5 courses with the subject RELI BC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
RELI BC2003Religion and Political Thought3.00
Are “belief” and “reason” two different things? What is the proper role of religion in modern society? How do we determine what is just and unjust in the absence of a Higher Law? Does religion continue to influence political decision-making in liberal democracies, and if so, how? These questions continue to animate debates about the relationship between religion and politics today. This class examines articulations of and responses to this question in the political thought of the Enlightenment, a period that has traditionally been described as the moment when “the West” parted ways with religion and religious belief as the foundation for its understanding of truth, justice, and social order. In this class, we will examine classic and overlooked works of Enlightenment philosophy. We will interrogate whether the Enlightenment really signaled a departure from religion. We will also examine whether the Enlightenment was the preserve — much less the invention — of white Europeans and American settlers. We will do so with an eye toward the politics of the present, examining how Enlightenment thought’s engagement with religion produced discourses of race, gender, economy, and nationhood that continue to shape the terms of political discourse today
RELI BC3096More than Real: Dreams, Imagination, and Virtual Reality in South Asian Religions4.00
This course is thematic, though a loose history of dreaming, imaginative praxis, and virtual reality environments across South Asia will emerge through the networked conversations across texts. The advantage of a thematic course allows us to cover various genres such as: ritual manuals; epic; poetry; philosophical argument; biographical accounts; prophecies; conversion stories; and medical textbooks to name a handful. At the end of the course, we will see how the texts encountered in the first part have been repurposed to speak to social justice movements around caste - both within South Asia and the diaspora population in the U.S. The thematic of dreaming and imagination also provides flexibility in method: because students will have the opportunity to study conversations between different historical actors across religious traditions about dreams, they will also have the opportunity to revise problematic accounts of religious pluralism and communalism in South Asia. Students will read primary texts from Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Sikh traditions to name a handful. Students can look forward to reading about worlds within rocks; falling asleep and waking up as another person only to die in the dream world, wake up and then realize your dream-life family is somehow real and looking for you; how to finally interpret those pesky dreams about teeth falling out; dismembered bodies generating the universe; daydreaming about a cloud that thinks mountain peaks look like nipples; how to build a mind-temple that Shiva prefers to the physical one with fancy rock; and much more!
The Religion Salon is a one-point course in the Religion department, designed to offer students an introduction to new areas of the academic study of religion and/or new approaches to the field. The Religion Salon will be offered as a supplement to an existing course offered in the same semester and will be open to (but not required of) the students in that existing course as well as to students who wish to take the Salon as a stand-alone one-point course. The Religion Salon will feature guest scholars whose research and teaching extend into new areas and/or engage in new approaches to the academic study of religion
Working research seminar devoted to helping students produce a substantive piece of writing that will represent the culmination of their work at the College and in the major
Working research seminar devoted to helping students produce a substantive piece of writing that will represent the culmination of their work at the College and in the major
