Religion

The concept of a “thing”—an entity that exists in and of itself, separate from all other things—is nothing but a useful fiction: In the real world, there actually are no “things” that meet that description. This, in a nutshell, is the startling proposition advanced by the Buddhist doctrine of śunyatā, or “emptiness” as the Sanskrit term is usually translated. Often misconstrued by critics as a form of nihilism (“nothing exists”), idealism (“all that exists are mental phenomena”) or skepticism (“we can never know what really exists”), the emptiness doctrine is better interpreted as a radical critique of the fundamental conceptual categories that we habitually use to talk about and make sense of the world. This course has several aims designed to help students develop the kind of research, writing, and critical thinking skills that are needed for academic success in college and in whatever career paths they may pursue thereafter. More specifically, the course will aim to impart a clear, accurate understanding of the “emptiness” doctrine, as it developed in the context of Buddhist intellectual history and found expression in various genres of classical Buddhist literature. Another aim of the course is to explore ways in which the emptiness doctrine, if taken seriously as a critique of the mechanisms and inherent limitations of human knowledge, may be fruitfully brought to bear in a number of different disciplines, both academic and otherwise. In fall, students will read and discuss a number of Buddhist texts—primary sources in English translation from the original Sanskrit or Chinese—that advocate the philosophy of emptiness, as well as some secondary scholarship on the subject. Students will also be given a series of assignments that target basic academic skills in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., how to do bibliographic research and evaluate the reliability of sources; how to annotate scholarly writing). In fall, individual conference meetings with the instructor will be devoted to learning and improving those skills. In spring, the class will read and discuss a number of scholarly works written in English that deal with Western (non-Buddhist) traditions of historiography, literary theory, and scientific inquiry. The readings are designed to introduce students to some of the main intellectual trends in the humanities, social sciences, and “hard” sciences that they are likely to encounter in other courses. At the same time, students will learn how to use the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness as an analytical tool to critique the conceptual models employed in the various academic disciplines treated in the readings. In conference work, each student will be required to use that tool to analyze the fundamental nomenclature—the way of dividing up the world into “things”—employed by some particular field of human endeavor, which may be an academic, artistic, or athletic discipline or any other endeavor (e.g., political or economic). In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly.

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality, a race, an ethnicity—or all or none of these? This question has driven Jewish thought for centuries and has preoccupied both Jewish thinkers and non-Jewish thinkers attempting to make sense of the place of the Jewish minority in surrounding cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which Judaism and Jewish peoplehood are understood historically, theologically, and sociologically and how this form of identity does or does not map onto emergent modern concepts of religion and nationality. We will use Judaism as a test case for exploring the very concept of “religion” itself, as it evolved in European culture, and the question of whether religion is a universal concept that applies to all humans around the world or a particularist construction emerging out of a uniquely Christian history. We will investigate topics such as the nature of Jewish religious practice, the relationship between Jewish law and identity, the rise of secular Jewish movements, and the implications of Jewish nationalist movements. We will engage with key texts from the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and modern Jewish thought while also considering contemporary debates on Jewish identity, secularism, and the intersection of faith, practice, and culture. We will also spend some time on comparative religious studies, examining how Judaism fits within broader categories of religion and spirituality and how these categories describe the multifaceted nature of Jewish life. The course will encourage students to grapple with the way in which concepts that we use in our everyday life, such as “religion,” in fact reflect deeply embedded histories and cultural biases and to think about what it means to do comparative religious studies as an academic project. Students will complete both short essays and in-class presentations over the course of the year in addition to one group presentation. The final conference project will serve as a culmination of a research question that the student has pursued; and while it may take a variety of forms and media, depending on the personal interests of the student, the project will display sustained research and engagement with academic sources related to the topic of choice. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Few people dispute the enormous impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on Western culture—and even on the modern world, in general. This seminar will introduce the interested student to this culture, mainly through reading salient primary texts in English translation. Our interest will range broadly. Along with some background reading, we will discuss mythology (Hesiod), epic hymns and poetry (Homer), history (Herodotus), politics, religion, and philosophy. By the end of the course, students should have a basic understanding of the cultural contribution of the Ancient Greeks, as well as a basic timeline of their history through the Hellenistic age. 

A historical survey of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions in Japan, from ancient times to the present, this course will cover all major Japanese religious traditions and movements—Shintō, Buddhism, Shūgendō, Confucianism, and the so-called “new religions”—as well as various elements of religion and culture, such as Noh theatre and Bushidō, that are not readily subsumed under any of the preceding labels. Readings will include many primary sources (Japanese texts in English translation), and audio-visual materials will be used whenever possible to give a fuller picture of traditional religious art, architecture, and ritual performance in Japan. Prior study or experience with Japanese culture (language, literature, history, etc.) is desirable but not required.

It has been almost a quarter of a century since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. How have perceptions changed about the events that occurred that day? Shortly after the attacks, then-President George W. Bush insisted that Islam was not to blame and, instead, framed the battle ahead as “the war on terror.” But what about those who insisted that what had happened was an almost inevitable result of the “clash of civilizations”? How did Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda frame the narrative and their part in it? What kinds of arguments were presented to justify the attack and the US military interventions that followed? In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, what has been called the “Islamophobia industry” developed and flourished, taking full advantage of new forms of media. What role has mainstream and alternative media played in how Muslims have been portrayed and the discrimination that they have faced in the years since 9/11? Ten years after the attacks, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened in New York City. How have this site and other memorials shaped the collective memory of the events, as well as the curriculum being taught to a generation born after 2001? In addition to the architects of these memorials, artists, writers, and filmmakers have explored the many religious, political, and social dimensions of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. How have these works of imagination expanded the ways in which people have made sense of, and found meaning in, painful events? While this seminar is being offered through the religion discipline, the approach will be an interdisciplinary one, drawing upon readings and other materials from a variety of academic, artistic, and literary fields.

The Qur’an declares itself to be a book “for those who believe in the unseen” and gives vivid descriptions of multiple worlds and beings that are invisible to the human eye. Muslims throughout the centuries have expanded upon this Qur’anic foundation in their explorations of what exists beyond, or at the very limits of, human perception and power. The course will examine writings from both past and present about supernatural jinn, angels, satanic beings, and heaven and hell. We will read about the visions and travels of individuals who claim to have accessed other worlds and beings through their dreams, altered states, near-death experiences, and magic. When a philosopher named Ibn Arabi declared in the 13th century that he could hear and understand the speech of animate and inanimate objects on Earth, was he engaging in fantastical, imaginative, deluded thinking or paranormal observation? How have academics and others who live in disenchanted spaces engaged with writings and practices that reject a purely materialist understanding of reality? How has scientific study in areas such as quantum physics and plant intelligence led to alternative ways of viewing what used to be called “primitive” thought? While course work will be looking at these questions and topics primarily through Muslim writings, individual conference projects could involve the exploration of these topics through the lenses of other traditions. No prior knowledge of Islam is required.

This course will provide a historical overview of how key philosophical thinkers have thought about religious themes within the philosophical tradition broadly known as Continental philosophy, beginning with Spinoza and ending with contemporary postmodern thinkers. We will engage with key questions of the modern period emerging from the challenge to traditional religious forms and belief systems, such as: What is the nature and existence of God? Can we understand God through rational thought? How do we make sense of evil? How is God reconcilable with a belief in human freedom? How do we make sense of religious pluralism and the existence of multiple belief systems? Does God actively work within human history? What is left of morality if we do not maintain a traditional belief in God? We will think about such questions comparatively and historically, discussing key thinkers and ideas from philosophical movements such as German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and poststructuralism and deconstruction. By the end of the course, students will have a broad understanding of the historical development of the field of Continental philosophy of religions, which should support further work in philosophy for interested students. Though primarily focused on Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish thinkers, as well as atheist and agnostic thinkers from these cultural backgrounds, there will be opportunities for students to explore the field of philosophy of religions within a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox Christian, or other religious framework, if so interested.

Perhaps no one has not heard the name of a seemingly obscure carpenter’s son executed by the Romans around 33 CE. Why? The religion that we call Christianity shaped the Western world for at least 1,500 years. This course will study the origins of that tradition. As we study those origins, we will explore Judaism in the strange and fertile Second Temple period (515 BCE–70 CE). We will encounter the learned societies of holy men like the Pharisees and the Qumran sectarians, as well as the freedom fighters/terrorists called the Zealots. Our main source will be the New Testament of the Christian Bible, though our sources will be supplemented by other primary materials. Excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature, as well as other Hellenistic texts from that period, will provide the cultural backdrop in which Christianity has its roots. We will learn about the spread of the new movement of “Christians,” as they were called by their detractors in Antioch, from its roots in the Holy Land into the greater Greco-Roman world. How did that movement, which began among the Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean, come to be wholly associated with Gentiles by the end of the second century? Who became Christian? Why were they hated so much by the greater Greco-Roman society? What did they believe? How did they behave? What are the origins of Christian antisemitism? What kind of social world, with its senses of hierarchy and gender relations, did these people envision for themselves?

The concept of a “thing”—an entity that exists in and of itself, separate from all other things—is nothing but a useful fiction. In the real world, there are no self-existing “things” that exist prior to our naming of them, just as there are no constellations in the night sky before we draw imaginary lines between the visible stars. This, in a nutshell, is the startling proposition advanced by the Buddhist doctrine of śunyatā, or “emptiness” as the Sanskrit term is usually translated. Often misconstrued by critics as a form of nihilism (“nothing exists”), idealism (“all that exists are mental phenomena”), or skepticism (“we can never know what really exists”), the emptiness doctrine is better interpreted as a radical critique of language and all of the conceptual categories that we habitually use to talk about and make sense of the world. The premise of this course is that the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is worth learning, because it empowers all who understand it to be smarter, freer, and more effective in the ways they employ language to think for themselves and communicate with others. It is, in fact, a mode of critical thinking that has universal applicability whether one embraces any beliefs or practices of the Buddhist religion that gave rise to it. Indeed, the doctrine of emptiness was first developed by Buddhist thinkers in ancient India to demonstrate the ultimate arbitrariness of all Buddhist conceptual categories, including “emptiness” itself! The course has two main aims. The first, pursued mainly in fall, is to impart a clear, accurate understanding of the “emptiness” doctrine as it evolved in the context of Buddhist intellectual history. We will read and discuss a number of Buddhist texts—primary sources in English translation from the original Sanskrit or Chinese—that advocate the philosophy of emptiness, as well as some secondary scholarship on the subject. Individual conference research by students in fall should focus on some aspect of Buddhist beliefs, practices, social institutions, arts, or literature. The second aim of the course, pursued in spring, is to explore ways in which the emptiness doctrine, if taken seriously as a critique of the mechanisms and inherent limitations of human knowledge, may be brought to bear in a number of different disciplines, academic and otherwise. The class will read and discuss a number of scholarly works that deal with Western (non-Buddhist) traditions of historiography, literary theory, and scientific inquiry. The readings are designed to introduce students to some of the main intellectual trends in the humanities, social sciences, and “hard” sciences that students are likely to encounter in other College courses. At the same time, the class will learn how to use the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness as an analytical tool to critique the conceptual models employed in the various academic disciplines treated in the readings. For individual conference work in spring, each student will be required to use that tool to analyze the fundamental nomenclature—the way of dividing up the world into “things”—employed by some particular field of human endeavor (which may be an academic, artistic, or athletic discipline) or any other endeavor (e.g., political or economic) in which the student is especially interested.

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality, a race, an ethnicity—or all or none of these? This question has driven Jewish thought for centuries and has preoccupied both Jewish thinkers and non-Jewish thinkers attempting to make sense of the place of the Jewish minority in surrounding cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which Judaism and Jewish peoplehood are understood historically, theologically, and sociologically and how this form of identity does or does not map onto emergent modern concepts of religion and nationality. We will use Judaism as a test case for exploring the very concept of “religion” itself, as it evolved in European culture, and the question of whether religion is a universal concept that applies to all humans around the world or a particularist construction emerging out of a uniquely Christian history. We will investigate topics such as the nature of Jewish religious practice, the relationship between Jewish law and identity, the rise of secular Jewish movements, and the implications of Jewish nationalist movements. We will engage with key texts from the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and modern Jewish thought while also considering contemporary debates on Jewish identity, secularism, and the intersection of faith, practice, and culture. We will also spend some time on comparative religious studies, examining how Judaism fits within broader categories of religion and spirituality and how these categories describe the multifaceted nature of Jewish life. The course will encourage students to grapple with the way in which concepts that we use in our everyday life, such as “religion,” in fact reflect deeply embedded histories and cultural biases and to think about what it means to do comparative religious studies as an academic project. Students will complete both short essays and in-class presentations over the course of the year in addition to one group presentation. The final conference project will serve as a culmination of a research question that the student has pursued; and while it may take a variety of forms and media, depending on the personal interests of the student, the project will display sustained research and engagement with academic sources related to the topic of choice.

The Fourth Gospel and the epistles associated with its authors, 1-3 John, have been particularly significant for the development of Christian thought. In this course, we will study the Gospel of John closely, engaging in the hermeneutical arts with an eye to the development of Christian theology, as well as uncovering the history and growth of the early Christian community responsible for its unique prose and views regarding Jesus of Nazareth and the role of Christian discipleship. We will immerse ourselves in the Hellenistic world, especially as it relates to Mediterranean Judaism. In doing so, we will examine the roots of Christian antisemitism and the development of Gnosticism and Christian docetism.

The American fascination with Zen Buddhism began during the postwar occupation of Japan and took off during the 1950s, when Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat Generation styled themselves as freewheeling Zen "dharma bums." In the 1960s, the Zen writings of D. T. Suzuki became popular and introduced the possibility of satori, or spiritual “enlightenment,” which seemed to fit right in with the “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy of the hippie movement and its use of psychedelic drugs. From the 1970s, Zen centers sprang up across the United States and Europe, giving people who were serious about gaining satori a taste of the rigors of Japanese-style Zen monastic training with its long hours of zazen (sitting meditation) and emphasis on ascetic endurance. Karate and other martial arts dojos opened in neighborhoods everywhere, and anyone who trained in one likely heard about the deep historical connection between Zen and Bushido (the “way of the warrior”) in Japan. Meanwhile, Zen has also became known in the West for its refined aesthetic sense, as represented in the “Zen arts” of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, ink painting, landscape gardening, and Noh theatre. This course intends to pull back the curtain of these Western images of Zen and look behind them to see what Zen Buddhism in Japan has really been like from the time of its initial importation from China in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) to the present. It may be surprising to learn, for example, that Zen was instrumental in introducing Confucian-style ancestor worship to Japan and that, even today, the main occupation of Zen monks is the performance of funerals and memorial services for ancestral spirits. Zen monasteries were indeed built and patronized by samurai rulers right down to the advent of the Meiji period in 1868, when Japan began a headlong rush to adopt many elements of Western technology and culture; but what attracted samurai to the religion was largely the elite Chinese culture that it conveyed, not any warrior spirit of fearlessness in the face of death. Ironically, much of what Americans think of as “Zen” was invented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the Zen Buddhist priesthood in Japan struggled to make itself relevant in the modern, scientific age of colonialism and militarism. The notions that Zen dispenses with religious superstition and empty ritual, for example, and that it is a kind of spirituality that can be practiced in the midst of everyday life no matter what a person's occupation were formulated in Japan by Zen monks and lay practitioners who had been deeply influenced by Western cultural norms, such as rationality and individualistic self-help. The idea that Zen training could toughen up soldiers to fight for the empire similarly dated from a time when the samurai class had been dissolved and the country was consumed by conscripting the sons of farmers and merchants into the military. In the postwar period, the theme of “Zen and Bushido” was conveniently muted, while “Zen and the arts”" was promoted—both within Japan and abroad. This course explores these and other aspects of the history and current status of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Some background knowledge of the Buddhist tradition is desirable but not mandatory.

Is religion meant to protect the status quo or to challenge it? This course will examine individuals and groups that have experimented with ideas and practices that are designed to upend, in nonviolent ways, established paradigms and institutions. On the individual level, this might involve spiritual training along the lines of “crazy wisdom,” which is intended to destabilize the ordinary ways in which one views oneself and reality. It might also entail the adoption of monastic-like disciplines that stand in stark contrast to the materialist preoccupations of ordinary life. On the societal and political levels, religious innovators have created communities and movements that challenge the mainstream interpretations of their respective traditions or the norms of their societies. What distinguishes these individuals and groups is their strong commitment to ideas and practices that require fundamental and profound changes in individual, social, and political behaviors. These commitments are usually not considered a reinterpretation of scriptures and earlier teachings but, rather, a rediscovery of their most crucial elements. Whether flouting society’s conventions through holy madness or alternative communitarian practices—or contesting them through new theologies and political activism—these practices are understood as a type of spiritual work. Examples of this phenomenon will be taken from a variety of religious traditions and movements.

One of the greatest rock songs of all time, “Layla,” was written by Eric Clapton after he read the story of star-crossed lovers, Layla and Majnun. This tale of a Bedouin poet, who went mad after he was cut off from his beloved, circulated widely in Arabic sources for hundreds of years before being expanded into a long narrative poem in Persian, by Nizami, in the 12th century. By this point in time, telling compelling stories had become a means by which Sufi writers (the mystics of Islam) described their particular vision of being Muslim, which was that of the pitfalls, despairing moments, and ecstasies of the spiritual quest and search for closeness to the divine Beloved. Layla and Majnun were just one of several couples in allegorical stories that were understood as teaching vehicles for disciples on the path. On the opposite end of the plot spectrum, there is Ibn Tufayl’s famous story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a mystical-philosophical work in Arabic also written in the 12th century. It describes an abandoned baby growing up on a desert island, raised first by a deer and then by his own devices, as he slowly discovers the nature of the human-divine relationship. Other classical works dispensed with this format of the singular narrative, opting instead for nesting stories within stories and mixing animal stories with stories about humans. We will look at examples of these literary techniques in poetic translations of Farid ad-Din Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī's “Mathnawi,” alongside “The Thousand and One Nights” folktale collection. Rooting storytelling in a deeper dimension that explores the human potential for more refined behavior and ethics, as well as higher spiritual states, will serve as the common thread to the works discussed in class.

how Judaism does and does not map onto contemporary racial categories has been, for centuries, a defining question of how Jews, as a small minority group, relate to their surrounding cultures. In many ways, the story of the historical construction of racial categories is itself a story indissolubly bound up with Jewish history—ranging from the development of the concept of blood purity during the Spanish Inquisition, which was then exported to the New World through Spanish colonialism, to late 19th-century racial theorists preoccupied with the question of how Jews do or do not relate to European peoples. As such, this course will consider the overarching question—Are Jews white?—from a historical and sociological perspective. In so doing, we will think about the historical development of the concept of whiteness itself and the relationship between the emergent concept of race and concepts of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, and nationality. We will look at how Jews were and are racially defined and categorized in different historical and cultural contexts in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States—and how this question is bound up with broader questions about power relations, political structures, and minority and majority identities. We will look at how Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism have altered Jewish racialization; how Jews relate to broader discourses of postcolonialism and Orientalism; and the different racializations of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The course will look at the ways in which Jews responded to the rise of Black nationalism in the United States and how racialized divisions between different ethnic Jewish communities shape politics in the modern state of Israel, with a particular focus on the rise of the Mizrahi Black Panthers. We will read sources from Jews of color and Jews who identify as white, from many diverse national backgrounds, as well as from many non-Jewish thinkers who find Jewish identity a fruitful way to think about the question of racial identity and its attendant political conflicts. We will explore how racial categories for Jews function both internally, within the Jewish community, and externally. In so doing, we will come to see how Jews and their relationship to whiteness is a defining question not just for Jewish identity but also how Jewishness can help shed light on the very concept of race itself.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

A number of contemporary politicians would have us believe that Medieval Europe was an almost uniquely Christian place and that the other two Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Islam—were fleeting and insignificant forces in the development of Europe and the Mediterranean. The arts, however, tell a different story. It is not a story of a utopia of tolerance and understanding, nor is it one of constant hostility and opposition between religious groups. The arts, instead, reveal multiple different ways that relations between different religious groups are constructed in societies, in times of war and peace, and in times of tension and productive interaction between different religious groups. The works we will explore are fascinating and historically revealing. The themes will be traced in mosques, churches, and synagogues; in palaces and gardens; in paintings, costume, and luxury arts, seeing how rich the act of grappling with difference can make a society. To understand these relations, we will also explore theories of interaction and question some of the ways in which religious difference has been characterized in the arts in the past.

This course will look at the rise and unfolding of China’s major religious traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular (folk) religion—and seeks to place them within a broader historical, social, and cultural context. In doing so, we will take a two-pronged approach. The first approach will involve the close reading of texts that were foundational in each of the traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, families, and communities; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they interact in behavior; and practices of inner self-cultivation and social engagement. The second approach will be to explore the specific religious practices associated with each of the traditions (e.g., ancestor worship, exorcisms, community worship, and prayers), the origins and transformation of popular religious festivals (including New Years, All Souls Day, and Hell), and the rise and spread of deity cults (including Guanyin, Mazu, and City Gods). This will involve a different set of texts, including ritual and liturgical texts, temple records and regulations, “how-to” manuals for specific practices, miracle tales, temple performance pieces, government documents, legal cases, diaries, and journals. In bringing these two approaches together, we will consider the ways in which religious traditions and practices both shaped and were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political institutions. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

This course will look at the rise and unfolding of China’s major religious traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular (folk) religion—and seeks to place them within a broader historical, social, and cultural context. In doing so, we will take a two-pronged approach. The first approach will involve the close reading of texts that were foundational in each of the traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, families, and communities; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they interact in behavior; and practices of inner self-cultivation and social engagement. The second approach will be to explore the specific religious practices associated with each of the traditions (e.g., ancestor worship, exorcisms, community worship, and prayers), the origins and transformation of popular religious festivals (including New Years, All Souls Day, and Hell), and the rise and spread of deity cults (including Guanyin, Mazu, and City Gods). This will involve a different set of texts, including ritual and liturgical texts, temple records and regulations, “how-to” manuals for specific practices, miracle tales, temple performance pieces, government documents, legal cases, diaries, and journals. In bringing these two approaches together, we will consider the ways in which religious traditions and practices both shaped and were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political institutions.

This course will offer a three-part approach to the study of law in premodern China, focusing on legal theory, courts and the implementation of law, and the relationship between law and popular culture. The first part of the course will provide an overview of the philosophical basis of law, the state’s development of civil and penal law codes, and its creation of courts and judicial institutions. The second part will look more closely at the application of the law code to criminal cases in the medieval period. Here, we will study case books and judicial judgments, precedent texts, magistrates’ manuals, forensic guidelines, and journal accounts. Topics that we will examine include: the role and function of local judges, the processes by which penal cases were judged and punishments determined, and the rights and obligations of the various parties in a legal suit. The third part of the course will examine the ways in which the judicial system both influenced and was influenced by popular culture. Our readings will include religious tracts, folktales, and popular fiction. Topics will include the ways in which the court system shaped popular notions of justice, karma, and revenge; the contribution of the legal system to increasingly complicated notions of heaven and hell; and the rise of popular “detective” fiction centered on the courtroom and judges.

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. 

In the 16th century, Europe entered upon a religious crisis that was to permanently alter the character of Western Christianity. Between 1520 and 1580, the religious unity of Catholic Christendom was destroyed, as believers throughout Central and Northern Europe severed their ties with the papacy to form new “Protestant” communities. But the impact of the religious crisis was by no means confined to the emergence of the churches of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt against the Roman church ushered in an era of soaring religious creativity and savage religious conflict that lasted for nearly two centuries and revolutionized thought, art, music...and politics. The modern state is ultimately a product of the Reformation crisis, as is the system of international law that still governs the relations among sovereign states. Students in this course will examine multiple aspects of the religious, intellectual, and political history of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Readings will focus attention on the diversity of religious thinking and religious experience in this era. Besides tracing the rise of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches and the complex history of the “Radical Reformation,” we will consider forms of belief independent of any church and new varieties of skepticism and doubt. We will also devote considerable attention to the reform movements that transformed Roman Catholicism during those two centuries and the upsurge of missionary energy and mystical spirituality that accompanied them. We will investigate the effects of the Reformation crisis on politics and the state and on the social order that Europe inherited from the Middle Ages. As part of this investigation, we will examine the most important political struggles waged in the name of religion between 1524 and 1689: the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years’ War in Germany, the Dutch revolt against Spain, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Revolution. Texts will include works by Luther, Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Pascal. 

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

Julian of Norwich is the earliest known woman to author a text in English. In 1373, at the age of “thirty and a half,” Julian fell severely ill. On the brink of death, she experienced a series of visions, which she recorded as her “short text” or Shewings. Sometime after her recovery, she chose a life of solitude as an anchorite; and for the next 40 years, Julian contemplated and elaborated on her visionary experiences. The result is her “long text,” A Revelation of Divine Love, which has been called “the most important work of Christian reflection in the English language.’ The journey of this course will begin with Julian’s Shewings and end with her Revelation—her writings serving as a lens to various traditions of medieval mysticism. Along the way, we will encounter the “intellectual” and “erotic” threads of mysticism woven throughout Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality—from the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), and Augustine of Hippo to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Dante, and Jewish mystics. Next, we will examine how monks and mendicants such as Richard of St. Victor, William of St. Thierry, and Bonaventure understood the intersection of human and divine love, how the knowledge of self leads to the knowledge of God. We will then pause at the fraught waystation of mysticism and heresy to examine how Meister Eckhart’s and Marguerite Porete’s teachings of the soul’s total union with God were met with institutional hostility and violence. Finally, we will land once again in medieval England. After surveying Julian’s English contemporaries, we will embark on a sustained close reading of her Revelation of Divine Love—now with preparation to see how she understood the purpose of her visionary experiences: “Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherfore showed he it thee? For love.”

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

When the iconoclastic poet John Milton published his masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), he had already lost the fight he had spent most of his adult life waging: A king had returned to the throne of England, and the radical energy of the English Civil War seemed to have consumed itself. Why write Paradise Lost—an epic poem about the biblical Creation, the Fall of Man, and the dignity of human freedom—at all? Among other things, Milton’s epic is an act of faith: faith in religious and political imagination; faith in the revolutionary potential of love; and, ultimately, faith in poetry as a means to express his passionate “great argument.” In this course, we will take our time reading all of Paradise Lost, considering its revisionary relationship with the Bible, its complex gender politics, its experimental poetic form, and its bold engagement with scientific advances and philosophical problems. Along the way, we will consider a range of theoretical approaches that literary scholars have taken to comprehend a text that one early reader described as a book that “contains all things.” Finally, we will explore the influence of Paradise Lost on later works, such as William Blake’s mystic poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

In this course, we shall begin by reading Schelling’s Bruno, which seeks redemption through a mystical “pantheism”—the teaching that the world is one with God. We shall then go on to read various texts from Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejects the mysticism of Schelling but still wants to save the world and seeks to do so through what one could call an atheist pantheism, which redirects the passion for transcendence to an embrace of life on Earth. Students will be expected to bring a written question on the reading to each class, to present short sections of the reading, and to write a paper analyzing a topic or section of the class reading.

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

The magnum opus, Ethics, of great early modern Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1633-1672) will serve as the focus of this course. German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi once wrote that “Spinoza is the only philosopher who had the courage to take philosophy seriously; if we want to be philosophers, we can only be Spinozists.” Even if Jacobi’s statement is exaggerated, it is certainly true that studying Spinoza will make us better philosophers. But Spinoza promises much more. He claims that those who follow the guide of his Ethics become freer, wiser, and, above all, happier. Ethics is a notoriously difficult and enigmatic text, written in the form of geometrical proofs, even concerning psychological, moral, and theological matters. Yet, many philosophers and poets considered it exceptionally beautiful. Among the questions the book tackles are: What determines our desires, and in what ways can we, or should we, control them? In what ways can we be free, and in what ways are our behaviors and desires predetermined? In what ways can we be unique, and in what ways are we an inherent part of a greater whole? As we will learn, Spinoza argued that God and Nature are synonyms and that, to achieve an eternal and blissful life, we do not need to die and go to heaven. We do not even need to change the world or ourselves. All we need is to understand the way things are.