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.

This course surveys formative trends in Christian history throughout the world from the 16th century to the present day giving a comprehensive view of the global Christian movement in time and space. It covers mission and ministry in Africa, Latin America, Asia and North America, as well as following changes in Europe and movements of religious transformation, cultural encounter and missionary expansion. The course applies historical approaches and the study of original texts to the understanding of formative trends in Christian history throughout the world from the 16th century to the present day. In European history attention is paid to the 16th-century Reformations (with particular reference to Scotland), the impact on the churches of the Enlightenment and industrialization, and their response in the 20th century to totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. On the global stage, the course covers the expansion of European Christendom to Latin America, Asia and Africa, the role of Christianity in shaping American history, and the more recent growth of distinctive varieties of non-western Christianity. In tutorials these themes are illustrated by study of original texts.