FALL 2018
Religion 320: Interpreting Sacred Texts
Promise and Fulfillment? Reading the New Testament in Light of the Hebrew Scriptures
Jim Hanson
Did Isaiah predict the Virgin Birth of Jesus some eight centuries before it happened? Was the prophet talking about Jesus when describing the “Suffering Servant?” Is the primary purpose of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “Old Testament”) to prepare for the coming of Christ? In what sense can it be said that Jesus “fulfilled” Jewish Scriptures? Does the New supersede the “Old,” or somehow complement it?
This class will address these and other related questions as we read significant sections of the New Testament – including portions of the Gospels, the Apostle Paul’s letters, Hebrews, and Revelation – with a focus on how the authors use and interpret the Hebrew (Jewish) Scriptures. We will consider literary, historical, and theological issues such as intertextuality, the original contexts of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, models for their relation, and how and why Jews and Christians read the same texts so differently.
Religion 390: History of Religions Seminar
American Identities: Religion, Race, Gender, and . . .
L. DeAne Lagerquist
Religion has always been a powerful and contested factor in the forging of American identities, an important factor in cultural dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion. Students in this seminar will investigate multiple ways that religion, race, and gender (among other social markers) inform the dynamic and complex process of constructing American identities. Attentive to past and contemporary instances, we will engage historical, theological, and ethnographic scholarship. Possible readings: The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz’s study of the ways anxiety about Native Americans and enslaved Africans provoked English settlers in Virginia to revise their theology about Christian baptism and to understand themselves as white; The Madonna of 115th Street, Robert Orsi’s exploration of the intertwining of Italian ethnicity and Roman Catholic religion in East Harlem; New World A-Coming, Judith Weisenfeld’s examination of the ways groups such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement challenge conventional categories of religio-racial identity; Mitzvah Girls, Ayala Fader’s investigation of the ways that language and practice form Hasidic girls’ gender and religious identity; Getting Saved in America, Carolyn Chen’s study of Buddhist and Christian Taiwanese immigrants; and Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, Sharon Betcher’s theological exploration of embodied difference, including disability and race. Students will devise and carry out individual research projects about topics of their choosing; while these may take the form of a conventional academic paper, other formats are possible. Counts for majors in Religion and American Studies
SPRING 2019
Religion 399: Thematic Seminar
Engaging Christian Political Theology: Power, Authority, Violence, and Resistance
Anthony Bateza
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber once said that human beings “with their religious factions have torn the world to pieces, they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger marks and their blood.” The relation between religious belief and politics is, to put it mildly, complicated. Religion is used to “baptize” political arrangements in ways that justify domination. At other times religious convictions have given life to movements of resistance and revolution. In response these realities some claim that religion and politics must be separated to protect the purity of the former or to check the pretensions of the latter. For Christians these questions are deeply theological. How is one to understand God’s power in authority as it bears upon earthly kingdoms? Conversely, to what extent are depictions of the divine themselves products of our political images and ideals? This seminar will examine how Christians today might respond to these and other questions by engaging the historical reflection of thinkers past and present.
While the focus of the course will be on Christian sources, texts from major figures in Jewish thought and secular political theory will also be included. Possible figures may include Augustine, Martin Luther, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Ted Smith, Wendy Brown, Bonnie Honig, and M. Cathleen Kaveny. Students will be invited to help shape the topics chosen over the semester, particularly as the ideas and figures explored bear upon current political issues and religious communities. Possible themes will include competing accounts of power and domination, the sacred versus the profane, covenant, civic virtue, right leadership, and the possibilities for just resistance.