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Religious Studies

RELI 060 [006E]: Religion and Racism
Communication Intensive (CI); Social and Behavioral Science/Other (SS); US Diversity (US) [GC Social Science & Cultural Diversity]
Edward Curtis
How does religion become a source of ethnic or racial prejudice among certain religious practitioners? When does prejudice against religious persons themselves constitute a form of racism or ethnocentrism? In this class, we will explore answers to these questions by examining the connections between religion and racism in modern racialized societies like the United States and South Africa. Topics may include American prejudices against Islam, efforts among American Christians to overcome the black-white divide in the United States, and the roles played by South African Christians in supporting and opposing apartheid. In studying religion and racism, we will also attempt to understand the larger relationships between religion and its social, economic, cultural, and political contexts.

RELI 061 [006F]: Religion, Magic, and Science
Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Philosophical]
Randall Styers
For well over a hundred years, scholars of the social sciences and religious studies have struggled to define "magic" as a distinct form of belief and social practice. But magic has proved extremely amorphous, and these scholarly efforts to find a single, stable definition have been repeatedly frustrated. Perhaps the only major agreement among the scholars in this tradition is that, whatever else it might be, magic is fundamentally non-modern. These academic debates over magic thus serve, in an unexpected way, to provide a valuable window into the nature of life in the modern world. Magic has served as a foil for modernity, a foil particularly for modern forms of religious piety and scientific rationality. These academic debates over the nature of magic have thus offered scholars an extremely rich opportunity to grapple with the definitions of religion and science. This course will explore the long tradition of scholarly efforts to define magic, religion and science and to police their relations with one another. Through this process, our ultimate objective will be to consider the nature of modernity itself. In addition, this study will also give us insight into the continued popular appeal of magic in contemporary society, and we will look at recent manifestations of magical subculture to see what they might teach us about life in the modern world.

RELI 063 [006G]: The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Historical Analysis (HS); The World Before 1750 (WB) [GC Pre-1700 Western History]
Jodi Magness
In 1947, a Bedouin boy wandered into a cave near the Dead Sea and discovered ancient scrolls stored in pottery jars. These scrolls and others that were later found in adjacent caves are called the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls, which date to about the time of Jesus, include the earliest preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible, as well as other ancient literary works. The scrolls were deposited in the caves by a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who lived at the nearby site of Qumran. In this seminar, we discuss the controversies surrounding Qumran (for example, was it really a sectarian settlement or was it a fortress or villa?). We also review the categories of literature represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and discuss why they are important.

RELI 064 [006J]: Re-Introducing Islam
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Global Issues (GL); Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Carl Ernst
This will be an introduction to the Islamic faith, focusing on the devotional relationship to the Prophet Muhammad that lies at the core of Muslim religious experience. It will use major themes of Islamic religious thought to bring out both traditional spirituality and the critical issues confronting Muslims today. It will sensitize students to the anti-Islamic biases that have clouded Western thought for centuries, and it will offer a fair-minded look at the debates taking place among Muslims today. Most importantly, it will reveal the central importance of the Prophet Muhammad as the model for worship, religious practice, ethics, family, society, politics, and mystical experience.

RELI 065 [006G]: Myth, Philosophy, and Science in the Ancient World
Historical Analysis (HS); The World Before 1750 (WB) [GC Pre-1700 Western History]
Zlâtko Plese
This interdisciplinary course explores various, often conflicting ways of shaping reality in the ancient world - religious, scientific, and philosophical. The course is organized around a series of case studies: (1) creation and organization of the world; (2) origins of mankind and sexual differentiation; (3) invention of the 'self'; (4) the origin and nature of dreams; (5) foundations of law, justice, and culture. Short papers, in-class discussions, and oral presentations will be used to reconstruct the complex intellectual world of the natural scientists, philosophers, oral story-tellers, ethnographers, and cultural historians throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Readings include Near Eastern mythical narratives and Homeric poems and hymns; selections from the Presocratic philosophers and Plato's dialogues; works from the Hippocratic medical orpus and Galen's medical treatises; and a number of religious texts from the Hellenistic period, Early Christianity, and Late Antiquity.

RELI 066 [006J]: Buddhism in America: From the Buddha to the Beastie Boys
Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Thomas A. Tweed
Most people think of America as a Christian nation, but Buddhism has had a presence since the nineteenth century and has had an increasing cultural impact in recent decades. This interdisciplinary course analyzes that cultural impact. It first introduces students to the teachings and practices of Buddhism, the religion founded in India by the Buddha five hundred years before Jesus, and then traces that Asian religion's history in the U. S., highlighting the period since 1965. Along the way, we focus on three basic questions: 1) What happens when immigrants bring their faith to another nation? 2) Why do some people change their religion? 3) How has Buddhism shaped American culture, and the culture of North Carolina in particular? We explore these guiding questions by examining a wide range of sources, including autobiographies, letters, poetry, art, architecture, ritual, music, film, and the law. Class sessions will emphasize student participation, and we will use multiple media, including film, music, and web pages. We also will visit an art museum and several Buddhist temples.
Visiting temples is part of the class research project that we will work on together. Working in small research teams, we will document the increasing presence of Buddhists in North Carolina, and to support that field research we have been awarded a grant from Harvard University's “Pluralism Project.” Each student in the seminar, then, will do research at one or two temples, conducting interviews, taking photographs, gathering information, and writing a profile that we will post on the Harvard project's web page. We also will create our own web page as a way to communicate the results of our collaborative research, and we will consider other means of communicating our findings too. The students in an earlier first year seminar on this topic, for example, decided to organize a public presentation, attend a scholarly conference, and print and distribute a seventy-page guidebook, Buddhism and Barbecue: A Guide to Buddhist Temples in North Carolina. This fall we will come to our own decision about the most effective ways to share the results of our research with the wider community.

RELI 067 [006F]: Nature, Culture and Self-Identity: Religion in the Construction of Social Life
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Lauren Leve
What does it mean to say there are no individuals in Hindu India? Are human beings really "self-less," as Buddhism believes? How are Judeo-Christian ideas about freedom, agency and providence embedded in American understandings of democratic citizenship and economic behavior? This course examines how different religious traditions conceive of human nature and the ways that these understandings are reflected in diverse forms of personal identity and public life. Readings will include biography, legal briefings and philosophical musings, as well as ethnographic case studies from places including India, Nepal, Tibet, Brazil, the Middle East, and the USA, and excerpts from a variety of scriptural traditions. By the end of the course, students can expect to have improved their critical reading and analytical skills, and to have developed a detailed appreciation of the ways in which religiously-constituted understandings of what it is to be human shape culture and self-identity.

RELI 068 [006F]: Charisma in Religion, Science, and Poetry: Case Studies in the Entrepreneurial Imagination
Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Philosophical]
Ruel Tyson
Before the arrival of the entrepreneurs in the contemporary meaning of the term, there were prophets, poets and scientists. The students in this course will identify, characterize, and compare strong cases from each of these types of change agents. In what ways were they all practitioners of that elusive skill and virtuosity we call "charisma"? What does the poet have to say to the prophet, the scientist/philosopher to both? How do the methods and imaginations of each equip students to be entrepreneurial in their own learning, their own ventures while continuing their education at this university?

RELI 069 [006I]: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Judaism
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Other Western History]
Yaakov Ariel
In recent decades, issues of sexuality and gender have strongly influenced religious life in America and elsewhere. New understanding of the role of women, and growing choices and freedoms in the realm of sexuality have strongly affected the Jewish community, reshaping the tradition and the manner in which it is practiced.
The course will offer students an opportunity to study the manner in which social and cultural changes affect religious practices and norms. It will further examine the reactions of Jewish groups to the demands for the inclusion of women and gays in their religious and communal lives. Taking a global perspective, we will compare the manner in which Jewish communities in America, Israel, Europe, Asia and Africa have accommodated themselves to the changing norms in gender and sexuality.

RELI 070 [006E]: Jesus in Scholarship and Film
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science & Cultural Diversity]
Bart Ehrman
This course will examine how historians have reconstructed the life, teachings, and death of the historical Jesus. It will look at the Gospels of the New Testament, as well as references to Jesus in other writings (Roman and Jewish sources, as well as Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament). In addition, the course, will see how Jesus has been portrayed in modern film, including such Biblical "epics" as The Greatest Story Ever Told, such "period pieces" as Jesus Christ Superstar, such brilliant retellings as "Jesus of Montreal," and such controversial films as "The Last Temptation of Christ," and "The Passion of the Christ." The ultimate goals of the course are (a) to see what we can say about the historical man Jesus himself (b) to see how Jesus came to be portrayed in both ancient sources and modern imagination.

RELI 071 [006F]: Ethics and the Spirit of the New Capitalism
Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Philosophical]
Ruel Tyson
When systems of communication change-from oral to textual and from textual to digital, our worlds-- including our most basic assumptions and the concepts on which ethical systems depend--change also. We inherit a long tradition for making sense of our experience by the use of character, story, and destiny. This seminar examines how these basic ideas are undergoing change, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, in the emerging culture of the Internet and the new capitalism.

RELI 072 [006I]: Apocalypse Now?: Messianic Movements in America
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Yaakov Ariel
The arrival of the year 2000 made many people aware of the prevalence of messianic ideas and their influence on the American mind. Messianic hopes have been present in America since Colonial times, and new messianic groups have come about periodically. This course will explore messianic movements in American history and their influence on the nation. It will consider such questions as America as a messianic concept, and why America had been susceptible to messianic movements. The messianic groups we will examine will include the Puritans in seventeenth century New England, the Millerites and the Mormons in the nineteenth century, and premillenialist evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also look at the messianic components of the late twentieth century groups such as the Nation of Islam, Hasidic Judaism, UFO groups, and the Children of God. We will also pay attention to secular versions of the messianic faith. Special attention will be given to groups that have caused national crises in the 1990s, such as the Branch Davidians and the bombers of the Oklahoma City Federal building. In addition to reading book chapters and articles, we will also read an apocalyptic novel, watch movies on apocalyptic themes, and search the Internet for messianic group sites.

RELI 073: From Dragons and Foxes to Godzilla and Pokemon: Animals in Japanese Myth, Folklore and Religion
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Communication Intensive (CI); Literary Arts (LA)
Barbara Ambros
This course examines the cultural construction of animals in Japanese myth, folklore, and religion.  The course will cover various kinds of animals: those that occur in the natural world (insects, snakes, foxes, badgers, monkeys), those that are found in myths (dragons, tengu (goblins), oni (demons)), and those that have appeared in popular media such as science fiction and animation (Godzilla, Pokemon).  We will discuss how images of various animals were culturally constructed as tricksters, gods, monsters, or anthropomorphic companions, how animals were ritualized as divine, demonic, or sentient beings in Buddhism, Shinto, and folk religion, and how animals could serve as metaphors that embodied collective ideals or nightmares.

RELI 074H: Person, Time, & Religious Conduct
Philosophical & Moral Reasoning (PH)
Jonathan Boyarin
What we call religion and ritual address fundamental human questions: What happens when we die?  Did we exist before we were born?  Does our skin define the limits of our being?  Why are we named for ancestors, for saints, for martyrs or teachers?  Most pertinently:  How do we act in the face of all these questions?  This seminar considers religious strategies from a broad range of historical and current traditions that guide human action in ways that link individuals to those who came before them, those who will come after them, and those around them now. By the end of this seminar, students will learn to see a wide range of human practices, from body markings to pilgrimage, fasting and martyrdom, as responses to anxieties and dilemmas shared by homo sapiens  across the bounds of culture and history—and will be able to address these questions using the tools and insights of current scholarship.