Religious Studies

This course introduces students to the dynamic, diverse, often colorful, and surprising world of global religions. It addresses religious traditions that have a huge influence on the world as we know it: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, but also local traditions in, e.g., Sub-Sahara Africa. The course integrates two components or perspectives: an ideational perspective that concerns religious beliefs and doctrines, and a practical “lived religions” perspective that concerns religious acts and rituals. Both components are approached from a transnational perspective that investigates how religions develop, and interact with each other and with other cultural phenomena and political institutions on a global scale.

The course examines the relations between Europe’s different religious groups – the various Christian denominations chiefly, but also Christians and Jews – in the centuries between the Reformation and the French Revolution. With the Reformation, a once-united western Christendom split into hostile, warring camps. Despite the ideals of toleration and religious freedom championed by some thinkers, actual social relations between the groups remained intensely problematic to the very end of the early modern period.

This course serves as an entrance into the world of the rabbis of the Talmud. Through close readings of primary sources, it provides insight into the development of rabbinic Judaism and its belief and legal systems. The course also emphasizes competing claims of interpretation prevalent in non-rabbinic Judaism and the influence of the surrounding Greco-Roman and Zoroastrian cultures. The course involves reading primary texts and their accompanying secondary sources.