Religious Studies

This course takes its title from a series of letters and papers that Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed while imprisoned in Berlin from 1943-1945. The theological questions posed by Bonhoeffer in these personal letters will set the tone for this course, as well as its overall aims. Specifically, those aims are to identify and to critically assess a variety of challenges that have been posed against religious thought and belief by the rapid development of secular culture and its rising influence in the modern, Western world. In doing so, this course will explore a wide range of political, social, and personal/existential ideas and provocations that theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers have been made to confront in this “world come of age”.

The course provides an overview of key milestones in the history of philosophy, from classical Greece to contemporary thought, and analyzes its connection with religious thought in its various historical manifestations.

What is Judaism? Since Judaism has a history spanning more than three millennia and all five continents, it inevitably means different things to different people. The academic study of Judaism tries to answer the question by focusing on Jewish practice, tradition, and history with a variety of perspectives: The definition of Judaism: is it a religion, culture, or ethnicity? Is it monolithic, essential, and static, or rather diverse, hybrid, and dynamic? What are the texts and practices that define Judaism? What are the central concepts of rabbinic Judaism? How does rabbinic legal text and reasoning work? What are the places and shapes of Jewish worship? How do tradition and modernization make their mark felt in the history of Judaism, from Antiquity to the present day? How does Judaism interact with other religions? Which are the contemporary ways of connecting with the Jewish tradition?

This course focuses on the relationship between religion and politics. To untangle this relationship, the course examines the role of four core processes – globalization, nation-state formation, colonialism, and gender – in giving shape to contemporary relations between politics and religion. In the first place, it offers a sweeping historical survey, starting with imperialism, the French and Haitian Revolutions, and modern state formation. This leads to contemporary geopolitics, religious nationalism (Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Confucian), and socio-cultural contests (over sexuality, abortion, education, and migration). The central goal is to understand how recurring questions of the political community (who has power, how, and why?) are informed by and inform struggles over the place, role, and nature of religion.  Questions are addressed in an interdisciplinary fashion, where politics, history, and religious studies encounter one another. The course consists of interactive lectures and seminar-style discussions, including ones that are student-organized and student-led.

The course focuses on the role of religion in the modern and contemporary Middle East and will cover four main parts: an introduction to Islam and its relations to the other monotheistic religions, namely Christianity and Judaism; Islamic thinkers and their reactions to modernity, including modern reformist movements, modernist, and Islamist thinkers; Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East; and Jewish-Muslim relations. Here the focus is on the effects of the creation of the state of Israel and its impact on Jewish-Muslin relations. 

The seminar gives an introduction into the different ideas around sex and gender in the Hebrew Bible. It discusses matters such as the creation of man and woman, the connection of sexuality and male struggles for power and honor, laws about sexuality in the Pentateuch, and the use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship between Yhwh and Israel.

This course examines contemporary Korean society, with special focus on social issues across various fields including sociology of religion. 

This course provides an examination of the structure and dynamics of culture, focusing on how they have created, maintained, and changed religions.

This course covers the three main religions of Spain: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It examines the historical processes that impacted Spain from the Middle Ages to the present, the debate regarding cultural heritage as a tool of narrative construction of the past, and the role cultural heritage plays in the identities of the present.