DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

(Summer 2024, Professor Michelle Molina)
Religion: we think we recognize it when we see it, and yet it is always changing. How does one study a moving target? In the first weeks of the course, we look back in time to understand how the ideas about religion that are familiar to us today are rooted in history. The emergence of the concept of "religion" as an object of comparison and study grew out of early modern European sectarian violence and colonial overseas expansion. We then turn to study some thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries who developed theories about the best ways to study religion. These scholars developed and honed the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology by testing their methods on case studies about religion. To know this history is to know our present, as well as to understand the methodologies that shape the university curriculum. What do we do with this legacy? Are these methods adequate to understanding religion today? In the second half of this class, we critically evaluate these methods by putting them to work to analyze religion in the world, both past and present. We will focus on how religion moves people. People are rooted in space and place by their religious practices, while simultaneously being moved by religion. As will have become clear in the first half of the course, religion is a moving target because people themselves do not stay the same. Throughout the course, we track the tension between rootedness and mobility by examining three themes: "conversion," "borderlands," and "death/afterlives." 

(Summer 2024, Marlon Millner)
A religious interpretation of the Black and Africana experience in the United States can be examined through three themes: Recognition by or rejection of the U.S.; the meaning of Africa or Blackness for Black and Africana religions; and the binary of sacred versus secular in Black and Africana religions. African American religion has been marked by the tension created by inclusion and exclusion. Throughout the history of the Black Atlantic, Black religious movements emerged that sought greater acceptance and inclusion in U.S. life. Other Black religious movements, by contrast, developed their identities and practices based on a rejection of American identity.

One of the primary drivers of these distinctions in Black and Africana continues to be the question of what the “African” in religion and African American life means. Some unique movements, both Christian and Islamic, or what are called African Traditional Religions, have sought to define or retrieve an African cultural past for current religious practices. The term “African” pertains not only to debates and differences in highlighting a cultural past tied to the continent of Africa; it also refers to religion in the United States that is constantly reformed by the movement and migration of people groups.

Finally, the category of religion itself is at stake, as more and more Black and diasporic persons embrace labels like humanist, spiritual-but-not-religious, and not affiliated (or nones). These nontheistic and non-institutional labels open up forms of African American religiosity that embrace the practices and rituals of African American religions, but often for symbolic, cultural, or artistic reasons, do not demand adherence to these pre- scribed rituals, belief in a particular set of doctrines, or a commitment to certain communities of practice.

What is the relationship between African Americans, Diaspora and Religion? The categories of religion and race emerge within the encounter between Europeans and Africans in New World conquest and enslavement. This suggests geography, conflict, and the entanglement and or emergence of cultures offer a story of religion in spatial, relational and temporal ways. This course will trace religion as a mapping of space, a motion of time and a making sense of encounter of Black movement. Black Diaspora, a religious interpretation will therefore examine key words, or themes, such as: SOUL, SPIRIT, AFRICA, FREEDOM, SONG and more in a multi-sensory exploration of sound, sight, texts, tastes, ritual, resistance and more. This course will use readings, music, visual art and videos.