Religion

This is an undergraduate lecture course introducing students to the study of religion through an engagement with the history of hip hop music. More specifically, this course is organized chronologically to narrate a history of religion in the United States (circa 1970 to the present day) by mapping the ways that a variety of religious ideas and practices have animated rap music’s evolution and expansion during this time period. While there are no required prerequisites for the course, prior coursework in religious studies, African American studies, and/or popular music is helpful.

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

This course provides a chronological and thematic introduction to Chinese religions from their beginnings until modern times. It examines distinctive concepts, practices and institutions in the religions of China. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in China, with readings drawn from a wide-range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature and modern historical and ethnographic studies. Special attention will be given to those forms of religion common to both “elite” and “folk” culture: cosmology, family and communal rituals, afterlife, morality and mythology. The course also raises more general questions concerning gender, class, political patronage, and differing concepts of religion.

There are over 800 distinct Native American nations currently within the borders of the United States. This course offers a broad introduction to the diversity of American Indian religious systems and their larger functions in communities and in history. We will explore general themes in the study of Native American religious traditions as well as look at some specific examples of practices, ideas, and beliefs. Of particular importance are the history and effects of colonialism and missionization on Native peoples, their continuing struggles for religious freedom and cultural and linguistic survival, and the ways in which American Indians engage with religion and spirituality, both past and present, to respond to social, cultural, political, and geographical change.

The category of labor is often understood as a secular concept – closely and inextricably intertwined with the logic and destiny of capital. In this paradigm the question of the human is teleologically bound to the transverse flows of capital, with the human emerging primarily as an economic subject. This course nudges us to think outside the framework where labor is primarily understood as an economic function, instead exploring how religious traditions have shaped alternative understandings of labor and the human experience. We turn to other imaginations – such as those embedded in and emerging from diverse religious traditions – and consider other trajectories and possibilities of labor. Across religious traditions, labor has been central to the definition of the human, in multiple, cacophonous ways. In this course, we will encounter various religious ideas of labor not only as the process through which world(s) are made, but also as the process through which the idea of the human is made, contested, and remade over and over again. Drawing from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, this course will explore how diverse religious traditions have used the concept of work to define, delineate, and defend what it means to be human. We will pair primary texts with films, short stories and secondary readings, 2 to understand how these traditions provide alternative ways of understanding labor – not merely as a mechanism of economic production but as a critical process through which we engage in the process of becoming human through our interactions with the divine, various non-human actors, and the natural world. In particular, we will examine how religious communities have historically mobilized around issues of labor justice, drawing from their theological and ethical frameworks to advocate for dignity, equity, and justice. These insights are particularly urgent in a time marked by widespread exploitation, the displacement of workers by automation, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, which challenge traditional understandings of human labor. This course hopes to facilitate a nuanced understanding of labor’s theological, ethical, and political dimensions and consider new possibilities for work and justice in a rapidly changing world.

This course courses engages the interdisciplinary study of religion online and provides practical training to students on developing digital humanities projects, in partnership with the Digital Humanities Center and the Empirical Reasoning Center, and will incorporate analysis and critical reflection into their research on religious communities. The first portion of the course focuses on understanding methodologies in studying digital religion and exploring religious communities online. Case studies focus on ascriptive and affirmative identifications of religious communities, including how religious communities use online space to redefine their public
perceptions. The latter part of the course utilizes tools of digital humanities to develop projects responsive to student interests and that allows them to analyze digital expressions of religion.

What is the relationship between religion and medicine in the United States? How have ideas about bodies and bodily difference shaped American public life? This course takes a historical approach to these questions from the colonial era to the present day. Working at the intersection of religious studies and the history of medicine, we will explore critical shifts in the medical thought and practice alongside changing ideas about bodies and bodily difference (both real and perceived), spanning gender, race, disability, age, sickness and health, and sex, sexuality, and reproduction.

This course is thematic, though a loose history of dreaming, imaginative praxis, and virtual reality environments across South Asia will emerge through the networked conversations across texts. The advantage of a thematic course allows us to cover various genres such as: ritual manuals; epic; poetry; philosophical argument; biographical accounts; prophecies; conversion stories; and medical textbooks to name a handful. At the end of the course, we will see how the texts encountered in the first part have been repurposed to speak to social justice movements around caste - both within South Asia and the diaspora population in the U.S. The thematic of dreaming and imagination also provides flexibility in method: because students will have the opportunity to study conversations between different historical actors across religious traditions about dreams, they will also have the opportunity to revise problematic accounts of religious pluralism and communalism in South Asia. Students will read primary texts from Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Sikh traditions to name a handful. Students can look forward to reading about worlds within rocks; falling asleep and waking up as another person only to die in the dream world, wake up and then realize your dream-life family is somehow real and looking for you; how to finally interpret those pesky dreams about teeth falling out; dismembered bodies generating the universe; daydreaming about a cloud that thinks mountain peaks look like nipples; how to build a mind-temple that Shiva prefers to the physical one with fancy rock; and much more! 

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 source of truth and authority? What is the origin of the world and how does that determine the social order? Who ought to rule, why, and how? What are the standards for measuring justice and injustice? What is our relationship to the environment around us and how should its resources be distributed among people? How do we relate to those who are different from us, and what does it mean to be a community in the first place? Historically, the answers to these questions that have been described as “religious” and “political” have been the restricted to a specific tradition of Western European Christianity and its secular afterlives. However, these are questions that every society asks, in order to be a society in the first place. This course analyzes how indigenous peoples in the Americas asked and answered these questions through the first three centuries of Western European imperial rule. At the same time, this course pushes students to question what gets categorized as uniquely “indigenous” thought, how, and why.

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.

This seminar considers the difference gender makes in interpreting ancient Christian texts, ideas, and practices. Topics will include gender hierarchy and homoeroticism, prophecy and authority, outsiders’ views of Christianity, bodily pieties such as martyrdom and asceticism, and gender politics in the establishment of church offices. Emphasis will be placed on close readings of primary sources and selected scholarly framings of these sources.

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.

This seminar focuses on historical, sociological, and first-hand accounts of a diverse set of American non-conformist religious and spiritual groups (including MOVE, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Father Divine's International Peace Mission, the Oneida Perfectionists, and Occupy and others). Diverse in their historical origins, their activities, and their ends, each of the groups sought or seeks to offer radically news ways of living, subverting American gender, sexuality, racial, or economic norms. The title of this seminar highlights the ways that these groups explain their reasons for existing (to themselves or others) not as a choice but as a response to a system or society out of whack, at odds with the plans of the divine, or at odds with nature and survival. Likewise, it considers the numerous ways that these same groups have often found themselves the targets of state surveillance and violence.

This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students investigates the significance of dreams in multiple cultural and historical contexts with a focus on Tibetan Buddhism. Dreams and dreaming are vital aspects of Tibetan Buddhist meditative practice, visionary experience, poetry, narratives, as well as visual arts. Students in the seminar will explore a range of materials that 1) guide Buddhist practitioners to cultivate certain types of dreams, and 2) narrate dream experiences that the dreamer has deemed worth recording, and 3) situate Tibetan Buddhist examples in broader contexts of religious and psychological perspectives, with an emphasis on Freud and Jung’s treatment of dreams. According to Buddhist sources, a dream might be significant because the dreamer understands it to be revelatory, foretelling the future, or it might be recorded simply because the dreamer finds the dream in some way compelling, troubling, or funny. In life writing, dreams often highlight crucial moments in the writer’s life experience. Just as psychoanalysts make use of dreams to engage with analysands, Tibetan medical texts instruct doctors to pay close attention to patients’ dreams in the process of diagnosis. Tibetan ritual texts guide meditators in techniques for lucid dreaming. Visionary dreams are recorded in great aesthetic detail. Narratives of dreams and dreamscapes are an important part of biographies and life writing in general. We will also consider European and American treatments of dreams and lucid dreaming, including psychoanalytic, philosophical approaches to dreaming. A significant element of the course is a daily dream journal.

Mysticism and philosophy are often seen as opposing modes of thought. Yet while Kabbalah emerged partly in response to Jewish philosophy, it bears clear traces of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian influence. This course explores the origins and core principles of both traditions, their roles within Judaism, and their intersections with non-Jewish thought. Particular attention will be given to key moments in Jewish intellectual history and to differing treatments of concepts such as myth, law, heresy, evil, and the divine.

What is scripture? How is cannon created? How do particular communities find meaning in varying works of literature? In this seminar, we will explore a number of influential American texts not simply in order to understand how they address questions of the holy and divine presence but also for how they provide creative ways of considering questions that have dogged Americans for centuries. In so doing, we will place literary works in conversation with contemporary theological trends and present-day scholarship on these connections. The course’s main thematic focus will be on government and collective rights; racial difference and questions of theodicy; children’s literature and disciplinary formation; the American libertarian streak; how best to care for the self; and humanity’s connection to nature. Students will examine a variety of texts – from the Declaration of Independence to Carl Sagan and Moby Dick – to better understand what matters to Americans and what do the literary artifacts we leave behind say about our current civilizational moment.

This course will have succeeded in its goals if by its end your operative definition of religion has been significantly jumbled, challenged, and complicated. While many of our historical actors will use the term in different ways, this course is invested not in identifying what is or is not properly “religious,” but rather in examining how ideas operate in the world for the people to whom they’re important. To a certain extent, we must take seriously the claims made by religious actors of God acting in their lives. But in terms of analysis, religion for us will be a fluid concept, one that evades simple definition, and that is always “real” in terms of its effects on belief, action, and identity.

This seminar provides an overview of sacrifice in both theory and practice. The concept of sacrifice, and its contestation, allows us to explore a range of issues and institutions related to the (often violent) act of “giving up,” or exchange. What must a sacrifice be, and how do its instantiations—for God; for country; for kin; for love; for rain; etc.—take shape? Readings are drawn from a range of sources, including Biblical texts and commentaries, the anthropological record, critical theory, comparative literature, and work on race and gender. The seminar aims to provide students with a strong foundation for relating sacrifice to broader concerns with the body, media/mediation, religion, politics, and kinship.

The Proseminar in Religion is designed to support PhD students within the department as they work on various aspects of professional development. Meeting three times per semester, the sessions will focus on both academic and non-academic career paths, coordinated by a member of the faculty and with guest speakers from both within and beyond the department. The emphasis will be on concrete outputs and skills training. The proseminar will require preparation and active participation from enrolled students, including background reading and writing assignments connected to the monthly topic. After each session focused on a piece of writing (fellowship applications; CVs and cover letters; publishing), students should come away from the proseminar with strong drafts of the relevant texts.
 

The proseminar is required for all ABD students in year 5 or 6 and can be taken sequentially or not. ABD students are encouraged to speak about the timing of enrollment with the DGS and their dissertation sponsor.

This course is intended for MA 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 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. 

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. 

This is a course designed for first- and second-year graduate students who are interested in the issue of community formation, lineage, genealogy, transmission, and translation, whether textual or cultural. Course texts will be a combination of theoretical interventions and case studies drawn from major religious traditions. The learning goals of the course are the following: (1) to introduce seminal interpretive and/or methodological issues in the contemporary study of transmission; (2) to read several theoretical “classics” in the field, to provide a foundation for further reading; (3) to sample, where possible, new writing in the field; and (4) to encourage students to think of ways in which the several issues and authors surveyed might provide models for their own ongoing research work.

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).