Graduate Division of Religion

Fall 2025 Course Atlas
 
(Please check back for changes and updates - last update 4.28.2025)

ICIVS 770/RLR 700
Wednesday, 2:30-5:15
Vincent Cornell

Graduate-level introduction to the theology of Sufism and philosophical mysticism in Islam.

RLE 780 - Moral Agency Under Constraint
Friday, 9:30-12:30
Ellen Ott Marshall

This course takes as its starting point Katie Cannon’s observation that the dominant tradition of western philosophical ethics assumes a moral agent with freedom and a wide range of choices. Cannon turned to literature by African American women to study female protagonists who demonstrate moral agency under constraint. This course uses a similar methodology: engaging literature, film, art, and lived experience in order to reconsider assumptions about moral agency. After a few introductory sessions, we move through three units: ethnographic case study, literature, and art. The last part of the seminar focuses on students’ research projects and the contexts and models of agency they pursue.

RLHB 780 - Iconography and the Study of Religious Visual Culture
Wednesday, 1:00-4:00
Ryan Bonfiglio

*This seminar will satisfy the Theories & Methods requirement.

This course introduces students from a range disciplines to the field of religious visual culture, with a special focus on theories and methods that pertain to how images, non-art objects, visual practices, and ways of seeing structure religious experience. While students will be encouraged to apply the theories and methods discussed to the study of religion more broadly—including to different traditions, different types of visual objects and practices, and different chronological and social settings—the course will look to ancient Near Eastern iconography and its relationship to the Hebrew Bible / Israelite Religion as an extended test case for exploring the implications, challenges, and possibilities of the “visual turn” in religious studies. The first section of the course will introduce the field of religious visual culture, including its intellectual heritage, hermeneutical frameworks, and guiding questions. Emphasis will be placed not only on theories of meaning-making in non-textual sources, but also on how a full expanse of conceptualities, practices, and habits inform how images are understood in religious settings. The second section of the course will survey approaches to the study of the Hebrew Bible and Israelite religion in light of ancient Near Eastern iconography. We will focus on the work of Othmar Keel and the rise of the “Fribourg School” of iconography, paying special attention to questions of methodology and hermeneutics. The third section will focus on the nature of the image-text relationship. We will consider past approaches to the image-text relationship in biblical studies, with special attention to metaphor theory and the interaction between visual and textual materials in the ancient world.  The fourth section of the course will focus on theories of visual response, including how images structure human relationships, beliefs, and behaviors not only as works of art, but as living things and social agents. Rather than dismissing such responses as reflecting naïve superstition or primitive beliefs in magic, we will seek to understand where these impulses come from, what they tell us about the social agency of art objects, and why such responses persist even (or especially) in religious traditions with interdicts against visual representations of the deity. 


Select bibliography: 

Section 1
David Morgan, Visual Piety; idem, The Sacred Gaze; Morgan and Sally M. Promey, The Visual Culture of American Religions; Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity; Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture; Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials

Section 2
Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World; Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel; Silvia Schroer, In Israel gab es Bilder: Nachrichten von darstellender Kunst im Alten Testament; Strawn, de Hulster, and Bonfiglio, Iconographic Exegesis and the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

Section 3
LeMon, Yahweh’s Winged Form in the Psalms: Exploring Congruent Iconography and Texts; Brown, Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor; Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation; Kövesces, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction

Section 4
Zainab Bahrani, The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria; eadem, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response; W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Picture Want? The Lives and Love of Images

RLHT 735 - Histories of Religions in the United States
Tuesday, 2:00-5:00
Alison Collis Greene

This course introduces the religious history of the region that is now the United States and the experiences of the peoples who have lived here between roughly 1500 and the present. The course blends the methods of history and religious studies, focusing on conversations across the two disciplines, with readings drawn from both. The course structure is chronological and thematic, considering the ways we define religion and the Protestant/secular/multireligious tensions that structure United States political and social systems. We begin with a reflection on the meaning of “religion,” followed by a text that introduces historical methodologies and questions. Students in the course can expect to learn the broad contours of United States religious history through the core weekly readings, divided into four units. Each unit begins with an assigned monograph alongside an article that frames some of the questions we will ask of that unit’s texts.

RLL 701 - Akkadian
Wednesday, 9:30-12:30
Roger Nam

This course will introduction the fundamentals of Old Babylonian grammar and the most common Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian cuneiform signs. At the conclusion of the second semester, students will be able to read literary texts in Old Babylonian (2000-1600) with the help of a dictionary. Students will also be equipped to navigate peripheral dialects of Akkadian and be able to grasp the essential elements of the Akkadian orthographic system. Through the course of both semesters, the students will encounter the broader dialect geography of Akkadian.

RLNT 711M - The Gospel of John
Friday, 1:00-4:00
Susan Hylen

This seminar is designed to acquaint students with critical issues in the translation and interpretation of the Gospel of John. Students will engage in translation and discussion of the Greek text of John, analyze interpretive choices of prior interpreters of the Gospel, and craft an argument about the interpretation of a passage of the Gospel. Prior knowledge of ancient Greek is required.

RLR 700 - Studying Religious Practices
Thursdays, 9:00-12:00
Elizabeth M. Bounds and Don Seeman

*This seminar will satisfy the Theories & Methods requirement.

This course explores the recent turn toward practice, toward the body, toward objects, and toward place within the fields of both theological and religious studies. To understand the significance of this development, we will inquire into the assumptions that have traditionally shaped these fields, if not the modern academy at large.  These assumptions include the privileging of discursive over practical knowledge, textual over oral media, symbolic over somatic analysis, and elite over popular perspectives. 

Methodologically the shift to practice has incorporated emphases on embodied forms of knowing, moral virtues and character formation, and community/culture. 

During the semester, we will read some theoretical work on the nature of practice, putting these works into conversation with the writings of historians, philosophers, theologians, and ethnographers who have helped advanced the practice turn in religious and theological studies. We will pay particular attention to methodological implications, to the ethics of researching and writing about living and often vulnerable populations, and to the intersections of the study of practice and questions of power (along such axes as race, class, sex, gender, colonial status, and educational attainment).  An ongoing question will be tracing the ways the accounts of practice move between empirical descriptions and normative or speculative claims.  There will be an opportunity to review and practice some skills in qualitative research.  

Possible Readings 

Essays by Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, etc. 
Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence 
Joyce Flueckiger, In Amma’s Room
Marla Frederick, Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global 

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry into the Production of Theological Knowledge 
Matthew Engelke, God’s Agents
Todd Whitmore, Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology
Essays from The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Theology and Qualitative Research

RLR 700 - The Holy Spirit in Early Christianity
Thursday, 1:00-4:00
Anthony Briggman

As late as the first quarter of the 5th century Christians affirmed accounts of the Holy Spirit which maintained that the Spirit’s divinity was not equal to that of the Father and the Son. According to one standard narrative, this state of affairs came to pass because the development of Christological and Trinitarian accounts took precedence. This course will advance an alternative narrative: the development of early Christian pneumatology from ca. 130-430 may be best understood by considering its appropriation and repudiation of Jewish traditions and forms of thought.

This narrative locates early Christian pneumatologies in the context of Jewish traditions regarding the spirit. We will, therefore, begin by considering those Jewish pneumatologies, which identify or associate the spirit with angels, the figure of Wisdom, female consorts, and the activities of creation, inspiration, and prophecy. We will then proceed to New Testament accounts of the Spirit, and finally the pneumatologies of early Christian writers. Readings come from a broad spectrum of sources, including: the Hebrew scriptures, Jewish intertestamental literature, the Targums, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Plutarch, Josephus, the New Testament writings, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Marius Victorinus, the Cappadocians, and Augustine.

RLR 700 - Sacred Space
Wednesday, 10:00-1:00
Ellen Gough

This course looks at the making and unmaking of sacred spaces. It focuses primarily on South Asia, but to help us develop some theories and methods in the study of space, place, and religion, the first section of the semester will look beyond South Asia. When our attention shifts to South Asia, we will look at travelogues, purāṇas, paintings, ethnographies, histories, and court cases to examine the roles that natural landscapes, ritual, narrative, material culture, politics, economics, and so much more play in the creation of sacred spaces. “Sacred space” will be defined here broadly – from the kitchen to the river – but the course will focus most intensely on the construction of pilgrimage places and regions as “Hindu,” “Jain,” “Buddhist,” “Muslim,” etc. We’ll pay particular attention near the end of the course to how the modern nation state is understood as Hindu. Students will be expected to develop a research paper related to sacred space on a topic of their choice – students do not have to write on South Asia. Readings are subject to change, depending on the research topics of the students enrolled in the course, but here are some selected readings: 

Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (1987); Steven Feld and Keith H. Bass, eds., Senses of Place (1996); David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (1996); Xuanzang,  The Records of the Western Regions Visited During the Great Tang Dynasty (646); Elizabeth A. Cecil, Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval India (2020); Sections of the Skanda Purāṇa, Indira Peterson, “Lives of the Wandering Singers: Pilgrimage and Poetry in Tamil Śaivite Hagiography” (1983); Alan Entwistle, Braj, Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (1987); Carl W. Ernst, “An Indo-Persian Guide to Sufi Shrine Pilgrimage” (1993); Dipti Khera, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (2020); Kama Maclean, Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954 (2008); James Todd, Travels in Western India (1839); Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (2018); Anand Taneja,  Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (2017); Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004); Arkotong Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (2020); M Siddiq v Mahant Suresh Das Decision (2019); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy (2021).

RLR 700 - Asian American Religious History
Wednesday, 1:00-4:00
Hellen Kim

What is Asian American Religious history? What are its aims, methods, and sources? How does Asian American Religious History reshape the fields of Asian American history, American religions as well as discourses in race and religion, immigration, diplomatic and transnational histories? This historiographic debate relies on the pioneering work of Asian American historians and US religious historians. Consider Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s call for a turn to the Pacific in “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim” (1997). Recall David Yoo’s argument for a “reconceptualization of Asian American Studies” so that a “serious and critical treatment of religion becomes an interpretive rule rather than an exception” (1999). Tim Tseng saw in the subfield the potential to overturn reductive characterizations of Asian Americans as either the perpetually foreign religious “other” or the racially assimilated “model minority” (2003). Where is the field now and where should it go? We will study these questions through historical method and develop historical research skills. We will investigate Chinese American Exclusion, Japanese American Incarceration, the Global Cold War, the Asian American Movement, the War on Terror and the COVID-19 pandemic eras as pivotal historical moments that not only reverberate into our contemporary world but also potentially provide a usable past.

RLR 700 - Archaeology and the World of the New Testament
Thursday, 1:00-4:00
Jennifer Quigley

This course studies the material culture and history of the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on Greek, Roman, and/or Byzantine antiquity. This course is offered in conjunction with a Candler travel seminar to Greece over J-Term of 2026, and doctoral students and/or advanced masters students in biblical studies interested in the travel seminar are strongly encouraged to take this course. How does New Testament studies engage with archaeology and material culture, and what insights can biblical scholars offer to specialists in archaeology and material culture? Course topics can include: the built and visual culture of empire, imperial and local religion, the construction of sacred space, religious pilgrimage, asceticism, martyr cults, healing shrines, domestic life, and the theory, politics, and ethics of archaeology and museums. The course will also frequently engage with the Carlos museum on campus.

RLR 700 - American Religion and Law 
Monday, 2:00-5:00
Kate Rosenblatt

If the First Amendment’s religion clauses indicate a relationship between religion and law, Americans have spent the last two hundred and fifty years debating the exact nature of that relationship. “Freedom of religion” is one of the United States’ most enduring and celebrated national ideals, even as the rights of religious belief and practice have been contested vociferously across the nation’s history. This graduate seminar will inquire into how religion and law have interacted with each other in the US from colonial settlement to the present. Some questions we will consider will be: What “counts” as religion in the eyes of the law, and how has this changed over time? How do legal decisions construct the very category of “religion” in setting the boundaries between secular law and religious life? Are there universally recognized legal criteria for “religion,” such as an organized community or a belief in God? And should religious communities be exempt from some secular legal regimes, such as anti-discrimination law?