Fall 2012 Course Offerings

FYS 100 Tolkien and the Medieval Imagination
MWF 9-9:50 a.m.
Scott Davis 

This course investigates religion and literature in medieval English literature by concentrating on several text that played a central role in the scholarly career of  J. R. R. Tolkien.  The course culminates in a reading of his Lord of the Rings. J. R. R. Tolkien retired as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 1959.  He had produced a major critical edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published a widely influential essay on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and done seminal work on the Middle English Ancrene Wisse.  He was also internationally famous as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  This course combines the reading of the medieval texts on which Tolkien worked with his own critical writing to see how they might illuminate his fiction.

FYS 100 American Gods
MW 4:30-5:45 p.m.
TR 9-10:15 a.m.
Doug Winiarski

An obscure man in New York City’s dingiest neighborhood is reborn as an Old Testament prophet. An immigrant Jewish peddler struggles to practice his faith in Yankee New England. An enslaved African American receives visions of a bloody Christ that ignite an insurrection. Early America was awash in a sea of gods both old and new. In this seminar, we will explore the alternative religions that flourished in nineteenth-century America, then turn to the study of religion in contemporary popular culture. The course concludes with an extended journey through Neil Gaiman’s award-winning science fiction novel, American Gods.

RELG 201 Bible as Literature
TR 12-1:15 p.m., FSLT
Frank Eakin

This course is a non-confessional survey of the diverseliterary genres found in the TaNaK (the Jewish Bible), the Intertestamental Literature, and the New Testament. The concern of this course is to understand the literature as produced by humans and for humans, and thus the diverse literary strategies and motifs characteristic of literature in general will find placement here as well. As bias and prejudice express themselves in other literature, so too these characteristics of the human condition are found in this material. Come to this course with an open mind, not to denigratetraditional religious views, but to look at the materials with a freshperspective, viewing the data with a lens comparable to that used in the study of literature broadly.

RELG 240-01 & RELG 240-02 Lost Christianities
 MW 12-1:15 p.m., FSHT
MW 1:30-2:15 p.m., FSHT
Stephanie Cobb

Explores the varieties of Christianity that co-existed from Jesus' death in the middle of the first century through the end of the second century. Included in these are Jewish-Christians, Marcionites, Montanists, and Gnostics. A variety of primary texts in translation will be read to understand better the struggle between forms of early Christianity and the way that one form became dominant and, thus, "orthodox."

RELG 255 Queers in Religion
 TR 1:30-2:15 p.m., FSLT
Jane Geaney

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.”
          David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography

“Educational institutions inculcate discipline…that encourages their pupils…to maintain the status quo.”                                                                                                                                    
          Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

The goal of this course is to provide students with an understanding of intersections of queerness and religion, using a pedagogy that fosters awareness of the forces that make it normal to presume heterosexuality on campus and in the classroom. The course explores the treatment of queers in a number of religious traditions. It focuses on religious homophobia, sacred queer gender formations, and recovered appreciation for queer identities from generally hostile religious traditions. The Fall 2012 iteration of the course has segments devoted to contemporary India, contemporary Two-Spirit Native Americans, and contemporary Taiwan. Students will acquire familiarity with literary theory, particularly Queer Theory.

RELG 267 Varieties of Christian Ethics
MWF 10:30-11:20 a.m., FSSA
Scott Davis

This course examines the forms that Christian ethics has taken in select times and places. It emphasizes the differing approaches Christian thinkers have taken to issues such as war, abortion, and bioethics. Christian approaches to answering key moral question have never been uniform. This course uses a variety of readings to illustrate that diversity, from late antiquity to the present. Readings will be drawn from such classic authors as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther, as well as such 20th and 21st century thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Lisa Cahill, and Gilbert Meilaender. In addition, we will draw on classic texts in history, psychology, and sociology to illustrate the approaches and methods available for social analysis.

RELG 287 Ninety-Nine Names of God
TR 10:30-11:45 a.m., FSHT
TR 12-1:15 p.m., FSHT
Mimi Hanaoka

This course is a historical approach to the foundational concepts, events, and texts in the Islamic tradition, paying particular attention to the Quran and hadith. The Quran is the Muslim scripture and the hadith are accounts of what the prophet Muhammad said or did. In Islam God is understood as having ninety-nine names, and this course explores how these names have been interpreted through reference to the Quran and the corpus of hadith material.

RELG 332 Hebrew and Christian Wisdom Literature
TR 3-4:15 p.m.
Frank Eakin

Biblical Wisdom Literature had roots in antiquity, further developed during the Intertestamental period, and possibly provides a clue for understanding both Jesus and some of the New Testament materials. This seminar is textually oriented and, in the main, student directed. Join us in this study of unusual but important Biblical literature which “turns on its head” traditional Biblical affirmations.

RELG 347 Women in Early Christianity
M 3-5:40 p.m.
Stephanie Cobb

Examines the representations of women in early Christianity, focusing primarily on the first four centuries of Christian history, with particular attention given to the problems of using ancient sources to determine social practice. The course provides an introduction to constructions of sex and gender in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and medical literature, the role of women in contemporaneous pagan and Jewish cultures, and intra-Christian conflicts involving the role of women, in particular, martyrdom, orthodoxy and heresy, and asceticism.

RELG 350 the Dao of Sex
TR 3-4:15 p.m.
Jane Geaney

For over two thousand years, Chinese culture has developed the “art of the bedchamber”—techniques for fostering health, longevity, and fulfillment through sexual intercourse. This course explores that tradition with a focus on the period of its origins in Early China and on the implications of it underlying conceptions of human personhood. In 1973 in Hunan, archeologists unearthed texts that date to the second century B.C.E that provide the earliest documentation of a Chinese tradition of nourishing life through sexual intercourse. This course focuses on exploring the conceptual world of those texts. The course provides a foundation in Early Chinese conceptions of the body in order to explain why sex would be conceived as something with salutary effects on eyesight and hearing, as well as impotence and procreation. It also examines the early texts’ promise that sexual techniques will produce “spiritual illumination. The course will chart the major transition in attitudes toward the arts of the bedchamber that occurred after the Tang dynasty. It will briefly contrast Daoist techniques with Buddhist sexual yoga.  Finally, it will survey some modern and contemporary Chinese expressions of the arts of the bedchamber.