121 - 130 of 201 results for: RELIGST

Required of all majors and combined majors. The study of religion reflects upon itself. Representative modern and contemporary attempts to "theorize," and thereby understand, the phenomena of religion in anthropology, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy. WIM.

Guided by faculty adviser. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor and department.

For Religious Studies majors writing the senior essay or honors thesis. Students present work in progress, and read and respond to others. Approaches to research and writing in the humanities.

Although researchers use historical and other academic research methods to access questions of religiosity across time, space, and culture, methodology contours the parameters of 'religion' or the 'religious' for a given study. While method defines a systematized means of deriving information from sources and is often subject to disciplinary boundaries, methodology references the premises and assumptions that govern the application of the method. Together, method and methodology shape the sources used and the questions asked within a given project. In this course, we will interrogate theoretical issues related to historical methods, such as historical and epistemic archival violence, alongside the methodological challenges of triangulating religion and religiosity across cultural and chronological chasms in our own work. By exploring research technologies and dissecting groundbreaking work, we will also consider the ways innovative methods can challenge and expand methodological approaches and questions. Finally, moving beyond theory, students will contemplate their own methods and methodologies, explore various ways of accessing and cataloging sources, discuss best practices, and other practical questions related to researching religious history.

This course offers an account of the history of Indian religions through the lens of their material cultures and privileges the self-understandings of the artisans who made religious worlds out of pigment and stone over those who mostly imagined them inside of books. We focus primarily on the periods and religious sub-cultures with the richest documentation, especially the Buddhism and Jainism in the Classical period, Saiva and Sakta monastic art patronage in early medieval Gujarat, the Western Deccan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu, the overlapping Muslim and Hindu worlds of Mughal, Pahari, and Rajput Court painting, and colonial North India. Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.

Required of graduate students in Religious Studies. Approaches to the study of religion. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit.

Required of graduate students in Religious Studies. Approaches to the study of religion. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit.

When Buddhism spread from India to China along the Silk Roads in the first millennium CE, the cultural interactions it encountered on its journey east also transformed Buddhism itself. Who were the individuals and groups behind this transmission of Buddhism? How were personal religious beliefs articulated against broader political and ecological contexts? In what ways did their gender, ethnicity, occupation, and religious identities contribute to the transformation of Buddhism? And how, in turn, did Buddhism shape the civilizations along the Silk Roads? Each week we explore a stop or a group of migrants along the Silk Roads, a text or an artifact associated with them, and a Buddhist idea to be transformed through them. This course also reflects on the modern adaption of Buddhist ideas through similar decentralized cultural contacts. No prerequisite. Undergraduates register for 200 level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.

Walter Benjamin, the intellectual fugitive at the heart of Critical Theory (the most excoriated form of thinking today), famously held his work to be "theological." This annual seminar will dwell in the apparent paradox of the fact that the origins of secular criticism lie squarely in the domain of religion by reading various works of theory theologically, so to speak. In doing so, we will not be the "speaking about the divine," as Plato first construed it, but rather, as Benjamin says, to think in relation to theology "as blotting pad is related to ink," which would be to absorb it thoroughly. This saturation will be achieved through a close reading of important works of theory that have approached the matter of thinking from the standpoint of opposition to the secular, de-godded production of knowledge (as well as some that haven't). The theme this year will be "desire"; authors may include Agamben, Baldwin, Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault, Zora Neale Hurston, Marion, and Tennessee Williams. Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.