DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(Winter 2025, Professor James Bielo)

How many ways are there to be a Christian? What counts as Christianity, what doesn’t, and who ultimately gets to decide? Where and when does Christian practice take place and what does it look like? How has Christianity been shaped by cultures around the world, and how has it shaped those cultures in return?

This class explores Christianity from a perspective of religious diversity. Using case studies from documentaries, podcasts, scriptures, scholarly articles, short stories, music videos, and films, students will encounter a variety of Christian lifeways, practices, beliefs, and identities. They will consider how important concepts in Christianity—like faith, sacrifice, and sanctity—have been variously defined and experienced across Christian communities. We will ask what factors account for the broad range of Christian doctrines and denominations, and analyze the anxieties, conflicts, and points of creativity have arisen out of this diversity.

(Winter 2025, Professor Kevin Buckelew)
The fragility of the human body, its susceptibility to illness and death, provoked a wide array of responses among religious practitioners in pre-modern China. Some pursued supernatural longevity and even immortality through various regimes of self-cultivation. Others, by contrast, renounced the body in part or whole through dramatic acts of self-immolation. Even in death, however, many aspired to rebirth in heavenly realms where bodies do not grow old and die, but rather live forever in bliss. This course examines these various attempts to overcome death in Chinese religion—including Buddhism, Daoism, and traditions that fall between these large categories—seeking to understand how the mortality of the body was used to authorize particular modes of embodied living. In the process, we will explore how these modes of religious life shaped attitudes toward food, medicine, gender, sexuality, and family. *Counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) major concentrations.

(Winter 2025, Professor Shira Schwartz) 

(Winter 2025, Dr. Lily Stewart)

Today, religion and science are often regarded as separate spheres of knowledge and practice, but was this always the case? In this class, we will explore the overlapping uses of medicine, miracles, and magic in premodern healthcare. We will ask what kinds of people were able to practice medicine (priests? physicians? nuns? magicians?), why a person’s barber was also their surgeon, how the dead supported the health of the living, and why rituals like confession could treat stomach aches and other ailments. 

We will learn what a vial of urine could tell a medieval physician about a patient’s habits, consider how an individual’s astrological sign influenced their treatment plan, and discuss what an excess of garlic in a person’s diet might tell us about the moral state of their spirit. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the complex, nuanced systems that medieval people used to theorize the body and its relationship to the soul, and will be able to articulate how physical, spiritual, and even supernatural medicines were often combined to treat both.

As we study the nuances of premodern medicine, we will also work to rethink the relationship between religion and science in our own world, and consider whether and where our modern healthcare practices align with the past as much as they depart from it.

Counts toward Religion, Health, and Medicine (RHM) major concentration.

(Winter 2025, Professor Michelle Molina)

(Winter 2025, Professor Sarah Taylor)

(Winter 2025, Professor KB Dennis Meade)