A study of the Ramayana of Valmiki in translation. Themes include aesthetic, ethical, and socio-political issues in the text, as well as commentary and the rise of Rama worship.

This course explores how ecological concerns have influenced and challenged contemporary religious traditions and non-traditional forms of religious expression. We will also consider how religious traditions themselves have shaped or contributed to the environmental crisis.

What is religion? How should we study it? This course gives students the opportunity to ask the big, messy questions about religion, and to see how scholars know what they know about it. Students will learn key theoretical ideas and research methods, and then apply them in their own projects.

The Hebrew Bible (i.e. the Old Testament) is not a single book, but an anthology selected from a larger body of ancient Jewish literature reflecting different authors, historical circumstances, literary genres, and religious agendas. This course familiarizes the student with critical study of the Hebrew Bible and related literature of ancient Jewish communities (Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls). Among the topics to be examined are the basic forms of ancient Hebrew literature, the issues of textual development, the process of canonization, and the ancient Near Eastern cultural environment from which this literature emerged.

This course focuses on the interaction of gender and religion from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective; topics include creation myths, authority and leadership, sainthood, expressions of the divine, and gendered ritual.

Ancient Jewish sages understood wisdom as a "skill in living." Wisdom for them was an approach to life, a way of looking at the world, and a quest for meaning and purpose in the relationships with God and fellow human beings. Some of history's most enduring collections of ancient wisdom are included in the Hebrew Bible (i.e., Old Testament) books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Wisdom perspectives are also found in the Song of Songs and many of the Psalms. Sometimes joyful and exultant, at other times cynical and fatalistic, the ancient sages wrestled with the ups and downs of life, and grappled with them rationally from the perspective of experience and community wisdom. This course investigates the genre of wisdom literature - its style, language, and historical and theological backgrounds - and explores the pluriformity of the biblical heritage.

Is violence inherent in religion? Most religious traditions include teachings that profess a love of peace, and yet these same traditions have motivated some of the most atrocious acts of violence in human history. This course will explore this issue through a critical and comparative examination of theories of different forms of religious violence (e.g., terrorism, sacrifice, patriarchy, colonialism). This examination will in turn involve considering violence in various historical and contemporary religious texts, practices, beliefs, and events.

Are scientific and religious practices and ways of understanding unrelated? Contradictory? Complementary? What assumptions are made when we practice religion or science? And what do we assume when we attempt to interpret these practices? This course explores the relationships between religion, science, and academic interpretation in the contemporary world.

This course offers students a historical glimpse at an ancient religion that has had a key influence on values that shape our world today: that not-harming should inform all our actions, that the truth consists in the awareness of contradictory views, or that the main quality of personality is self-improvement.

This course studies the interplay between religion, magic, and astrology. It analyzes how magic and astrology have been viewed in history by different world religions, and how these religions have integrated, or excluded, magical practices and astrological beliefs in their mainstream practices and beliefs.

Analytic and comparative study of the earliest accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the canonical and non-canonical Gospels with a supplementary focus on historical reconstructions of Jesus using broader textual, cultural, and archaeological data.

An exploration of the literary form and theological content of Paul's letters in the New Testament, including analyses of the importance of Paul in the rise, spread, and development of what would become earliest Christianity.

Apocalyptic literature, concerned with the expectation of imminent, radical and transforming intervention of the divine into human history, flourished between 200 BCE and 200 CE. This course provides an introduction to the study of the origin, form and function of ancient Jewish and related apocalyptic literature understood in its cultural and literary contexts.

This course examines how Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity interacted in late antiquity. It explores the processes by which each community (in competition with the other and shaped by a wider social context) formed an identity for itself by establishing an "orthodox" set of beliefs, rituals, moral guidelines, and spiritual ideals.

A detailed study of selected aspects of Judaism. Visit the Departmental web site at History of Religions for further information.

How have screen-based media technologies (cinema, television, computers, smart phones, video games, etc.) shaped the practice and representation of religion from 1890s till today? What is the relationship between screen cultures and visual religion? Topics may include: magic shows and early cinema; religion in classical Hollywood; devotional websites or zombies.

This course uses theories and methods from the study of religion to understand narrative and visual aspects of films that are not explicitly religious. Genres of films may include comedy, horror, action, drama, and sci-fi. Approaches may include the tudy of rituals, symbols, myth, gender, politics, sacred figures, and psychology.

This course examines the role and representation of various biblical traditions, teachings, and themes in a few selected works of fiction. Topics may include: covenant, freedom, evil, conquest, love, power, suffering, parables, education, and grace. No previous knowledge of the Bible is required.

A broad historical survey of Christmas ranging from the earliest accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament up to contemporary debates about the place of Christmas and its celebration in the public sphere.

A detailed study of selected aspects of Christianity. Visit the Departmental web site at History of Religions for further information.

Though it promises eternal life, Christianity was forged in death. By considering narrative accounts of early Christian martyrdom, including the development of the cult of the saints, this course examines how persecution and death have shaped the culture of Christianity for two thousand years.

A study of the ways in which Protestant and Catholic Christians contributed to and reacted against the complex intellectual, political, and social changes in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

The course studies passages of Zoroastrian texts, principally from pre-Islamic times, in English translation. These passages are studied from the doctrinal point of view, and placed in the context of the history of Zoroastrianism. In addition, their points of contact with the texts of other religious literatures are analyzed.

The course analyzes the religious practices and the daily practices having a religious background, performed by the Zoroastrians in modern times. Their historical development is analyzed, considering, for the medieval and modern times, the influence of the environment of the countries where Zoroastrians lived, and where they represented a minority. Also highlighted is the significance of these practices in relationship to the Zoroastrian doctrinal system.

Spanning a millennium from the fall of Rome to the Protestant Reformation, this course explores the many ways in which the western branch of Christianity, based in Rome, shaped the religion, society, culture, and politics of emerging Europe.

A detailed study of selected aspects of Islam. Visit the Departmental web site at History of Religions for further information.

An introduction to the Quran, the scripture of Islam. Surveys of the history of the text and the development of traditions of Quranic interpretation and commentary, including tafsir and ta'wil, from early to modern times.

This course examines the encounter between Jews and Muslims during the Middle Ages, when a large majority of the Jewish people subsisted under Muslim rule: an overview of the religious, political, communal, material and intellectual settings of the Judaeo-Muslim experience.

This course will examine the origins of Syriac-speaking Christianity on the eastern fringes of the Roman world, and chart its spread into Persia, Central Asia, China, and India. In contrast to the situation in Byzantium and in the Latin West, Christians in Asia lived (with few exceptions) as religious minorities under Zoroastrian, Muslim, Confucian, or Hindu rulers. We shall consider how these Christians adapted to regional cultures, engaged the political structures of the day, and developed their own unique theological and spiritual traditions.