Religion

Religion features animals everywhere, from the lion lying with the lamb in biblical prophecy, to the beasts that populate many myths, to beliefs in the transmigration between human and animal souls, to legislations and rituals for animal slaughter, to religious responses to animal suffering, to a range of positions on meat-eating and vegetarianism, and the list keeps going. “Animals and Religion” introduces you to the many different ways that the world’s religious traditions approach nunhuman beings — the creatures we call “animals.” We will address animals in the big “world religions” such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and the “Abrahamic” traditions, as well as in local and indigenous traditions and in secular spiritualities, from antiquity to today. We will conduct our inquiry under the shadow of species extinction, factory farming, and other forms of species-based oppression. The course will explore how religious traditions are obstacles as well as rich resources in contemporary thinking about the question of the animal and in the choices we make regarding fellow creatures.

Discussion section for RELI UN1452: Animals and Religion

Discussion section for RELI UN1452: Animals and Religion

Are “belief” and “reason” two different things? What is the proper role of religion in modern society? How do we determine what is just and unjust in the absence of a Higher Law? Does religion continue to influence political decision-making in liberal democracies, and if so, how? These questions continue to animate debates about the relationship between religion and politics today. This class examines articulations of and responses to this question in the political thought of the Enlightenment, a period that has traditionally been described as the moment when “the West” parted ways with religion and religious belief as the foundation for its understanding of truth, justice, and social order. In this class, we will examine classic and overlooked works of Enlightenment philosophy. We will interrogate whether the Enlightenment really signaled a departure from religion. We will also examine whether the Enlightenment was the preserve — much less the invention — of white Europeans and American settlers. We will do so with an eye toward the politics of the present, examining how Enlightenment thought’s engagement with religion produced discourses of race, gender, economy, and nationhood that continue to shape the terms of political discourse today.

This course examines the work of religious ideas—and ideas about religion—in creating, mediating, and responding to climate change. We will use religion as a lens for examining the role of humans in creating ecological destruction and efforts to repair and rework relationships with the natural world. The course draws on primary texts from and literature about a wide range of religious traditions in a bid to unsettle universalist narratives about both the environment and climate change. Students will encounter a variety of religious philosophies of the environment and interrogate the role that shifting ideas about religion have played in the emergence of the climate crisis. Throughout the course, questions of colonialism will be central in understanding how we think about religion and cultivating attitudes toward the environment. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of the notoriously vexed category of religion and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Overall, this course will provide a strong grounding in both the study of religion and the environmental humanities.

 

The course introduces the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, its essential primary textual source materials translated from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, and the philosophical insights of some of the traditions’ outstanding individuals.

 

The course introduces the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, its essential primary textual source materials translated from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, and the philosophical insights of some of the traditions’ outstanding individuals.

 

The course introduces the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, its essential primary textual source materials translated from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, and the philosophical insights of some of the traditions’ outstanding individuals.

 

The course introduces the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism throughout India, South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Central Asia, its essential primary textual source materials translated from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, and the philosophical insights of some of the traditions’ outstanding individuals.

Buddhist teachings came to Tibet relatively late in the history of Buddhism’s travels through Asia. Tibetan emperors adopted Buddhism from India around the eighth century, which sounds like a long time ago now, but by that time Buddhism was already well established in parts of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. In addition to being known as a tradition of renunciants and forest dwelling philosophers, Buddhism was associated with cosmopolitanism—literacy, the arts, architecture, higher education and beyond. Tibetan rulers, like so many rulers before them, turned to Buddhism after amassing power through warfare and violence, and they became interested in Buddhism’s methods for cultivating wisdom and compassion as antidotes to ignorance and selfishness. They were also curious about whether Buddhism could help justify and support their claims to power. Because Buddhism was already a complex system, Tibetans were able to uniquely integrate all three of the major traditions of Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism. Thanks to the hard work of Tibetan and Indian translators and artists with imperial support, monks and nuns followed the rules of the earliest disciples of Buddha, philosophers pored over Indian Buddhist treatises, and ritualists fine-tuned the tantric, esoteric, intensive path to liberation from dissatisfaction and suffering. The new expressions of Buddhism that emerged in Tibet have shaped religion, education, literary production, the arts, and language across a massive and diverse swath of Asia, from northern India to Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and areas of Western China. More recently, Tibetan Buddhism has spread across the globe. In this course, by analyzing primary textual sources in translation as well as visual and material culture, we will investigate the history and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in all its complexity, from its earliest origins to the present. There are no prerequisites for this introductory lecture

Considers efforts since 1900 to synthesize a coherent understanding of what Hinduism entails, sometimes under the heading of sanatana dharma. Using a rubric provided by the Bhagavad Gita, explores philosophical/theological (jnana), ritual (karma), and devotional (bhakti) aspects of Hindu life and thought.

Curious about ambivalences and how we might attend to what we would rather not know, the late psychoanalyst Muriel Dimen took an interest in what she called the “eew! factor,” the visceral reaction of disgust and revulsion that is usually far more ambivalent than we like to think. Laced with attraction and excitement, relegated often to the unconscious, the “eew! factor” will provide us a lens for thinking with psychoanalysis about desires, bodies, social and moral boundaries, power, violence, ethics, and their ambivalences. Conceptions of purity and pollution, taboo and transgression work to establish norms and boundaries, while also rendering the forbidden exceptional, threatening, alluring, and powerful. We will attend to the dynamics of transference and countertransference to think through the ambivalences of attraction, pleasure, embarrassment, revulsion, and shame that surround investments in and rejections of queerness, racialization, religion, and institutions. We will examine how value and power do and don’t accrue around taboos and transgressions and to secrecy and revelations. In light of the affective intensities of the “eew! factor” that seems never far in our everyday negotiations of social, moral, and bodily boundaries, we will also ask what ordinariness and a lack of exceptionality in relation to the “eew!” might look like, if it is even possible.

An exploration of alternative theoretical approaches to the study of religion as well as other areas of humanistic inquiry. The methods considered include: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy, and deconstruction. (Previous title: Juniors Colloquium)

This course examines the history of religion in the United States from the Civil War to the present through thematic units focused on the legal structures of religious freedom; race, religion, and nationality; healing, aesthetics, and embodiment; and, finally, religion and politics. Over the course of the semester, students will explore various religious communities as well as the ways social, political, and economic factors have shaped those traditions – and how religious communities have in turn shaped US society, politics, and culture. Students will also be introduced to key themes and debates in the field of American religious studies.

This course examines the history of religion in the United States from the Civil War to the present through thematic units focused on the legal structures of religious freedom; race, religion, and nationality; healing, aesthetics, and embodiment; and, finally, religion and politics. Over the course of the semester, students will explore various religious communities as well as the ways social, political, and economic factors have shaped those traditions – and how religious communities have in turn shaped US society, politics, and culture. Students will also be introduced to key themes and debates in the field of American religious studies.

This course examines the history of religion in the United States from the Civil War to the present through thematic units focused on the legal structures of religious freedom; race, religion, and nationality; healing, aesthetics, and embodiment; and, finally, religion and politics. Over the course of the semester, students will explore various religious communities as well as the ways social, political, and economic factors have shaped those traditions – and how religious communities have in turn shaped US society, politics, and culture. Students will also be introduced to key themes and debates in the field of American religious studies.

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

This is the discussion section for RELI UN3314: QURAN

This course conceives of the Qur’ān as a living text in constant flux through interactions with other religious traditions.  It focuses on developing an understanding of the Qur’ān’s form, style, and content through a  close reading of comparable religious texts.  Major topics covered include the Qur’ānic theory of prophecy, its treatment of the Biblical tradition (both that of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), and its perspective on pre-Islamic pagan religion.  The central goals of the course include the ability to (a) analyze primary religious sources in a critical and objective manner and (b) construct coherent arguments based on concrete evidence.   In a class of this nature, class members will naturally hold or develop a wide variety of opinions about the topics covered.  The goal is not to adopt a single opinion concerning the interpretation of a particular text, but rather to support personal conclusions in a clear logical manner. 

In this course, students will come to see the imbrication of religion, power, and mental illness across South Asia by examining experiences of suffering and its management; the history of psychiatry in the British colonial era and its afterlives; and the relationship of religion to concepts of mental and emotional disorder. Students will identify models for medical structures of care, healing, and treatments in the context of religion, ritual, and quotidian life. Topics include diagnostic processes and the creation of categories, stigma and models of clinical care, hysteria, spirit possession, pharmaceuticals, and the relationship of trauma to political structures. This course has three sections: 1) the first portion undertakes a brief historical survey of medical disciplines and institutions in South Asia (such as the development of Ayurveda, Yunānī Ṭibb, and the rise of the bīmāristān); 2) the second portion of the course focuses on the rise of the asylum (sometimes called the pāgal khāna) in tandem with psychiatry and its twinned consequence: the pathologization of asceticism by British colonial technologies of discipline; 3) the final portion examines the relationship between British colonialism and psychoanalysis with the introduction of this western discipline to the subcontinent. 

This course will take critical stock of historical structures throughout South Asia claiming to provide care (such as family, caste, healthcare, mental asylums, colonialism, educational systems, pensions, and much more). As a result, students come to consider concepts of social suffering, biopolitics, biosociality, political subjectivity, and postcolonial disorder. 

Primary source material will include the following: śāstra, ethnography, clinical studies, poetry, scripture, ritual texts across Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. 

 

 

What is the relationship between religion and human rights? How have different religious traditions conceived of “the human” as a being worthy of inherent dignity and respect, particularly in moments of political, military, economic, and ecological crisis? How and why have modern regimes of human rights privileged some of these ideas and marginalized others? What can these complicated relationships between religion and human rights explain some of the key crises in human rights law and politics today, and what avenues can be charted for moving forward? In this class, we will attempt to answer these questions by first developing a theoretical understanding of some of the key debates about the origins, trajectories, and legacies of modern human rights’ religious entanglements. We will then move on to examine various examples of ideas about and institutions for protecting “humanity” from different regions and histories. Specifically, we will examine how different societies, organizations, and religious traditions have addressed questions of war and violence; freedom of belief and expression; gender and sexual orientation; economic inequality; ecology; and the appropriate ways to punish and remember wrongdoing. In doing so, we will develop a repertoire of theoretical and empirical tools that can help us address both specific crises of human rights in various contexts, as well as the general crisis of faith and and observance of human rights as a universal norm and aspiration for peoples everywhere.

The Religion Salon is a one-point course in the Religion department, designed to offer students an introduction to new areas of the academic study of religion and/or new approaches to the field. The Religion Salon will be offered as a supplement to an existing course offered in the same semester and will be open to (but not required of) the students in that existing course as well as to students who wish to take the Salon as a stand-alone one-point course. The Religion Salon will feature guest scholars whose research and teaching extend into new areas and/or engage in new approaches to the academic study of religion.

Working research seminar devoted to helping students produce a substantive piece of writing that will represent the culmination of their work at the College and in the major.

African Americans and Native Americans have a shared history of racial oppression in America. However, the prevailing lenses through which scholars understand settler colonialism, religion, and black and indigenous histories focus overwhelmingly on the dynamics between Europeans and these respective groups. How might our understanding of these subjects change when viewed from a different point of departure, if we center the history of entanglements between black and native lives? How does religion structure the overlapping experiences of Afro-Native peoples in North America?

From political movements in Minneapolis, Oakland, and New York City to enslavement from the Cotton Belt to the Rio Grande, this class will explore how Africans, Native Americans, and their descendants adapted to shifting contexts of race and religion in America. The course will proceed thematically by examining experiences of war, dislocation, survival, and diaspora.

Is the market a religious system? Can we consider "capitalism" to be a key arena in which the relationship between the religious and the secular is both negotiated and performed? In this course, students will explore the complicated relationship between faith and the market, the religious and the secular, and the evolution of vice and virtue as they relate to economic thriving in the United States. While no hard and fast rules for thinking about the relationship between right conduct and material interests cut across all religious and philosophical traditions, human agents invest real faith into currency, into markets, and into the reigning economic order to bring about increased opportunities, wealth, and freedom to people across the globe. Throughout this semester, we will chart both the long shadows and the future trajectories of these beliefs from our American perspective.

In recent decades, the study of the so-called “Buddho-Daoism” has become a burgeoning field that breaks down the traditional boundary lines drawn between the two Chinese religious traditions. In this course we will read secondary scholarship in English that probes the complex relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in the past two millennia. Students are required not only to be aware of the tensions and complementarity between them, but to be alert to the nature of claims to either religious purity or mixing and the ways those claims were put forward under specific religio-historical circumstances. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. We will address topics on terminology, doctrine, cosmology, eschatology, soteriology, exorcism, scriptural productions, ritual performance, miracle tales and visual representations that arose in the interactions of the two religions, with particular attention paid to critiquing terms such as “influence,”  “encounter,” “dialogue,” “hybridity,” “syncretism,” and “repertoire.” The course is designed for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of East Asian religion, literature, history, art history, sociology and anthropology. One course on Buddhism or Chinese religious traditions is recommended, but not required, as background.

This seminar will examine the history of the impact of technology and media on religion and vice versa before bringing into focus the main event: religion today and in the future. Well read the classics as well as review current writing, video and other media, bringing thinkers such as Eliade, McLuhan, Mumford and Weber into dialogue with the current writing of Kurzweil, Lanier and Taylor, and look at, among other things: ethics in a Virtual World; the relationship between Burning Man, a potential new religion, and technology; the relevance of God and The Rapture in Kurzweils Singularity; and what will become of karma when carbon-based persons merge with silicon-based entities and other advanced technologies.

Examination of topics in the religious philosophy of Tibet.

The frontier is central to the United States’ conception of its history and place in the world. It is an abstract concept that reflects the American mythology of progress and is rooted in religious ideas about land, labor, and ownership. Throughout the nineteenth century, these ideas became more than just abstractions. They were tested, hardened, and revised by U.S. officials and the soldiers they commanded on American battlefields. This violence took the form of the Civil War as well as the series of U.S. military encounters with Native Americans known as the Indian Wars. These separate yet overlapping campaigns have had profound and lasting consequences for the North American landscape and its peoples.

This course explores the relationship between religious ideology and violence in the last half of nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and geographically, we will engage with both primary sources and classic works in the historiography of the Indian Wars to examine how religion shaped U.S. policy and race relations from the start of the Civil War through approximately 1910.

Nomads, natives, peasants, hill people, aboriginals, hunter-gatherers, First Nations—these
are just a handful of the terms in use to define indigenous peoples globally. The names these groups
use to describe themselves, as well as the varying religious practices, attitudes, and beliefs among
these populations are far more numerous and complex. For much of recorded history however,
colonial centers of power have defined indigenous peoples racially and often in terms of lacking
religion; as pagan, barbarian, non-modern, and without history or civilization.

Despite this conundrum of identity and classification, indigenous religious traditions often
have well-documented and observable pasts. This course considers the challenges associated with
studying indigenous religious history, as well as the changing social, political, and legal dimensions
of religious practice among native groups over time and in relationship to the state. Organized
thematically and geographically, we will engage with classic works of ethnohistory, environmental
history, indigenous studies, anthropology, and religious studies as well as primary sources that
include legal documentation, military records, personal testimony, and oral narrative.

Course description: This seminar is intended for masters students in Religion who are writing and completing a thesis or other paper of similar length and scope. Enrolled students will work with the instructor, their advisor or second faculty reader, and seminar participants to develop, research, and write a thesis. Preparation and prerequisites: Instructor’s permission is required to enroll. Students are strongly encouraged to discuss the feasibility of potential thesis topics with a faculty member in Religion (preferably their advisor or other suitable faculty member), and if relevant also strive to identify key primary texts or sources, in advance of the semester. Course structure: The seminar will meet weekly. The first part of the term will focus on thesis development including scholarly scope, “fit” between theory and methodological approach, and the organization of a literature review and bibliography. The second part of the term will focus on workshopping drafts and sections in development, and ultimately full drafts.

It might be an exaggeration to say that religion begins with mothers. More accurate, perhaps, would be the suggestion that birth being paradigmatic of all origins and beginnings, all creation stories, mothers might serve as the ultimate metaphorical resource to think religion (and a few other things). And then there is of course the Great Mother, the matriarchal origins of the divine, as well as the contested matriarchy at the origins of human society. We will consider as many mothers as we can, beginning with specific mothers, mothers like Eve and Hagar, and “Mother India” too. We will attend to Mary, Mother of God, and we will consider matricide and maternal infanticide too. We will learn about the “mother tongue” and African matriarchy. Throughout we will explore the mother and the maternal as religious and theoretical questions — with a little help from psychoanalysis’ mothers.

There is no shortage of spilled ink, popular media coverage, scholarly inquiry, and academic institutes—including right here at Columbia University—dedicated to examining the intersection of religion and public life. From narratives of religion’s predicted decline during the twentieth century to its much-discussed global resurgence at the turn of the twenty-first, the concept of public religion continues to occupy popular imagination. Through the lens of public religion, we are able to examine pressing issues such as the revitalization of, or disillusionment toward, institutional forms and political establishments in our questionably secular age. What happens when religion “goes public”? Correspondingly, what assumptions about the category of religion and its role in public places do discussions of public religion promote?  Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the possibilities, pitfalls, and practicalities of understanding religion in terms of public life.  

The coursework will draw from scholarship, policy documents, and real-world case studies on issues ranging from climate crisis to conspiracy. Focusing on examples of advocacy, considerations of democratic renewal and decline, and competing claims of power and authority, this seminar considers the ways in which our definitions of religion impact lived, embodied, and practiced forms of religion and secularism in our current moment. 

Emplacement is often taken as the unspoken background of the study of religious phenomena. This seminar considers how problematizations of space, place, locality, and geography may cast religious phenomena in a new light. Approaches to theorizing space and place from various disciplines such as geography, cultural anthropology, philosophy, literature, art history, and history of cartography will be brought into conversation with questions emerging within the study of specific religion traditions. 

While this seminar is open to interested students from all disciplines, our work in this course specifically falls into the “zone of inquiry” of “space and place” of the Religion Department’s graduate programs. “Zones of inquiry” seek to introduce students to a particular cluster of key concepts and various theoretical elaborations of those concepts, in order to aid students in honing their ability to reflect critically on and develop further the central concepts that they derive from and bring to the specific traditions and phenomena that they study in their own research. A main goal of this course will therefore be to deepen our conceptual and analytical acumen and expand our theoretical resources at the intersection of religious studies and theories of space, place, and geography.

In this seminar we will examine the thought of the early 20th-century German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in light of his commitment to the task of philosophy (broadly understood) as a form of Erkenntniskritik, epistemological critique, that takes up questions of experience, history, culture, and politics in a damaged world. Paying special attention to Benjamin’s deployment and reshaping of theological tropes and figures, our considerations will be shaped around the following thematics: (1) the transformations of theorizing experience in relation to philosophies of history; (2) the critique of culture and modernity; and (3) the aesthetics of rhetoric and affect in relation to social criticism.

This course is designed for advanced graduate students in need of introduction to non-Buddhist as well as Buddhist sources for the study of pre-modern Japanese religion. The following represents a sample syllabus centering upon the themes of astrology and divination in early Japanese religion.

This course is designed for graduate students in need of introduction to non-Buddhist as well as Buddhist sources for the study of pre-modern Chinese religion. The course may be repeated for credit.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of a Sinitic language (Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese).