Courses

Courses

Fall 2007 Courses

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014. Heresy and Orthodoxy
Jorunn Buckley M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25 Ashby House-Conference Room
This writing-intensive course focuses on readings in heretical texts, orthodox creeds, and scholarly treatments of the religious-ideological construction of heresy and orthodoxy. Fundamentally, heresy is dangerous precisely because of its proximity to orthodoxy. Examples focus on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions; attention is given to categories such as dogma vs. freedom, pure vs. impure, society vs. individual. Facets of present-day debates on fundamentalism are included.

216. The New Testament in its World
Jorunn Buckley M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 HL-311 (third floor)
Situates the Christian New Testament in its Hellenistic cultural context. While the New Testament forms the core of the course, attention is paid to parallels and differences in relation to other Hellenistic religious texts; Jewish, (other) Christian, and pagan. Religious leadership, rituals, secrecy, philosophy of history, and salvation are some of the main themes.

225. Religion and Political Violence in South Asia
Sunil Goonasekera T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 Searles-126
Religion is a universal phenomenon that touches, if not dominates, daily life and is a force that can compel people to be both perpetrators and victims of violence. Sociological and anthropological studies point to social, political, economic, cultural, legal and psychological facts that propel individuals and groups to use violence and justify its use by bringing violence into a religious context. Seeks to understand the relationship between religion and violence and the causes and effects of that relationship. Specifically addresses these issues in South Asian cultural systems.

251. Christianity, Culture, and Conflict
Elizabeth Pritchard T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55 Hubbard-22
An introduction to the diversity and contentiousness of Christian thought and practice. This diversity is explored through analyses of the conceptions, rituals, and aesthetic media that serve to interpret and embody understandings of Jesus, authority, body, family, and church. Historical and contemporary materials highlight not only conflicting interpretations of Christianity, but the larger social conflicts that these interpretations reflect, reinforce, or seek to resolve.

253. Women in Religion
Elizabeth Pritchard T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Ashby House-Conference Room
An analysis of the ways in which religion authorizes women’s oppression and provides opportunities and resources for women’s emancipation. Topics include the enforced gender relationships of monotheism, the goddess movement as alternative society, and the conflicts generated among women by racial, class, religious, ethnic, and sexual differences. Material drawn from Christianity, Neopaganism, Voudon, and Hinduism.

289. Construction of the Goddess and Deification of Women in Hindu Religious Tradition
Sree Holt T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 38 College-Conference Room
Focuses include: (1) an examination of the manner in which the power of the feminine has been expressed mythologically and theologically in Hinduism; (2) how various categories of goddesses can be seen or not as the forms of the “great goddess”; and (3) how Hindu women have been deified, a process that implicates the relationship between the goddess and women. Students read a range of works, primary sources such as Devi Mahatmya, biographies and myths of deified women, and recent scholarship on goddesses and deified women. One-half credit.

319. Religion and Fiction in Modern South Asia
John Holt M 6:30 - 9:25 Ashby House-3
A study of the Hindu and Buddhist religious cultures of modern South Asia as they have been imagined, represented, interpreted, and critiqued in the literary works of contemporary and modern South Asian writers of fiction and historical novels, including Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses), V.S. Naipaul (An Area of Darkness, India: A Million Mutinies Now?), Gita Mehta (A River Sutra), etc. Part of the Other Modernities course cluster in the Asian Studies program.

390. Theories about Religion
John Holt T 1:00 - 3:55 Ashby House-Conference Room
Seminar focused on how religion has been explained and interpreted from a variety of intellectual and academic perspectives from the sixteenth century to the present. In addition to a historical overview of religion’s interpretation and explanation, the focus also includes consideration of postmodern critiques and the problem of religion and violence in the contemporary world.

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