31 - 40 of 201 results for: RELIGST

Can religions get along, and can interreligious relations be used to achieve positive social change in a complex global world? Efforts to pursue interfaith cooperation by a number of development agencies, policy think tanks, non-profit organizations, and local activists have become ever-more popular in the past decades, producing an avalanche of materials and approaches on how to promote and achieve interfaith harmony. These efforts come with a new set of thorny questions: who gets to be included at the interfaith table? How do religious worldviews change the aims and methods of peacebuilding? How do global relations of power affect the aims and means of justice? This class will travel around the world to explore the promises and limitations of changing the world through interfaith relations. We will explore groups attempting to preserve the Amazonian rainforest, Indian sacred sites shared by Hindus and Muslims, the work of interfaith icons like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, the challenges of LGBTQ+ interfaith organizers, and the utopian visions of large interfaith organizations like the Parliament of the Worlds' Religions. We will take a hands-on approach based on case studies in order to assess best practices, persistent challenges, and limitations in the work of leveraging religion to foster global peace and justice. Guest speakers and active class discussion will encourage students' own reflections on what religion is, its political import, and the historical and ongoing challenges of applying the lens of interfaith relations to conflict resolution and transformation.

( HISTORY 15D is 3 units; HISTORY 115D is 5 units.) This course provides an introduction to Medieval Europe from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. While the framework of the course is chronological, we'll concentrate particularly on the structure of medieval society. Rural and urban life, kingship and papal government, wars and plagues provide the context for our examination of the lives of medieval people, what they believed, and how they interacted with other, both within Christendom and beyond it. This course may count as DLCL 123, a course requirement for the Medieval Studies Minor.

Buddhism often figures in the popular imagination not as a religion, but as a philosophy, or a way of life. But why is such a distinction made? Does Buddhist thought and practice make sense as a philosophy? What do Buddhists actually mean when they say there is no self? Is this a philosophical claim? And what about the Buddhist arguments that everything is empty, projected by the mind, or the result of past karma? Is meditation on such theories philosophical practice? This course explores these and other questions by studying the perennial ideas that have made Buddhist traditions distinctive, the implications of these claims for living a meaningful life, and how these ideas and their associated practices have been received in contemporary secularized societies.

This course will provide an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as well as later, classical Jewish literature. We will examine ancient Jewish texts in their social context and explore both the history of Ancient Israel as well as later, diasporic forms of Jewish practice and culture. The class will begin at 11:00 am. This course is under review for WAYS SI and EDP.

Throughout history and across cultures, people have interacted with invisible others. They have called them gods, ghosts, spirits, the dead and so forth. Humans have also experienced invisible others as responding in ways that are often (but not always) experientially consistent across time and space. They hear voices, see visions, feel presence and force. This class explores the relationship between specific psychological experiences and specific social practices through which these experiences are interpreted and cultivated. Often, these practices and ideas are intertwined with human health and medical healing, with loneliness, pain and death. We will not presume that invisible others are real or not real: the goal of the class is to understand them as real experiences. And we will ask: how do new forms of interacting with AI characters seem like and unlike these older forms? Students will explore these questions by using the practices themselves, and by reading a combination of ethnographic literature, medical science and psychological experiments.

Since time immemorial, humans across the globe have used a variety of psychedelic substances to access visionary states of consciousness. This vast pharmacopeia includes plants, vines, flowers, cacti, herbs, animal excretions, and more recently, synthetic drugs that isolate the most potent compounds in naturally-occurring materials. This course examines how these psychedelic substances have shaped the human story across time and space. Our investigation begins in the neolithic era (circa 10,000 BCE) before moving into humanity's earliest religious communities, then proceeds to the mystery cults of the ancient world, indigenous cultures of "shamanism," and the world's major religious traditions. Attention is likewise focused on psychedelics in the modern world, specifically the postwar culture of hippies, the global boom in ayahuasca tourism, and the current "Psychedelic Renaissance" within medical research. Alongside this historical survey, the course will explore the heterogeneous uses, protocols, and rituals that structure the extreme alteration of consciousness occasioned by psychedelics including lysergic acid diethylamide ("LSD"), mescaline, psilocybin (the active compound in "magic mushrooms"), and dimethyltryptamine ("DMT"). Moreover, our analysis will also seek to problematize the ways in which prejudices born out of the War on Drugs have skewed how psychedelics have been understood within scholarship and the mainstream public in general. Through a combination of lectures and guided class discussion, students will engage the foundational research and core questions that animate the academic study of psychedelics. N.B.: In accordance with Stanford University policy, neither the instructor, nor the course curriculum endorse the use of illicit or illegal substances. All exploration and analysis of psychedelics in this course is firmly grounded in academic research and critical scholarship

What happens when you put a group of smart undergraduates - many of whom are alienated from "organized religion," some of whom consider themselves "spiritual" - into conversation with the most sophisticated (and honest) Christian theologian of the past three centuries? This reading group aims to find out. We will focus on a single, recent proposal in constructive theology, paying special attention to its philosophical and methodological underpinnings. Just what "theology" was, is, or should be will be central to the conversation. This is an un-course, even an anti-course: Bleeding-edge classroom technology, innovative pedagogical practices, the cesspool of opinion that is social media, the instructor's politics, and even Canvas will be quietly ignored. Our syllabus will fit on a page and take shape as we go - depending on student interest and where the shoe pinches. The amount of reading will be modest, given the subtlety of the proposal under consideration. Students who attend all meetings and participate actively will receive 1 unit of credit. Those wishing to pursue something in more depth may receive a second unit of credit by writing a short paper. It goes without saying in a non-sectarian university that all interested brains and minds, bodies and souls, are welcome. Enrollment limited; permission of the instructor required. Please complete this brief survey before December 25: https://forms.gle/PPG5Tm3abDdSSGty7.

The two great Hindu Epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, offer a sustained reflection on the nature of virtuous living in the face of insoluble ethical dilemmas. Their treatment of the concept of dharma, understood simultaneously as ethical action and the universal order that upholds the cosmos, lies at the heart of both Gandhian non-violent resistance and communalist interreligious conflict. This course will focus on a reading of selections from the Epics in English translation, supplemented with a consideration of how the texts have been interpreted in South Asian literary history and contemporary politics and public life in India.

This course offers students a chance to study the Bhagavad Gita, one of the masterpieces of world religions, treating it as a work of literature, a work of philosophy, and a work of theology. "The many lives of a text" also introduces students to the much less familiar story of the Gita's many centuries of varied receptions across the history of Indian religions. We will look at how traditional Sanskrit commentators, both well known and unduly obscure, have read and responded to the Gita, how it has been told and retold in narrative literature, its interpretation and reimagining in a range of Indian vernaculars (including how the Gita was taught in precolonial India), and the place it has held and continues to hold within colonial, nationalist, postcolonial, and contemporary discourses.