Department of Religious Studies
Course Offerings: Fall, 2002
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto - the essential beliefs, doctrines, institutions, and practices of the major religious traditions in Southern and Eastern Asia. Historical backgrounds and development will be surveyed briefly to provide context for the course's central focus: understanding the distinctive worlds of meaning created and maintained and expressed in these religions. Reading and discussion of representative primary texts in translation will be emphasized in this effort to understand basic attitudes and beliefs. Particular attention will be devoted to answering questions about the persisting influence and vitality of these religious traditions - about the nature and significance of change and about the importance of these great religions in shaping the sense of identity, aspirations, and expectations of their adherents in the face of contemporary technological and ideological challenges.
Requirements: No prerequisites. Moderate reading load. Short papers.
In-class midterm and final examinations.
This course introduces students to the study of religion through consideration of some important religious traditions of the Western world. The ancient religious expressions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan will set the context for the living and intertwined belief systems of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The course will provide a basic familiarity with these traditions, and will place special emphasis on exploring the origin, history, major developments, and variety within each of these monotheistic traditions. Topics covered will include: History, Scripture, Monotheism, Authority, Worship and Ritual, Ethics, Material Culture, Religion and the Political Order, Gender Issues and New Religious Movements.
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the different ways in which formulaic fictions address religious, social, historical, and psychoanalytic concerns, with emphasis both on religious themes and on literary devices and strategies. We will focus on narratives that engage religion directly, as well as on the uses of religious and mythic themes in literature and culture. Readings include Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Nizami’s Layla and Majnun, Jami’s Yusuf and Zulaikha, Manjhan’s Madhumalati, the Pancatantra, the Marzuban Nama, ‘Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, and assorted short fiction, folktales, and travel narratives.
Understanding the Cult Controversy
Waco, Jonestown, Sokka Gakai, Elvis fans. What is a "cult"? Why do some cults seem bent on self-destruction? Why do outsiders have such visceral antagonism towards cults? This course examines a wide variety of "cults" and "cult-like" groups, using several methodological approaches to better understand cults, their members, and outsiders’ responses to them.
Rites exist at the heart of religion. Yet how does one study ritual? Students will consider the relationship between writing about ritual and the performances, acts and gestures that make up our subject. This course emphasizes writing and revision and as an important way of exploring complex ideas.
As students engage in different types of writing, they will discover different aspects of ritual studies. The term ‘ritual’ comes into being in the modern world. A variety of theories use the
word ‘ritual’ in order to insinuate a variety of value judgments about the relationship of ‘ritual’ and ‘belief.’ Students will research and write about the hidden assumptions and conceptual insights of competing models of practice.
Students will also use descriptions of ritual in order to write of their own observations and their own lives. Experience will be an important tool for reflecting upon the strengths and weaknesses of competing theoretical frameworks. Students will write, discuss and review theie work with each other in a workshop and seminar environment, in both small group and larger class settings.
This seminar will investigate some of the many dimensions of the relationship between religious traditions and physical health and healing. How do major world religions approach these inevitable and very human questions? What about spiritual traditions that are not part of organized, established religions? Can spiritual and religious practices heal? Are there really miracles of healing brought about by divine intervention? How does modern medical science respond to such issues? We will read primary and secondary sources from a variety of traditions and viewpoints, and will interview practitioners of religious and medical establishments. Students will write two papers.
Mysticism has been a topic of fascination, study, and debate in many of the world’s religious traditions as well as contemporary academic discourses. Modern theories about mysticism draw on a number of scholarly disciplines including (but not limited to) fields as diverse as psychology, Foucauldian power dynamics, philosophy, and the history of religions. This course will investigate the ways that the multiple phenomena grouped under the single, cross-cultural heading "Mysticism" have been configured by the disciplines used for investigation, and how that affects the conclusions one draws about the subject. In addition, students will examine questions of whether the phenomena under investigation are all the same thing, or if it is more appropriate to discuss "Mysticisms" embedded in distinct social contexts. Primary and secondary sources will be used, and all required materials will be in English.
Introduction to different ways in which religion is represented in film Emphasis upon religious themes, but some attention to cinematic devices and strategies. Although most films studied will deal with only one of the major historical religious traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the selection will always include at least two of those traditions.
September 11, 2001 is a date that few Americans now alive will ever forget. Images of the World Trade Center exploding in flames and then collapsing in a cloud of death and debris haunt us, and the vulnerability demonstrated by the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon fills us with anxiety. According to the U.S. government investigators, the people responsible for these acts of terrorism were Islamic extremists, men who believed that their violent deeds would please God and win them a place in heaven. Likewise, Timothy McVeigh and abortion clinic bombers invoke Christianity to justify their violence, Jewish terrorists successfully plotted the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, and violent acts have been performed in recent years by Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. This seminar will address three questions: When can an act of violence be called "religious"? Are religions inherently violent and, if so, how? And how do different religions deal with the violence in human nature.
This course is intended as an introduction to movements and figures of African American religion from slavery to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions will focus on themes related to content and methodology in the study of African American religious history. Guiding themes include the relationship between race and gender; the tension between piety and activism; the ambivalence between mainstream respectability and racial pride; and the interaction between Christianity, lived religions, and alternative traditions.
This course examines views and attitudes towards black Africans as found in the ancient and medieval sources of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We will attempt to discover the relationship between these views and racism in Western civilization.
Religious Studies
121
TR 1:30-3:00
Instructor: Fishman
tfishman@sas.upenn.edu
General Requirement II: History
and Tradition
Broad introduction to the history of Jewish civilization from the Biblical period through 1492. Focus on the development of rabbinic culture and on Judaism’s cross-cultural interactions with Christianity and Islam.
How has Jewish law developed over the millenia from biblical times to the present? What insights can this legal tradition offer us today as we seek answers to such issues as abortion, euthanasia, genetic research, and business ethics? This course will examine the literary and legal sources of Jewish law within a historical framework, with special emphasis upon the development and dynamics of Jewish jurisprudence. It will also explore the relationship between Jewish law and social ethics.
Christianity did not begin in a vacuum - indeed it emerged from the complex Jewish world of which we catch a glimpse in the "Dead Sea Scrolls" and it blossomed into various forms among the "mystery religions" of the Greco-Roman world around the Mediterranean Sea and farther east. In this course we will explore those developments in the first two centuries of the common era, with special focus on the evidence preserved in the earliest surviving Christian writings, including the "New Testament" collection. The goal of the course is neither conversion nor its opposite, but understanding as best we can from this chronological and geographical distance what the participants in the various developments thought was happening, and how they shaped and were shaped by their worlds. We will get very involved in discussing what can be known about the period, and how much we as interpreters contribute to any resulting "historical" picture. Get down and dirty with ancient materials; it shouldn't hurt much! Join the excursion into some of the deepest roots of western society.
Online course materials can be accessed through the instructor's homepage.
A comprehensive introduction to Islamic doctrines, practices and religious institutions in a variety of geographic settings from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the present. Translated source materials from the Qur’an, sayings of Muhammad, legal texts, and mystical works will provide an overview of the literary expressions of the religion. The course aims, as well, to view Islam in the immediacy of everyday life. Among the topics to be covered are: The Qur’an as scripture and as liturgy; Conversion and the spread of Islam; Muhammad in history and in the popular imagination; Concepts of the feminine; Muslim women; Sectarian developments; Transmission of religious knowledge and spiritual power; Sufism and the historical elaboration of mystical communities; Modern reaffirmation of Islamic identity; and Islam in the American environment.
This course will explore the rich variety of religious beliefs and practices that we today label as Hinduism. We will focus on how these doctrines and practices have both reflected and informed cultural life on the Indian subcontinent in their historical developments from the earliest Vedic times down to contemporary revivalist movements. We will treat such basic issues as the nature of self and the body, divinity and the cosmos, and social norms and values, in all the variety of their religious expression - from ascetic yoga to ritual devotionalism; from high philosophy to spirit possession. Materials will include readings on the original texts in translation, and historical, ethnographic, and film studies.
This year, Topics in Religion and Science will examine recent scholarship on the nature of religion based in contemporary trends in cognitive science. Over the last decade, a broad assortment of anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and scholars of religion has considered such problems as: how the construction of the human mind affects our understanding of the divine; the way that religious ideas reproduce themselves throughout a society (the "epidemiology of representations"), and the formal properties of religious ideas and practices. We will read key works in this exciting literature with a view to answering three main questions: Does the cognitive science paradigm present a truly new approach to the study of religion? What are the future prospects of this paradigm? and What does this imply for the traditional separation between the psychology and sociology of religion?
This course will provide not only an opportunity to examine novel methods for the study of religion, but also ask broader questions about the nature of religion. There are no prerequisites, and sufficient time will be devoted to giving all students a common reference point for critically handling the core content of the course. We will take a brief look at some traditional approaches to the psychology of religion, such as Freud and Maslow, at the Durkheimian tradition in the sociology of religion, and at an argument from the phenomenological critique of science. An overview of trends in cognitive science will be given, and we will consider the differences between symbolic and connectionist models of human cognition; the implications of evolutionary theories of mind; and empirical results from cognitive psychology. The bulk of the course will be devoted to the work of Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, E. Thomas Lawson, Robert McCauley, and Frits Staal; and to the reception of their researches.
This course explores the changing perceptions of the "other" religious culture as expressed in Jewish and Christian writings from antiquity to the present. Primary source readings (in English translation) include selections from the Gospels, Pauline Epistles, Church Fathers, medieval Jewish chronicles and legal sources, Martin Luther, proponents of Jewish Emancipation, 20th century papal documents.
The Jews are among the few nations and ethnic groups whose oral tradition occurs in literary and religious texts dating back more than two thousand years. This tradition changed and diversified over the years in terms of the migrations of Jews into different countries and the historical, social, and cultural changes that these countries underwent. The course attempts to capture the historical and ethnic diversity of Jewish folklore in a variety of oral literary forms. A basic book of Hasidic legends from the 18th century will serve as a key text to explore problems in Jewish folklore relating to both earlier and later periods.
Topic for Fall 2002: Introduction to Midrash
This course is intended to introduce students to midrash, the activity of Biblical interpretation as practiced by the Rabbis in the ancient world; to its literature, its literary forms, and its techniques of interpretation; and to modern scholarship on midrash. We will study various texts from different periods in the history of Midrashic literature, and attempt to apply different critical and disciplinary methodologies – literary, historical, theological – to the task of analyzing these texts.
We will also seek to situate midrash within the larger history of Jewish Biblical interpretation and within the context of Jewish literary creativity through the ages, including our own. Class discussion will be held in English, but students must be able to read unpointed Hebrew texts. No other previous background in the literature is necessary. Since the content of this course may change from year to year students may take it for credit more than once (if the course is indeed different).
Requirements: Students must be able to read unpointed Hebrew texts.
The course will be an overview of monasticism that will examine the spiritual, cultural, and socio-economic aspects of a movement that as much as any other helped shape medieval society. Topics to be covered will include: St. Antony and the Desert Fathers; St. Benedict and the Rule; Monasteries in Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian France; Westminster and Saint-Denis; and we will conclude with the challenges to traditional Benedictine monasticism as exemplified by Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians and Francis of Assisi and the friars. We will read a combination of primary and secondary sources and also look at a number of monastic buildings and manuscripts. There will be two papers: one short one based on an original source and a longer research paper.
This course is an introduction to the use of computers in the Humanities. The focus will be on issues and techniques involved in developing IT resources for use in the Humanities student’s field of study. Major projects will include the creation of a web site and programming related to the student's major. The class will utilize a combination of lectures, discussion, presentations and practical lab experience. Techniques will include intermediate HTML (forms, presentation with Cascading Style Sheets), graphics, and programming CGI scripts. The course will also consider methodological issues such as accessibility, copyright, and other ethical and legal problems. Enrollment is limited and preference is given to students who have completed COLL 110.
Please obtain section numbers from the department office or from the faculty member with whom you will be working.
Religious Studies
412
T 3:00-6:00
Instructor: Callahan
This seminar will engage works of autobiography in the African American tradition with particular attention to the spiritual and religious contexts of the authors. We will discuss recurring themes, scriptural motifs, and religious and social tensions expressed in the works. Gender, political ideology, social activism, and religious identification will also be explored.
Religious Studies
418
TR 10:30-12:00
Instructor: Stern
dstern@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Distribution III: Arts and
Letters
Christianity and Judaism are often called "Biblical religions" because they are believed to be founded upon the Bible. But the truth of the matter is that it was less the Bible itself than the particular ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Christians and Jews that shaped the development of these two religions and that also marked the difference between them. So, too, ancient Biblical interpretation – Jewish and Christian – laid the groundwork for and developed virtually all the techniques and methods that have dominated literary criticism and hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) since then. The purpose of this course is to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted by Jews and Christians before the modern period, and particularly in the first six centuries of the common era. We will make a concerted effort to view these interpretive approaches not only historically but also through the lens of a contemporary critical and hermeneutic theory in order to examine their contemporary relevance to literary interpretation and the use that some modern literary theorists (e.g. Bloom, Kermode, Derrida, Todorov) have made of these ancient exegetes and their methods. All readings are in English translation, and will include selections from Philo of Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic midrash, the New Testament and early Church Fathers, Gnostic writings, Origen, and Augustine. No previous familiarity with Biblical scholarship is required, although some familiarity with the Bible itself would be helpful.
From as far back as we can get, competing traditions about Jesus and his significance are attested, some of which found their way into the "New Testament" collection, while others survived elsewhere in the early Christian world. Close examination of these ancient materials exposes a variety of obstacles to reconstructing a convincing historical picture of the man and his message, but along the way a great deal can be learned about the historical enterprise, whether exercised in the form of the controversial "Jesus Seminar" or in less publicized efforts. This is not a Bible School class, but it may result in a rewarding experience of academic enlightenment – and excitement!
Online course materials can be accessed through the instructor's home page.
Religious Studies
507
W 12:00-2:00
Instructor: Hufford
dhufford@sas.upenn.edu
This course will examine traditional systems of supernatural belief with an emphasis on the role of personal experience in their development and maintenance. The course will focus on subjects of belief generally conceived as being "folk" in some sense (e.g., beliefs in ghosts), but will not exclude a consideration of popular and academic beliefs where appropriate (e.g., popular beliefs about UFO's and theological doctrines of immortality of the soul). The course will be multidisciplinary in scope.
Religious Studies
537
M 2:00-4:00
Instructor: Matter
amatter@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
From the time of Jesus on, Christianity has developed elaborate conceptions of the coming Eschaton, the end of this created world. This seminar will read a number of primary texts from ancient, medieval and modern Christian communities that reflect the changing visions of the end, including the Apocalypse of (or Revelation to) John, 2Thessalonians, commentaries on the Apocalypse and 2Thessalonians, works of Joachim of Fiore, the Spiritual Franciscans, Girolamo Savonarola, and some modern examples of Christian Apocalyptic, including Edgar Cayce and a volume from the "Left Behind" series.
Religious Studies
545
TBA
Instructor: von Schlegell
brvs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Distribution II: History and
Tradition
Permission of Instructor
Intensive reading of the selections from the Qur’an along with the traditional, concise commentary of al-Jalalayn. Each participant will choose a tafsir representative of one of the different exegetical approaches (historical, legal, grammatical, sectarian, mystical, literary, modernist) for ongoing contribution to seminar discussion. Introductory lectures on the history of the written text, Arabic diglossia and Qur’anic language, revelation and prophecy in Islam, and the rules for Qur’anic recitation (ahkam al-tajwid).
Requirements: Reading knowledge of Arabic
Religious Studies
601
T 2:00-5:00
Instructor: Behl
abehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
This course is aimed at introducing students to a variety of classic and contemporary approaches to the study of religious charisma, conversion, and the process of comparison. We will read methodological statements about these problems, as well as actual case studies in time and place. Requirements for the course include brief reports on the weekly readings and a final research paper.
Religious Studies
735
Time to be announced
Instructor: Kraft
kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/kraft.html
Permission needed from instructor
Topic to be announced. Knowledge of hellenistic Greek is required.
Online course materials can be accessed through the instructor's home page.
Religious Studies
999
Time and topic arranged.
Instructors: Staff
rstudies@sas.upenn.edu
Please obtain section numbers from the department office or from the faculty member with whom you will be working.
Please note: many of these offerings are cross-listed with other departments. Please consult the SAS Fall 2002 Course Roster for cross-listings.