The seminar is the core course of the Department's doctoral program. It is required of, and limited to, all first year PhD students of the Department. The purpose of the course is to provide doctoral students with a general understanding of the study of religion through constructive engagement with a number of fundamental challenges — theoretical and methodological — that commonly confront researchers in the field. It revisits major interpretive controversies that have shaped the history of "religious studies" as an interdisciplinary field, inviting students to join in this ongoing scholarly conversation.

This gateway course introduces students to the philosophy of religion. It does so by working through some of the foundational elements of modern attempts to understand and assess religious concepts through various combinations of reason and experience. Additionally, we will utilize principal methods of analysis (e.g., hermeneutical, conceptual, phenomenological); and provide examples of central topics in the field. By its conclusion, students should be better able to locate their research within the field and imagine their own ways of teaching it to undergraduates.

This gateway seminar will introduce students to the field of Islamic studies and the basic research methods of the field. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the history of Islamic studies and the major questions that has animated it as a field in religious studies. Since Islamic Studies is made up of various subfields, each week will be devoted to one particular branch of Islamic studies. For each of these subfields we will cover the history of the discipline, the research tools and the most recent developments. Students become familiar with the research tools and methods available and learn how to utilize them in their own research projects. By the end of the course students will have a metahistory of the field as well as an ability to construct a syllabus to teach Islamic studies at the introductory level.

This gateway seminar will introduce students to approaches to the study of religions of Mediterranean antiquity. The purpose of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the history of the discipline and how methods have evolved in the study of Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, and Early Judaism in the context of Greco-Roman antiquity. Topics covered in the course include source and form criticism; archaeology; social sciences; conceptualization of diversity; the material text; and positionality. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to teach a range of methods at the introductory level and equipped to refine an approach to frame their own research projects.

This gateway seminar will introduce students to the field of Jewish studies, both as an interdisciplinary academic formation and as a subfield of religious studies. It aims to provide students with a schematic account of the field's history and the major questions that have animated research in it, as well as showcasing more recent or cutting-edge work. Students will gain familiarity with key research tools and methods and, at the end of the semester, will be able to construct a syllabus to teach Jewish studies at the introductory level.

This gateway seminar will introduce students to the field of South Asian Religions, both as an interdisciplinary academic formation and as a subfield of religious studies. It aims to provide students with a schematic account of the field's history and the major questions that have animated research in it, as well as showcasing more recent or cutting-edge work. Students will gain familiarity with key research tools and methods and, at the end of the semester, will be able to construct a syllabus to teach South Asian religions at the introductory level.

The MA Workshop Group is required of all first year MA students of the Department. MA students will meet every week during the first term in a seminar course designed to provide rigorous training in method and theory in the study of religion. Topics considered include: historical development of religious studies, significance and application of interdisciplinary methodologies, key theorists, and theoretical controversies.

With the approval of the Associate Director, and, in the case of a doctoral student, with the approval of the student's Advisory Committee as well, a student may construct an independent study course of Directed Reading with a professor who agrees to supervise the work. The form for this purpose is available at the Centre. Normally no more than one full year or two half year courses of this type are permitted in a degree program. These courses may be undertaken during any term, including the summer.

With the approval of the Associate Director, and, in the case of a doctoral student, with the approval of the student's Advisory Committee as well, a student may construct an independent study course of Directed Reading with a professor who agrees to supervise the work. The form for this purpose is available at the Centre. Normally no more than one full year or two half year courses of this type are permitted in a degree program. These courses may be undertaken during any term, including the summer.

Major research paper (at least 50 pages) on a topic relevant to the study of religion, prepared under the direction of a professor. By January 30 of the year in which they intend to write the paper, students should identify their topic and secure the approval of the professor who will direct their work on the paper.

The key objective of this course is to understand the ritual efficacy of bonding in terms of enabling, perpetuating, regulating, and dissolving partnerships transcending exclusively human social ties. The course will focus on practices constituting friendship, alliance, and marriage, and other forms of bonding whether temporary or perpetual problematizing the inherent assumptions regarding time, commitment, intimacy, power, sexual difference, and species. The course will explore rites involving the transhuman, designed along the lines of, but at the same time questioning the priority of human weddings.

This course examines religious, cultural, and philosophical perspectives on the human and other-than-human. Themes and religious traditions studied will vary by year but may include human-environment relationships; animal ethics; multispecies subjectivity and embodiment; legacies of scientific racism; ecological, legal, and ethical consequences of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism; religious uses of intelligent technology; global and historical transhuman movements; or religious responses to climate crisis.

Few methods have been more foundational to the scholarly study of religion, or more subject to searching criticism, than the practice of comparison. This seminar offers an advanced introduction to comparative method in the contemporary academy by means of a close study of 4 to 6 significant comparative projects published in the last decade. Examples will be drawn from different subdisciplines of Religion, including but not limited to ritual studies, philosophy of religion, comparative theology, and/or ethnography.

In a secular age, public religion is — to recall Mary Douglas' definition of dirt — matter out of place. Since the early modern consolidation of the category, "religion" has been understood as fundamentally private, cordoned off from politics, economics, and other social domains both conceptually and (in some cases) legally. But despite the emergence of regulatory structures meant to circumscribe or privatize it, religion has remained a vital component of public life worldwide, thus posing significant problems for secularist modes of thought. To make sense of this predicament, recent work in the emergent field sometimes described as critical secular studies has undertaken a critical reappraisal of secularism and related categories. This seminar introduces students to this ongoing scholarly conversation by asking how a critical genealogy of "the public" can contribute to it. What is a public? What is the genealogy of this term as a category of modern thought, and what is its relationship to political liberalism (or "government by discussion")? Assigned readings will survey critical approaches to these questions emerging from media studies, postcolonial studies, critical legal studies, queer theory, and affect theory, as well as various fields within religious studies.

Primary readings in curse tablets, grimoires, objects of ritual power, and literary accounts of socially marginal acts of ritual power, as well as of culturally approved acts of miracle. These will be coupled with readings in secondary literature on the methodological problem of "magic" as a category that often spans folk and academic domains as well as historical and critical scholarly literature on "magical" materials and related primary sources.

The capacity to achieve mystical union with God requires the forgetting of one's self, an infatuation with the divine, and, to communicate this experience to us, the capacity of the poet. Initially, Christian mystics reflected upon scriptural poetics. In confronting its figurative and lyrical language they developed an understanding of the poetic capacity of words to embody and express the mystical experience. The development of vernacular mysticism also brought about the flourishing of mystical poetry, which applied the poetic capacity demonstrated in scripture to the description of personal mystical experience. This course will consider some of the consummate poet-mystics of the Latin West. It will examine how the recording of mystical experience in poetic form allows the mystical writer to achieve a result not otherwise possible in discursive terms of communication. In our reading we will see how, through the practice of poetry, language becomes approximate and playful, capable of giving presence to absence, materiality to the immaterial, and lexicon to the non-lexical.

A cross-cultural, psychoanalytic examination of subjective religious experiences through myths, narratives, rituals, and communal actions express the multifacted dimensions of trauma and their impact on individuals and their social cultural contexts. Exploration of ways religious narratives and social practices encode multiple levels of psychodynamic processes that attempt to symbolize unbearable anxiety, grief, loss deriving from personal and social traumas. Different religious and cross-cultural narratives and popular spiritualities will be explored, focussing on ways they may both reproduce and symoblize trauma while also providing resources for healing. Cross-cultural case studies examining the depth psychodynamics of individual and group trauma from the perspective of psychoanalysis, psychology and anthropology that emphasize emotional creativity and healing potential without relying on discourses of pathology will be considered.

This course will challenge the prevailing view that the thought of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno are so deeply pessimistic as to be devoid of hope. Freud's psychoanalytic theories are widely (mis)interpreted in the register of a crude pansexulaism and biological determinism. Adorno's critique of society and the individual is often (mis)interpreted as so ruthlessly pervasive that it forecloses on any possibility for emancipatory transformation. This is a distorted view of both thinkers, that misses the hopeful, utopian currents that motivate and shape psychoanalysis and critical theory. The course will explore the emancipatory currents in Freud and Adorno, and their implications for potentialities of individual, social, and ecological transformation.

Commentary is a privileged genre in many religious traditions. It also has a long standing value in contemporary scholarly traditions. The course will explore different kinds of commentary, looking at theories of writing, of studying, and of meaning constituted across generations. We will also explore commentaries in different religious traditions. Thus, the course will be a crossroads of historical traditions and scholarly approaches to religions. The seminars will be organized around excerpts from specific commentary texts and theoretical reflections on those texts.

This course is an introduction to the basics of critical editing for students of Asian languages.

Students will enter the atelier of critical editors of Asian works, with a focus on religious texts: they will understand the purposes of inventories, descriptions, and collations of textual witnesses, studies of their genealogy, examination and choice of the variants, and reconstructions of the best texts. The course may also select specific topics in Asian textual cultures, involve the study of sources in their original format, and convey specialized notions in paleography, codicology, bibliography, stemmatics, and digital humanities.

This course is based on the assumption that philology is a hermeneutic enterprise that centers the text and is therefore neither Anglocentric, nor Eurocentric, nor simply obsolete. Indeed, every text has been historically transmitted, reconstructed, received, or even falsified. However, the present disciplines, categories, strategies, and techniques of classical philology were developed in a European milieu and tailored to the needs of European languages. The course will therefore critically assess these current Eurocentric categories, techniques, etc… in order to adapt them to the various Asian textual traditions, especially religious ones.

The broader purpose of this course is to nourish the awareness that our historicity shapes our interpretation. As such, the course will be useful to all textually oriented students.

In terms of both idiom, volume and time span, Buddhist texts are arguably the most widely translated texts in the world. This process of ongoing transfer and reformulation spans from the Middle Indic languages in the early centuries BCE to the 'classical' Buddhist languages such as Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, including most 'big' East, South, Southeast Asian and European tongues and many less well-known languages such as Mon, Newar, or Tocharian. It is in these shifts that both the continuities and the discontinuities of Buddhism have been reinscribed into its very textual fabric. In that sense, Buddhism has been forever both lost and found, and in fact may have never existed anywhere else than, in translation. This course will take a peep into the Buddhist translator's workshop and confront the insights gained there with new theories that have emerged out of the current theoretical interest in translation.

Buddhism, the Buddha, and indeed a Buddhist twist on storytelling have shaped modern world literature from its very beginnings. One could in fact argue that one of the many beginnings of modern fiction in many parts of the world is Buddhist and further that Buddhism has consistently played a role in recurring renewals of how to write fiction since the onset of modernity. In this course students will explore that role by analysing key works, in English or in English translation and written between 1879 and today, which either modernize motifs drawn from premodern Buddhist texts or process contemporary material by adopting a Buddhist aesthetic or philosophical stance. That will involve not only reading modern religious fiction in its own right and within the context of its composition and reception in mind, but also confronting the works with the classical sources, both narrative or doctrinal, which they draw from. Students will explore: the beginnings of modern Buddhist fiction in Europe and Asia with Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879), Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), and Niṣṭhānanda Vajrācārya's Lalitavistara (1914), confronting European Orientalist aesthetics with religious reform literature in Asia, the secularization of Buddhist hagiography in Dalit and Marxist 1940-50s narrative literature by B. R. Ambedkar and D. D. Kosambi, 1920s and 1950s Germanophone and US-American counterculture Buddhist literature with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922) and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums (1958), the emergence of post-war Japanese modernism through the processing of WWII in Michio Takeyama's The Burmese Harp (1946), the influence of Buddhism on postmodernist and experimental writing in Roger Zelazny's SF classic Lord of Light (1967), the collection Nixon under the Bodhi Tree (2004), and in George Saunders' much-acclaimed Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), right up to recent feminist and queer retellings of the life of the Buddha's wife Yashodhara in the homonymous novels in Telugu and in Canadian English by Volga (2017) and Vanessa Sasson (2021), respectively, as well as, staying with Canadian literature, in Shyam Selvadurai's latest novel Mansions of the Moon (2022). Each session will focus on one book which will be embedded in select readings drawn both from related contemporary Buddhist-inflected writing and from classical Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Newar Buddhist sources in translation. The larger question this course will ask is about the importance of religion for poetics and the role of the novel as a space in which authors and readers can experiment globally with both with religious hybridity and literary innovation.

This is an advanced study of selected Enlightenment thinkers with a focus on their analyses of religion. The course is mainly devoted to the work of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, although this may vary from year to year. Issues addressed include the rational critique of traditional religious sources and concepts, the relations among religion, ethics, and politics, and the modern re-interpretation of religious ideas.

The philosophy of religion has recently received renewed attention by scholars of religion attempting to rethink the possible contributions the subfield can make to the larger field. These scholars move away from the subfield's historical association both with theology in medieval Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, an association that does not fit with the self-understanding of the academic study of religion, in redefining the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophy of religion. This seminar will explore this redefinition by asking whether and why philosophy might matter to religious studies today not only as a method allied with those of psychologists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists but also as a meta-discourse that reflects on the entire field's presuppositions. The course will explore the importance of both philosophy of religion and philosophy of religious studies for the academic study of religion. And it will do so by addressing five topics of central importance to the field: i) philosophical conceptualizations of religion; ii) the legitimacy and unavoidability of normative evaluations; iii) the (a)historicity of religious phenomena; iv) the use and abuse of comparison; and v) the centrality and constructedness of religious traditions.

This is a study of the way textual interpretation and theories of language have been central to the development of modern philosophy of religion. We begin with the foundational work of Schleiermacher and then move to a detailed inquiry into the hermeneutical contribution of Heidegger's Being and Time and Gadamer's Truth and Method. In particular, we explore the way in which twentieth century hermeneutical theory advances from the study of textual meaning per se to wider questions of the role of language in modes of consciousness and in the presentation of reality.

How have different researchers constructed 'religion' as their object of study, and are some frameworks simply incompatible with each other? We discuss — but also provide critical assessments of — different theoretical and methodological frameworks. A running theme of the course relates to the politics as well as the epistemology of defining religion.

This seminar will provide students with the opportunity to practice close, line-by-line reading of a classical philosophical text in its original language (often German). Texts, which will vary from year to year, will be selected for their importance to the study of religion, and attention will be paid equally to linguistic and philosophical points of interest.

An advanced study of the work of critical thinkers such as David Hume on the topic of religion. Works studied include the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Natural History of Religion, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

A seminar that explores a topic in the philosophical study of religion. Possible topics include: the nature of religious truth; the phenomenology of religion; religion and respect; religion and the meaning of life; the literal and metaphorical aspects of God-talk and other religious language; naturalizing religious belief; tolerance and religion.

This course deals with the most important point of intersection between theology and philosophy: the existence of God. This intersection is only possible when theologians are interested in philosophical argument, and when philosophers are interested in the "God question." This course will deal with this intersection on the specific question: Are there proofs of the existence of God? We will be examining how this question has been dealt with by some prominent Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu thinkers, such as Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant, Rosenzweig, and Barth.