An advanced study of Immanuel Kant's interpretation of religion, as developed in major writings such as Critique of Practical Reason and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Emphasizes rational ethical criteria as the basis for analyzing the doctrines, symbols, and institutions of historical religions.

Study of key theoretical concepts in psychoanalaytic theory, i.e., the unconscious, repression, aggression, sexuality, dreams, unconscious fantasy, transference, and projection and their implications for understanding religious experience and belief in the work of Sigmund Freud, D. W. Winnicott, R. D. Laing, and other analytic writers. Freud was consistent in asserting that theory must reflect and elaborate clinical observation. Thus, the course will also include extensive discussions of clinical case material in order to illustrate the ways in which these concepts illuminate and help explain not only internal psychic experience but also the ways in which culture, society and politics structure and shape the human mind. The course will also examine the historical trajectories of psychoanalytic concepts, including some of the main controversies and debates around issues such as repression, dissociation, and trauma. This course is cross listed with TRP6523H.

This course is designed for MA and PhD students in religious studies whose research involves fieldwork. It addresses current debates about the ethnographic enterprise, as well as practical issues, such as research design, ethical matters, interview techniques, and writing field notes. The course focuses on ethnographic research on religion.

Both "feminist" and "womanist" are terms that are greatly debated. Alice Walker popularized the term "womanist" in her 1983 collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Walker's four-part definition includes a definition of a "womanist" as "a black feminist or feminist of color." This course provides a survey of the history and development of feminist and womanist biblical interpretation in North America. It includes interpreters of the Hebrew Bible (sometimes called Old Testament or Tanakh) and New Testament

This seminar sets the study of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism into relation with a movement in critical historiography of the modern world, namely postcolonial theory. Though the term "postcolonial theory" encompasses a panoply of approaches and dispositions, the basic insight that founds the seminar is the non-givenness of colonial domination and the resulting close attention to the endeavour of constructing such domination as "natural" as well as to the subaltern strategies of negotiation to which such situations typically give rise. Ideally, the conversation between contemporary postcolonial theory and research and scholarship on early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism will go two ways. On the one hand, students of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism into awareness of methodological developments in historical research on other periods and settings. On the other hand, postcolonial theorists can benefit from how some of their insights are modified, applied, and developed in the context of the ancient world. This, in turn, expands and strengthens both the scope of the theory and the field of early Christian studies.

This seminar will focus on Judges 13–16, sometimes called the "Samson Cycle." It will introduce a variety of critical methods and issues central to the scholarly interpretation of these texts. It will also cover examples of the reception of these texts across a variety of religious and secular traditions from antiquity to the present. Seminar discussions will be organized around close readings of primary texts and secondary literature. This course requires reading knowledge of biblical Hebrew narratives.

Over the centuries, biblical literature has captured the imagination of countless scholars, writers, artists, religious leaders, and members of the general public. This seminar explores the interpretative histories of select biblical texts and characters as reflected in not only scholarly literature and literature from various religious traditions, but also popular literature and culture. The specific types of reception discussed may differ from semester to semester depending on instructor's interests and specialization.

A critical examination of the relevance of comparative (especially northwest) semitic philology and historical Hebrew grammar to the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and to the teaching of Biblical Hebrew. This course is cross-listed with WYB5016H.

The course considers the various ways in which the medium of prophecy is transformed in the post-exilic period, particularly as this relates to the retrieval and extension of Isaianic traditions. The course will focus on the deployment of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. The prerequisite languages for this course are Biblical Hebrew and Koine Geek.

A seminar examining the phenomenon of falsely claimed and/or attributed authorship in religions of the ancient Mediterranean, mainly Christianity and Judaism. The course examines understandings of authorship and other cultural forms that facilitate or inhibit ancient pseudepigraphy, ancient controversies over authorship, as well as specific pseudepigraphical writings.

This course will explore the history of Bible translation from antiquity to our own day, focusing on translation as political and cultural as well as linguistic negotiation. We will ground ourselves in the history of translation theory (and in particular in postcolonial translation theory), recognizing that theoretical approaches to the problem of translation themselves emerge from theologically and politically charged historical conditions. With our philological, cultural, and historical tools in hand, we will explore the history of translations and revisions of the Bible, immerse ourselves in unsual examples of translation (children's Bibles, the Emoji Bible, R. Crumb's Genesis, etc.), and try our hand at the craft of Bible translation.

The trope of the "Talking Book" appears within early Black American literature. Those who were not yet literate regarded others moving their lips and reading aloud as seemingly "talking" to the book. The Bible was one of the central works that Africans in the Americas confronted as a written and oral text. This course explores the history and development of biblical interpretation by Black biblical scholars in North America. It considers how these scholars address the use, impact, and influence of biblical texts in African Diasporic cultures and traditions. It examines the disciplinary and methodological diversity of their work as well as their challenges and contributions to academic biblical studies.

In late antiquity, narrative accounts of Christians who chose to suffer and die rather than renounce their beliefs emerged as a distinct (and hugely popular) literary genre. The "acts" of the martyrs did more than preserve the memory of those who had died — they helped to shape the very identity of the remembering community. In this course, we will examine the persecution of Christians in the Roman and Persian Empires historically, literarily, theoretically, and culturally. Why were Christians persecuted, and what can we know about the periods of persecution? Furthermore, how did Christians narratively represent and celebrate pain and death, and how did the literary "making" of martyrs forge a religious identity premised upon the collective memory of suffering? In asking these questions, we will consider how literary concepts about the body, death, and holiness ultimately drove the development of the cult of the saints.

The historical study of Christianity traditionally begins in the eastern Mediterranean and then turns westwards, focusing on the historical and theological development of Christianity in its Greek and Latin contexts. But such an approach paints an extremely partial picture of the development and spread of Christianity in late antiquity and the early medieval period more broadly — one that, for example, completely omits the rich heritage of Christianity in the Syriac tradition. A dialect of Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac was, for several centuries, the preeminent Christian literary language from the Syrian countryside through Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau. In addition to surveying (in English translation) the unique biblical, theological, liturgical, hagiographical, and historiographical contributions of Syriac-speaking Christians and their literatures from the first centuries of the Common Era up to the early Islamic period, this course will focus on the importance of Syriac and Syriac Christianity as a bridge linking Rome with Persia and Byzantium with Baghdad. As such, some time, too, will be spent examining the history of Christianity in upper Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Arabian Peninsula. This course should thus be of interest to graduate students in a variety of fields, including biblical studies and Christian origins, Christianity in late antiquity, Sasanian/Zoroastrian studies, and early Islam.

Social networks are critical keys to the transmission and exchange of various non-material and material commodities, including rumours, information, employment opportunities, influence, infections and religious cults. Social Network Theory provides useful models to account for the diffusion of elective cults within the deregulated religious environment of the ancient Mediterranean World (300 BCE to 300 CE). The course will examine selected elective cults, reconstruct the social networks in which they are embedded, and develop theoretical models by which to account for the successes or failures in propagation.

Focus on the social setting of the early Jesus movement in Roman Palestine and in the cities of the Eastern Empire. Topics will include: rank and legal status; age and population structure; patronalia and clientalia; family structure; marriage and divorce; forms of association outside the family; slavery and manumission; loyalty to the empire and forms of resistance; legal and social issues concerning women; taxation; the structure of the economy, and how these issues are variously reflected in documents of the early Jesus movement. Open to qualified graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Graduate students will be expected to read primary texts in the original languages; knowledge of Greek is essential; knowledge of a modern research language (French, German, or Italian) is necessary.

Through studies of fasting, sexual renunciation, and other bodily disciplines, this course considers the ways by which ascetic elites and their promoters constructed a Christian ascetic ideal in late antiquity. In surveying the development of Christian asceticism from its Greco-Roman philosophical roots through to the rise of a flourishing monastic movement, our sources will include hagiographies, church histories, letters, sermons, rules, and practical treatises that address various modes and methods of ascetic renunciation. Thematic explorations include ascetic interpretations of the bible, solitary and communal forms of asceticism, asceticism as the basis for conversion and contemplation, asceticism and gender, and the importance of asceticism as a marker of class, status, and authority in the late ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

This course investigates the literary relationships among the Synoptic gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, and other early gospels. Special attention is paid to the major solutions to the Synoptic Problem current today, the revival of the Griesbach hypothesis and the Farrer hypothesis, and recent advances in the Two-Document hypothesis. A range of issues will be presented, from the assessment of minor agreements to theories of synopsis construction. The currently competing hypotheses will be tested carefully by an examination of Synoptic texts.

This course is designed to introduce major modern approaches to the interpretation of the parables and to offer the basis for a new approach to the parables as realistic fiction, interpreted through a reconstruction of the economic and social world of Jewish Palestine.

A study of the construction of deviance or heresy within the literature of first and second century Christianity: tasks include a survey of sociological theory in its application to deviance in the ancient world and close readings of selected texts from first and second century Christian and pre-Christian communities.

An examination of key issues for the understanding of the letter of James: authorship, date, historical setting, genre, manuscript tradition, and attestation. The course situates James in the context of Second Temple Jewish wisdom literature of the Judaean diaspora.

How are we to analyze the words that Christians use? How might oral forms compare with written ones? And how should we understand the relationships between religious language and ritual action without seeing one as merely derived from the other? This course provides the opportunity both to explore theories of language use and to apply them to forms of verbal discourse ranging from prayers, speaking in tongues, and biblical citations to more informal narratives. Protestant and Catholic attitudes to religious language are examined in ways that sometimes reinforce, something challenge, theological distinctions between the two, and there will be the opportunity for students to bring their own texts for analysis. Some techniques for the analysis of ritual texts are explored, and the advantages and disadvantages of close textual analysis are discussed. Although the focus is on Christianity, the aim is to provide methodological and analytical tools that can also be applied to the study of other religions.

With the aim of familiarizing students with texts that have been critical for the development of Buddhist literature across regions, historical periods, and languages, this course offers a close reading of one or more primary texts in translation or in the source language(s). Texts read may include, but are not limited to, sūtras, tantras, jātakas/avadānas, verse, commentarial and scientific literature, historiography, and epigraphy. The course focuses on texts from East and Central Asia.

With the aim of familiarizing students with texts that have been critical for the development of Buddhist literature across regions, historical periods, and languages, this course offers a close reading of one or more primary texts in translation or in the source language(s). Texts read may include, but are not limited to, sūtras, tantras, jātakas/avadānas, verse, commentarial and scientific literature, historiography, and epigraphy. The focus will be on texts from South or Southeast Asia.

This course will interrogate the statement that "to be a Burmese is to be a Buddhist." Burma/Myanmar has been a country in which Buddhism took many different forms (Indian, Sri Lankan, Pyu, Mon) before it became Burmese as we know it. It is a country in which Buddhists are confronted with neighbours who practice a host of other religions such as Islam and Christianity and where Buddhists themselves worship the spirits of heroes who died violent deaths, called the nats. It is a country in which Buddhism remains both dominant and contested. Through an analysis and discussion of historical, anthropological, visual, and literary sources this course will take us through the religious landscape of Burma/Myanmar that lies behind the tourist images of Pagan, the literary invocations of the road to Mandalay or the headlines featuring "the Saffron Revolution," Aung San Suu Kyi and the recent liberalisation of the country.

An overview of the field of Buddhist Studies, a review of pedagogical approaches common in the field, and discussion of emerging theories and practices focused on teaching Buddhism in higher education contexts.

Advanced readings in Tibetan Buddhist Literature. Tibetan language skills required.

The course explores how health and healing have interacted with Buddhist traditions in historical and contemporary contexts globally. Topics may include ritual healing and sorcery, contemplative practice, disease etiology and frameworks of physiology, materia medica and dietetics, and how these appear as part of personal and professional religious practices and doctrines.

This course will have students read choice pieces of South Asian literature. While tackling a text in simple Sanskrit from a major literary tradition, Buddhist or Hindu, and discussing its content and context, students will learn strategies for translating and interpreting Sanskrit literature.