Conquest of America
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TTH |
11:00AM-12:20PM |
Philip Arnold |
LYMAN 115A |
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The conquest of America, and the colonialism that followed, has defined what it means to be American. It is the foundational event, which has informed Americans about their relationship with the land as a “natural resource.” In sharp contrast, however, Native Americans or Indigenous peoples (both of these are descriptive terms of the original inhabitants of the Americas), have an understanding of land as Mother Earth or as a member of the extended family. In settler-colonial and Indigenous contexts it is the meaning of land that defines religion. Conquest and colonialism has been used to justify by what is called the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery.” Understanding this religious history will help us to understand American religion and identity today.
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| REL 383 M001 |
Bollywood and Religion
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MW |
3:45-5:05PM |
Arun Brahmbhatt |
BH 110 |
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Spontaneous dance numbers. Item Queens. Saris billowing in the Alps. Double Roles. Intermissions and 200-minute+ runtimes. Masala. These are some of the defining characteristics of the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, India. With its inception in 1913 and popularly called “Bollywood” for the last 50 years, the ever-changing industry is one of the largest in the world. This course employs classical Indian theories of aesthetics to explore how Bollywood films grapple with the human condition, with the centrality of religion in these portrayals.
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