This course serves as an introduction to the religious beliefs and practices of China, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. The course covers several broad themes in Chinese religion, including ritual, self-cultivation, means of communicating with the gods, and the intersection of political authority and religion. We will engage with textual, material, and visual traditions.

An introduction to environmental ideas, texts and practices of Buddhism in broad historical and geographical context. Engages Buddhist "environmental imagination" through readings of primary texts, considers the ways that contemporary Buddhists around the world have interpreted environmental problems, and the ways that Buddhist modernist movements draw upon Buddhist ideologies in the service of social-environmental change.

This course will examine American religious life and thought prior to the Civil War, including but not limited to Puritanism, the "Great Awakening," slavery, the American Revolution, reform movements, and the Civil War.

This is a lecture-based course--an idiosyncratic but hopefully helpful introduction to Buddhist philosophy. A few aspects of Buddhist philosophy, at any rate. The subject is potentially endless and can be grabbed from several different ends. Note: this course emphasizes the history of Buddhist concepts and arguments in premodern South Asia. But we will explore what are hopefully ideas of interest: in philosophy of mind; metaphysics; gender.

Readings in the prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible. Emphasizes grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. Attention to issues of translation and interpretation. Prerequisite: HEBR/RELJ 1420 or the equivalent.

"The Black Church" carries unique symbolic weight in America--but why? This course explores how the idea of the Black Church gained moral authority, whether there is a collective Black Church or only black churches, the traditions and practices the concept names, who the concept celebrates and who it marginalizes, and how--or whether--the Black Church, as myth or reality, is still relevant in African American life today.

This course will be a historical and topical survey of the development of Sufism from the classical Islamic period through the modern age, paying special attention to the interaction of ideas and the social and political contexts surrounding them.

This seminar takes as its point of departure Carolyn Bynum's statements: "No scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter. Religious experience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same." The unifying theme is gender and Buddhism, exploring historical, textual and social questions relevant to the status of women and men in the Buddhist world from its origins to the present day.

Reading historical and social analyses along with a range of environmental theologies, this seminar investigates entanglements of Christianity with modern environmental problems. It considers the influence of Christianities in various environmental imaginations, and the role of ecological science and environmental stress in reshaping religious imaginations.

Surveys the history of Christianity in the Byzantine world and the Middle East from late antiquity (age of emperor Justinian) until the fall of Constantinople.