Spring 2025 Courses of Interest
Course: Religion and the Climate Crisis
Instructor: Raffaella Taylor-Seymour
Description: This course examines the work of religious ideas—and ideas about religion—in creating, mediating, and responding to climate change. We will use religion as a lens for examining the role of humans in creating ecological destruction and efforts to repair and rework relationships with the natural world. The course draws on primary texts from and literature about a wide range of religious traditions in a bid to unsettle universalist narratives about both the environment and climate change. Students will encounter a variety of religious philosophies of the environment and interrogate the role that shifting ideas about religion have played in the emergence of the climate crisis. Throughout the course, questions of colonialism will be central in understanding how we think about religion and cultivating attitudes toward the environment. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of the notoriously vexed category of religion and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Overall, this course will provide a strong grounding in both the study of religion and the environmental humanities.
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Course: Religion and Public Life
Instructor: Justine E. Ellis
Description: There is no shortage of spilled ink, popular media coverage, scholarly inquiry, and academic institutes—including right here at Columbia University—dedicated to examining the intersection of religion and public life. From narratives of religion’s predicted decline during the twentieth century to its much-discussed global resurgence at the turn of the twenty-first, the concept of public religion continues to occupy popular imagination. Through the lens of public religion, we are able to examine pressing issues such as the revitalization of, or disillusionment toward, institutional forms and political establishments in our questionably secular age. What happens when religion “goes public”? Correspondingly, what assumptions about the category of religion and its role in public places do discussions of public religion promote? Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the possibilities, pitfalls, and practicalities of understanding religion in terms of public life.
The coursework will draw from scholarship, policy documents, and real-world case studies on issues ranging from climate crisis to conspiracy. Focusing on examples of advocacy, considerations of democratic renewal and decline, and competing claims of power and authority, this seminar considers the ways in which our definitions of religion impact lived, embodied, and practiced forms of religion and secularism in our current moment.
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Course: Early Horror
Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
Description: This course will examine the origins and evolutions of horror literature from ancient Babylon to the Early Modern period. We will be examining consistent tropes that span long periods of time, as well as local innovations and idiosyncracies that are particular to a given culture at a given moment. We will be asking what makes for horror—that is, how does horror literature work, and what is it trying to do—as well as why horror is such an enduring modality.
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Course: Museums and Sacred Things
Instructor: Courtney Bender
Description: This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure. We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation to object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.
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Course: Religion & the Movies
Instructor: Clémence Boulouque
Description: This class is an introduction to both film and religious studies and aims to explore their interaction. Ranging from auteurs to blockbusters, the course will analyze movies that make use of the sacred and of religious themes, figures or metaphors. The course will probe the definitions and boundaries of religion -as theology, myth, ideology- and will show students how religion remains a critical presence in the arts, even in a secular guise. We will look at the ways in which popular culture can serve religious functions in contemporary society and examine how faith is represented in popular culture.
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Course: Religion and the Afro-Native Experience
Instructor: Tiffany Hale
Description: African Americans and Native Americans have a shared history of racial oppression in America. However, the prevailing lenses through which scholars understand settler colonialism, religion, and black and indigenous histories focus overwhelmingly on the dynamics between Europeans and these respective groups. How might our understanding of these subjects change when viewed from a different point of departure, if we center the history of entanglements between black and native lives? How does religion structure the overlapping experiences of Afro-Native peoples in North America?
From political movements in Minneapolis, Oakland, and New York City to enslavement from the Cotton Belt to the Rio Grande, this class will explore how Africans, Native Americans, and their descendants adapted to shifting contexts of race and religion in America. The course will proceed thematically by examining experiences of war, dislocation, survival, and diaspora.
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Course: Religion and the Indian Wars
Instructor: Tiffany Hale
Description: The frontier is central to the United States’ conception of its history and place in the world. It is an abstract concept that reflects the American mythology of progress and is rooted in religious ideas about land, labor, and ownership. Throughout the nineteenth century, these ideas became more than just abstractions. They were tested, hardened, and revised by U.S. officials and the soldiers they commanded on American battlefields. This violence took the form of the Civil War as well as the series of U.S. military encounters with Native Americans known as the Indian Wars. These separate yet overlapping campaigns have had profound and lasting consequences for the North American landscape and its peoples.
This course explores the relationship between religious ideology and violence in the last half of nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and geographically, we will engage with both primary sources and classic works in the historiography of the Indian Wars to examine how religion shaped U.S. policy and race relations from the start of the Civil War through approximately 1910.
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Course: Global Indigenous Religious Histories
Instructor: Tiffany Hale
Description: Nomads, natives, peasants, hill people, aboriginals, hunter-gatherers, First Nations—these are just a handful of the terms in use to define indigenous peoples globally. The names these groups use to describe themselves, as well as the varying religious practices, attitudes, and beliefs among these populations are far more numerous and complex. For much of recorded history however, colonial centers of power have defined indigenous peoples racially and often in terms of lacking religion; as pagan, barbarian, non-modern, and without history or civilization.
Despite this conundrum of identity and classification, indigenous religious traditions often have well-documented and observable pasts. This course considers the challenges associated with studying indigenous religious history, as well as the changing social, political, and legal dimensions of religious practice among native groups over time and in relationship to the state. Organized thematically and geographically, we will engage with classic works of ethnohistory, environmental history, indigenous studies, anthropology, and religious studies as well as primary sources that include legal documentation, military records, personal testimony, and oral narrative.
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Course: Religion and Political Thought
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: Are “belief” and “reason” two different things? What is the proper role of religion in modern society? How do we determine what is just and unjust in the absence of a Higher Law? Does religion continue to influence political decision-making in liberal democracies, and if so, how? These questions continue to animate debates about the relationship between religion and politics today. This class examines articulations of and responses to this question in the political thought of the Enlightenment, a period that has traditionally been described as the moment when “the West” parted ways with religion and religious belief as the foundation for its understanding of truth, justice, and social order. In this class, we will examine classic and overlooked works of Enlightenment philosophy. We will interrogate whether the Enlightenment really signaled a departure from religion. We will also examine whether the Enlightenment was the preserve — much less the invention — of white Europeans and American settlers. We will do so with an eye toward the politics of the present, examining how Enlightenment thought’s engagement with religion produced discourses of race, gender, economy, and nationhood that continue to shape the terms of political discourse today.
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Course: Religion and Human Rights
Instructor: Timothy Vasko
Description: What is the relationship between religion and human rights? How have different religious traditions conceived of “the human” as a being worthy of inherent dignity and respect, particularly in moments of political, military, economic, and ecological crisis? How and why have modern regimes of human rights privileged some of these ideas and marginalized others? What can these complicated relationships between religion and human rights explain some of the key crises in human rights law and politics today, and what avenues can be charted for moving forward? In this class, we will attempt to answer these questions by first developing a theoretical understanding of some of the key debates about the origins, trajectories, and legacies of modern human rights’ religious entanglements. We will then move on to examine various examples of ideas about and institutions for protecting “humanity” from different regions and histories. Specifically, we will examine how different societies, organizations, and religious traditions have addressed questions of war and violence; freedom of belief and expression; gender and sexual orientation; economic inequality; ecology; and the appropriate ways to punish and remember wrongdoing. In doing so, we will develop a repertoire of theoretical and empirical tools that can help us address both specific crises of human rights in various contexts, as well as the general crisis of faith and and observance of human rights as a universal norm and aspiration for peoples everywhere.
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