C O U R S EO
F F E R I N G S
(for course summaries, select from the links below)
Introductory courses
The Western Construction of Religion
American Spiritualities: Introduction to Religion and Culture
Cultural History of American Religion through the Civil War
Cultural History of American Religion from the Civil War to the Present
Culture and Apocalypse
Religion and American Literature
Advanced courses:
Magic of the State: Religion, Politics, and Visual Culture
The African-American Religious Experience
Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
Religion, the Beats, and Postwar America
Religion and Modern Thought
Seminars:
Secularism and the State of Evangelicalism
Society of the Spectacle: Religion and Visual Culture in Antebellum America
Specters of Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick 1851/2005
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Introductory Courses
The Western Construction of Religion
This course will introduce students to the history of the study of “religion,” We will begin by looking at the theological, epistemological, and political conditions that made possible the emergence of religion as a category of critical scrutiny in the modern West. After reviewing such key issues as the Reformation principle of sola fides, the Cartesian cogito, and Kant’s distinction between natural and revealed religion we will survey the curious and contested history of second-order reflection upon religion as it has been carried out in anthropological, psychological, phenomenological, sociological, philosophical, and historical spheres. By the end of this course students will have acquired a more subtle vocabulary in which to discuss what they are talking about when they talk about religion, what kinds of judgments are implicit in their methodologies, and finally, what they hope to understand when they look for religion in the world. Readings may include Martin Luther, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, E.B. Tylor, Sigmund Freud, William James, W.E.B. Dubois, Èmile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, Mircea Eliade, Walter Benjamin, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Catherine Bell, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Talal Asad.
American Spiritualities: Introduction to Religion and Culture
The course will familiarize students with mainstream as well as alternative spiritual practices, past and present with the objective of demonstrating the interplay between religion and cultural forms. We will pay close attention to the personal element in religion in both organized and unorganized forms—a personal element that is inevitably part of the culture in which it is actualized. As an introductory mapping of the many forms of spirituality that have been part of American history, the course will then identify and examine four major types: liturgical or ritual-based spirituality that is the private dimension of public faith; evangelical spirituality that is based on the experience of conversion; prophetic spirituality that seeks social change; and finally, metaphysical spirituality that is based on intuited knowledge of the cosmos. Reading assignments include verbal and non-verbal texts that run the gamut from tracts of theology and religious instruction to acts of civil disobedience and jazz—Jonathan Edwards, D.T. Suzuki, Black Elk, Jarena Lee, Aimee Semple McPherson, Starhawk, Nat Turner, Patti Smith, Julia Butterfly, and Sun Ra. By the end of the semester students will come to not only appreciate religious diversity but to struggle with the knowledge that there are very different ways to contemplate and represent the abstract workings of the cosmos, very different ways to act, very different ways to feel the moments of existence as they flit by.
Cultural History of American Religion through the Civil War
This course will introduce the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of religion as it has
manifested itself in American history from the sixteenth century until the eve of the Civil
War. We will begin by looking at the different ways in which the idea of
America in the age
of discovery was shot through with religious assumptions. After comparing
the religious
worlds that came together at the onset of colonization, we will trace the
contours and
implications of this initial pluralism as the nation expanded from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Throughout this course we will pay special attention
to the interaction
between religious institutions, ideas, and practices and developments
within the political,
social, economic, artistic, and philosophical spheres. Topics include the cosmic visions of European explorers and Native Americans, New England Puritanism, African religions and the Middle Passage, Quakerism and the Pennsylvania Colony, the question
of gender in Colonial America, the Great Awakening(s), the institution of slavery, the
Enlightenment in
America, Mormonism, Spiritualism and communitarian movements, Roman
Catholicism and anti-Catholic pornography, the growth of Judaism in the nineteenth
century, the American Renaissance, the conservative theology of Charles Hodge and the liberal
theology of Horace Bushnell, as well as the Industrial and Market Revolutions.
Cultural History of American Religion from the Civil War to the Present
This course undertakes a cultural history of American religion from the end of the Civil War to the present “war on terrorism.” In addition to looking at liturgical forms of religion and surveying various religious movements and groups during this time period, we will also explore 1) how cultural forms serve as vehicles of religious meaning; 2) how religious values are expressed and/or criticized in everyday social life; and 3) the place of religion in the recent history of American modernity. Although the most visible form that religion takes is institutional, the most visible function conservative, the most visible currency existential solace, religion should not be considered solely in terms of institutional affiliation, church attendance, or parish activity. As this course will demonstrate there is much more to religion than choral music, creeds, knee-bound pleas, pews, or pulpits. Topics include Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry, industrialization, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible, pragmatism, fundamentalism, immigration and nativism, Neo-orthodoxy, UFO scares, anti-communism and the atomic bomb, Beat poetry, Vatican II, “death of God” theology, the Civil Rights and Feminist movements, the art of Barbara Kruger and Laurie Anderson, and terrorism.
Culture and Apocalypse
Since the historicizing of Reformation millennialism on American soil, America has been conceived as both the end of one age and the beginning of the new. It has become an undefinable promise to be carried forward, a way of envisioning the present in terms of what has already been revealed once upon a time. This course will explore a diverse group of phenomena—from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, the American Revolution, and the Ghost Dance movement to the Neo-Orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr, the mass suicide of Jonestown, and reactions to the tragedies of September 11th—in order to compare the expectation of revelation across different historical moments. We will begin by examining the relationship between the explicitly Christian notion of millennialism and the more generic idea of apocalypsis as a hermeneutical revelation—a way of seeing and interpreting the world. We will then seek to understand how these logics of revelation at once shape, and are filtered through, specific cultural circumstances such as the erosion of Puritan orthodoxy, racial persecution, American imperialism, and global terrorism.
Religion and American Literature
This course will investigate the relationship between literature and the religious life. Readings will include Early American literature, the writings of the American Renaissance, Modernism, Chicano Literature, and postmodern poetics. Students will explore the question of what makes religious literature “religious”? How have religious groups communicated their beliefs and values through literature? How have authors challenged religious values and practices in literature? Does literature have to talk about religion to be religious? Students will read essays, novels, and short stories that discuss religious identity in a variety of religious traditions as well as writings that challenge popular understandings of religious commitment in the modern world. Literary works such as Ann Bradstreet’s poetry and short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, and Brett Easton Ellis’s Glamorama offer insight into the way religion was experienced and particular times and under particular conditions. They are religiously significant not as attempts to secure salvation or the name of God, but as an inquiries into the possibilities of living life within a world that traffics in appearances and whose meanings are deemed specious or totalitarian or both. By addressing such things as gender hierarchies, racial injustice, as well as the prison house of language, public symbols, or domestic constraints, such works are distillations of religious experience outside the normal precincts of traditional religion.
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Advanced courses
Magic of the State: Religion, Politics, and Visual Culture
What are the sacred bonds that tie Americans together? How do such bonds come into being? Does the United States possess its own religion? To what extent does this modern democratic nation rely on the power of religion to legitimate its authority and to perpetuate its aims? What, if anything, is religious about the formation and representation of personal and collective identity? Such questions will guide our exploration of what sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau, once called American “civil religion.” In addition to exploring the relationship between public rituals, collective identity, images, and perception this course argues that images possess both ideological and material force, a power that many commentators have described in the language of religion. Topics include Civil War photography, lynching and photography in the postbellum South, the memorialization of Gettysburg in the American imaginary, the motion studies of Eadward Muybridge, the advent of motion pictures and modern advertising, the atomic bomb and the Zapruder film, as well as contemporary surveillance technologies. This course will encourage students to develop a critical vocabulary to talk about the relationship between religion and political authority, religion and visual culture, as well as religion and perception.
The African-American Religious Experience
This course surveys a variety religious traditions and expressions of African Americans throughout the history of the United States. We will begin with an examination of the central and important role that slavery played in laying the groundwork for African American religious and cultural orientation. We will then explore how Christianity played a complicated role in the slave context, justifying the actions of slaveholders on the one hand, and offering hope to slaves on the other hand. In addition to varieties of African American Christianity we will also look at non-Christian African-American traditions and their “New World” setting. Weekly topics include West African religious traditions, the Middle Passage, slave songs and spirituals, the rise of independent Black Churches, abolitionism and slave revolts, Reconstruction and W.E.B. Dubois, conjuring and folk traditions, suffrage and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Black Judaism and the Nation of Islam, the Civil Rights Movement and liberation theology, the spirituality of John Coltrane and Sun Ra, and finally, the religious criticism of Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Cornel West. Each week we will locate religious expressions and traditions within their social, cultural, and historical context. Our exploration of African American religion(s) will be both thematic and historical. We will chart the changes and continuities in African American religious traditions and analyze some of the major themes and concerns that have driven African American religious experience.
Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
This course will examine the role religion has played in the formation and maintenance of gender roles and sexual codes of conduct in American history. It will also introduce students to the ways in which these roles and codes have been established and challenged in and through the religious imagination. By revisiting important moments in which discourses of femininity and masculinity have been expressed and embodied by individuals, religious institutions, and social movements we will explore the complex and contested terrain of gender and sexuality in American religious history. Weekly topics include the erotic dimensions of European imaginings of the “new” world, the gendering of race in Puritan captivity narratives, the domestic life of men in Colonial New England and the subversive discourses of Ann Hutchinson and Ann Bradstreet, the erotics of conversion in the First and Second Great Awakenings, the gendered rhetoric of “virtue” in the Revolutionary period, manuals of domestic instruction and men’s fraternal organizations in antebellum America, the pragmatic temper of Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” poems and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible, the “muscular Christianity” and hygienic reform efforts of early twentieth-century evangelicals, the religious normalization of the nuclear family and heterosexuality in post-World War II America, the evolution of feminist theology in the works of Valerie Solanas, Mary Daly, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Donna Haraway, and finally, the very different ideals of masculinity put forward in the Promise Keepers movement and Gil Cuadros’ meditation on AIDS in his novel City of God (1994).
Religion, the Beats, and Postwar America
In the mid-1940s, before writing the obscenity-laden manifestos that would earn them fame, opprobrium, and the group label the “Beat Generation,” William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg had begun a collaborative project of literary and spiritual development, what they termed the “new vision.” This course will examine the history of this development within the context of the changing religious climate of post-World-War II America. It will use the example of the Beats to explore two different but intimately related phenomena—the capacity of the imagination to create a religious world out of the most mundane and secular of experiences and the historical conditions of postwar America that privileged personal experience as an arbiter of religious truth. In addition to reading the literature, journals, and correspondence of the major Beat writers, we will also examine other source materials—from Supreme Court cases and sermons to sociological studies and documentaries about the atomic age—that illumine the religious volatility of this particular period in American history.
Religion and Modern Thought
By examining primary texts dating back to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, this course surveys some of the basic ideas and institutions that might be understood to define “modernity” and its relation to religion in Western culture. We will look at such things as the relationship between the Protestant Reformation and modern capitalism, the religious motivations underpinning the various strands of European Enlightenment, Romanticism, and industrialization, the project of rational autonomy as it plays itself out in the religious and political spheres (with special emphasis on the American Revolution), Evangelicalism and the origins of mass media, critics of religion such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Guy Debord; and finally, those like William James, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvior, Judith Butler, and Cornel West who have reimagined the religious promise of Enlightenment.
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Seminars
Secularism and the State of Evangelicalism
This course will follow two historical trajectories within American culture that emerged simultaneously during the eighteenth century—the ideology of “secularism” and the post-Puritan religious phenomenon of evangelicalism. These two discourses have often been understood as antithetical to one another—from the disestablishment of religion to contemporary debates over the separation of church and state and the teaching of “intelligent design.” Indeed, over the past two centuries each, in various guises, has often defined itself in opposition to the other. This course will begin by examining these processes of negative identification in both historical and theoretical terms. It will then explore, in depth, specific moments in American history when these discourses have competed against one another for the right to define and authorize such things as the meaning of the human subject, the structure of the political collective, the proper code of ethics, the nature of history, the ways and means of the sense perception, sexual, racial, and ethnic differences. Readings will range from sermons of the Great Awakening, tracts of Common Sense philosophy, and the Constitution to Supreme Court cases, “death of God” theology, and works of the “new” evangelical cinema such as The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind.
Society of the Spectacle: Religion and Visual Culture in Antebellum America
This course examines the relationship between religion and visual culture in antebellum America. Each week of seminar will be devoted to a specific theme and will explore how specific developments in the visual field reflected, assuaged, as well as exacerbated tensions between skepticism and faith, the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, pervading antebellum America. Themes include the evangelical origins of mass media forms and the commercialization of visual technologies such as the thaumatrope, zootrope, and daguerreotypy; the emergence of mass periodicals and the market economy; advertising and the problem of repetition; the imagic cult of celebrity; the panorama; Spiritualism and photography, scientific, religious, and ethnographic uses of photography; as well as documentary photography during the Civil War. In addition to surveying the visual cultures of antebellum America by way of primary documents and historical treatments, we will read theoretical works by such figures as Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Martin Jay, Anne McClintock, and Allan Sekula. Such works will (1) help us contextualize technological developments in terms of vision and visuality and (2) broach questions concerning their religious dimensions.
Specters of Moby-Dick
Since its publication Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), like the whale itself, has vexed, enchanted, disturbed, and annoyed. The history of its reception is peculiar, from an almost uniform dismissal by Melville’s contemporaries to the successive periods of canonization in the twentieth century, beginning in the 1920s with the so-called “Melville Revival.” This seminar will begin by investigating: (1) Melville’s religious concerns; (2) the degree to which they informed Moby-Dick; and (3) his search for an alternative language in which to conduct metaphysical inquiries. This seminar will then explore Moby-Dick has been such a resource for twentieth-century writers who have raised religious questions about culture as insistent and vexing, if not more so, than those raised within more traditional religious settings.In order to explore the novel’s strange afterlife students will read Moby-Dick as well as a representative sample of twentieth-century appropriations—works by Ralph Ellison, C.L.R. James, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Laurie Anderson, and Don DeLillo—with particular attention paid to what religious sense has been made of Melville’s so-called “botched” experiment.Throughout the semester we will pay particular attention to how literature is a potentially destabilizing force, problematizing such things as mass culture, racial injustice, imperialism, visual technologies, the communications revolution, and the literary canon as matters of religious import.
Moby-Dick 1851/2005
This seminar explores issues of religion, representation, and power within Herman Melville’s scene of writing and, inevitably, within our own. The argument undergirding this seminar is that the study of religion is, first and foremost, the study of the ways and means of power in history. Viewing religion in terms of creative acts of interpretation performed by historical actors, this seminar will explore the relationship between religion and various themes and projects of modernity, including authorship, philology, colonialism, race, anthropology, perceptual distraction, gender hierarchies, and class divisions. Students will become attentive not only to the “text” of Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) and its historical context, but also their own interpretive apparatus—continually asking themselves how they are reading, why they are reading, and to what purpose they are reading. In addition to Moby-Dick, we will engage primary documents of history, philosophical, theological, and anthropological tracts, as well as works of literary and cultural theory.
