REL 295 - Special Topics in Religion

FDR: HU
Credits: 3 credits in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Prerequisite varies according to the topic. A course offered from time to time in a selected problem or topic in religion. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Spring 2015 topic:

REL 295: Christianity in Contemporary American Political Discourse (4). This course asks students to select an issue of focus and to trace public discourse on that issue across a variety of Christian perspectives. Students will explore the Interpretation history of biblical passages, use digital tools to help analyze their sources, and create a detailed concept map of the discourse surrounding their Issue. Combined with readings designed to introduce them to Christianity’s complex history and to the analysis of language and rhetoric, these projects will help students appreciate the diversity of Christianity in America today as well as the pervasiveness of Christian discourse in the public sphere. (HU) Fruchtman. Spring 2015 

Winter 2015 topics:

REL 295-01: Martyrdom: From the Maccabees to ISIS (3). his class explores martyrdom as a historical, literary, and religious phenomenon. It offers critical tools for deciphering martyrdom discourse in other contexts, such as interreligious conflicts and American popular culture. While maintaining a focus on historical circumstances surrounding martyr narratives, we also establish some thematic commonplaces, including witness, sex, gender, power, dreams, memory, community, blood, violence, torture, sacrifice and death. Martyrdom is a powerful and potentially dangerous discourse. This class helps students appreciate the full significance of its use. (HU) Fruchtman

REL 295-02: Augustine, Descartes, and the Literature of Self and Soul (3). This course explores western conceptions of the human self or soul and its place and purpose in the world, or lack thereof. It is framed by consideration of two key figures: St. Augustine and René Descartes. A careful reading of the depiction of the restless soul in Augustine’s Confessions is followed by study of its transformation into the certain self by Descartes’ philosophy. After reading these two inter-related figures, we consider literary, religious, and/or scientific literature that lets us reflect on the state of the soul in a world centered on selves or the fate of the self in a soulless world… and whether there might be other options. (HU) Kosky

REL 295-03: Authority and Gender in the Middle Ages (3). This course explores the various ways that texts, traditions, institutions, and individuals asserted, acquired, and maintained authority (or failed to do so) in the Middle Ages, with particular attention to issues of gender. We discuss the gendered reality of historical figures and the impact of that reality on claims to authority, and investigate how discourses of masculinity and femininity served to legitimize both religious and secular authority in the period from Constantine to Luther. (HU) Fruchtman

Fall 2014 topic:

REL 295A-01: Heidegger and being in the world (3). This course explores the work of Martin Heidegger and the development of its themes in the work of select literary and/or film artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. A close reading of the magisterial account of being in the world in his 1927 Being and Time is followed by careful study of representative essays from his later work. Short works from Heidegger’s critics help us see the possibilities and/or problems that his account of being in the world poses for ethical, religious, and existential concern. After our reading of Heidegger, we consider the literary and cinematic work of major 20th- and 21st-century artists who let us reflect on the meaning and importance of his thinking about being in the world. Artists considered may include Terrence Malick, Cormac McCarthy, Milan Kundera, and others. (HU) Kosky.