This course introduces students to cinematic representations of religion in feature and documentary films. Films about religion are cultural documents in and through which individual artists, religious and nonreligious groups, and nations symbolically construct their conceptions of themselves and the world. They are also the occasion for political, social, and cultural debates about ethnic and national identities. This course adopts a cultural studies approach to the study of films about religion and invites students to investigate the public debate and interdisciplinary questions and issues raised by the release of films such as Avatar, Schindler’s List, The Passion of the Christ, Daughters of the Dust, and The Hurt Locker.

This course introduces students to the complex world of Islam. Students will gain a critical understanding of the history of Islam, its sacred texts, and the central figures shaping this global religion. Central to our discussions will be the diversity of both Muslim identities and practices. Together, we will explore a variety of sources, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to piece together a multi-dimensional picture of Islam, which nuances the popular (and at times monolithic) discourses about Muslimness. This will include the major academic debates on how to study, characterize, and represent Islam. We will also explore non-academic sources, especially those by Muslims, who present a diversity of perspectives about Islam. Alongside the foundational academic literature on Islam, course materials will include short stories, autobiographies, graphic novels, documentaries, and podcasts.

This course examines the intricacies of the “Abrahamic traditions,” Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, both historically and in the modern world. Our class will take a literary approach to religion. We will explore central themes, such as monotheism, prophecy, and other elements relevant to religious identities through a close reading of the sacred texts—the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an—and their interpretive traditions, authoritative and popular. This will include interpretations and scriptural imagery embedded within popular culture, such as Beyonce’s “Virgin Mary” and Marvel’s depictions of genies (jinns). Students will be introduced to an array of sources, including essays from religious studies scholarship, short stories, graphic novels, and podcasts, which will bring our discussions of the scriptures and their stories to life. Together, we will explore the diversity of religious identities not only across the three traditions, but within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

Seeing, naming, and analyzing the ways in which religious ideas and practices have been used both to support and to resist various forms of violence are the central concerns of this course. Among topics considered are theories and practices of division and hierarchy, power and privilege, sacrifice and scapegoating, atonement and retribution, restorative justice, crusade and jihad, compassion and community-building, religious pacifism, and nonviolent resistance. Community-engaged learning can help to ground our study throughout the course, and a Purposeful Work element invites us to think about how the subject matter of the course can contribute to finding/creating meaning and purpose in our own lives and work.

"Religion” is a concept directly tied to, and embedded in, practices of empire, race, conquest, and colonization. And yet we also use “religion” and related terms to describe the ways of knowing, living, and being that are most deeply meaningful to countless persons and communities worldwide. So, what is religion, and how/why do we study it? This course engages students in developing knowledge, insights, and tools helpful for understanding the variety and complexity of religious practices and identities found throughout human societies. In centering case studies, narratives, and stories that illuminate intersections among religion, race, power, privilege, and colonialism, the course provides an introduction to the study of religion through both its harmful and liberatory legacies and potentials.

An introduction to the major religious traditions of Asia, in both their historical and contemporary forms, with a focus on modern popular developments in Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions, and the ways in which racism has influenced popular perceptions of these religious traditions in North America and Europe. The course explores the foundational teachings of each tradition, examines their historical and social contexts, and seeks answers to questions such as: What is the nature of religious experience? What are the functions of myth and ritual? How have these religious traditions been adapted, adopted, and appropriated in "the West"?

How are interpretations of the Bible’s creation stories informed by contemporary cultural understandings of right and wrong, sex and gender, power and privilege, human and non-human? And, conversely, how do interpretations of these stories - ancient and modern - shape our sense of how the world works and what is possible now and in the future? Close readings of ancient texts paired with a wide array of later interpretations and commentary provide the basis for our studies.

A study of the various religious traditions of China in their independence and interaction. The course focuses on the history, doctrines, and practices of Daoism, Confucianism, and various schools of Mahayana Buddhism. Readings include basic texts and secondary sources.

This course introduces students to the major themes and movements in American religious history from the colonial period to the end of Jacksonian reform. Among the topics discussed are Reformation "churches" and "sects," Puritanism and secularism in seventeenth-century America, ethnic diversity and religious pluralism in the Middle Colonies, slavery and slave religion, revivalism, religion and the American Revolution, and social reform.

The course seeks to understand the importance of religion in the evolution of a sense of national identity and of national destiny for the United States. Consideration is given to the importance of religious traditions both in the development and sanctioning of national mythologies, and in the critique or criticism of these mythologies. The historical background of such considerations begins with Native American religions. The course concludes with a study of "religious freedom" in a multicultural nation again uncertain of its grounds for unity.

Did the Greeks and Romans believe their myths about winged horses, goddesses, and golden apples? How are myths related to the religious, political, and social world of Greece and Rome? This course examines Greek and Roman myths from a variety of theoretical perspectives in order to understand their meaning in the ancient world and their enduring influence in Western literature and art.

This course explores daily life and community in the Middle Ages through festivals, holidays, and marking the passage of the seasons. First, students are introduced to the format of both the natural and ritual year, and how individuals and groups responded to environmental factors. Second, they consider the role of such seasonal rituals as a means of creating social cohesion and coercion. Medieval festivals and holidays were not just fun: they frequently sought to impose specific visions of social and religious order on participants (and those who were excluded). Third, students reflect on how holidays and communal rituals still have power to shape community, identity, and belonging in contemporary society. The course helps students learn about medieval religious and cultural practices in a critical manner; while focusing on Christian traditions, they also consider Jewish and Muslim customs in a broader European context. Recommended background: prior coursework on the pre-modern world.

Medieval Spain was a crossroads where the civilizations of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism met, mingled, and fought. Diverse and dynamic societies emerged, and from this climate of both tension and cooperation came a cultural and intellectual flowering that remains a hallmark of human achievement. Using a wide range of primary sources, this course focuses particularly on two key concepts in Spanish history: the Reconquista and the Convivencia. To examine these, students investigate the nature of conflict in medieval Spain and the ways in which those who lived there constructed and understood their communities.

An anthropological approach to ancient Greek religion in which archeological, literary, and art-historical sources are examined to gain an understanding of religion in ancient Greek society. Topics explored include cosmology, polytheism, mystery cults, civic religion, ecstasy, sacrifice, pollution, dreams, and funerary customs.

Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler, Finzi. Each a successful composer, but each of their stories marred by one commonality: antisemitism. Using the hermeneutics of Jewishness, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, detailed study will be afforded to each of the aforementioned composers, to discuss the interplay between the nineteenth and twentieth-century European musical arena and antisemitism. Not open to students who are enrolled in or have earned credit for FYS 586.

The sociology of religion examines the collective roots and consequences of religious life. This introduction to the subject emphasizes critical historical moments when the role of religion in social life changed profoundly. Students focus on the transformations of the "Axial Age" (900-200 B.C.E.) that generated "world religions" such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Judaism and gave religion a new critical distance from social life; and on the Protestant Reformation, which helped create the modern world, influencing aspects of life that seemingly have little to do with religion. The final section of the course explores religion in contemporary American society.

During the 20th century, Jewish racial identity has increasingly moved towards notions of whiteness with the perceptions of “Black Jews” being fictional and farcical. By the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, Black communities and cultural icons were identifying as Jewish. Ethiopian Jews were admitted to Israel under the Law of Return and musicians such as Lenny Kravitz, Drake, as well as comedian Tiffany Haddish publicly asserted a Jewish identity. Global perceptions influenced by racial science criminalized Blackness, and Judaism participated in racial thinking and hierarchies as well while also being subjected to them. In this global history of Black Judaism (1800-present), students will learn about the historiographical and current debates regarding race and ethnicity in Judaism, discuss the increasing diversity of global Judaism, and push beyond the history of Blacks and Jews as an allied history to an intersected history.

Using the literatures of African and African-descended peoples, this course examines the religions-traditional/indigenous, Christian, Islamic, and so-called "syncretic"-from the continent and the diaspora. The selected works may represent the religious traditions, rituals, and practices of the Yoruba, Shona, Asante, Tswana, as well as African Independent Churches, Rastafari, and followers of Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and related religions. Students approach texts-novels, short stories, dramas, films and poems-as literary productions and not just media to convey information about the religions they represent. This course is also attentive to contexts; students examine the sacred symbol systems represented as well as the historical era depicted and the literary traditions and cultures that produce them. Recommended background: course work in Africana or religious studies.

What is the Hebrew Bible (Christianity's Old Testament and Judaism's Tanakh)? This course centers perspectives of BIPOC biblical scholars who employ a range of scholarly tools and methods for exploring the content and genres of major books of the Hebrew Bible - including Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings-with brief forays into selected Prophets and Wisdom literature. Topics include theories about the composition and sociopolitical contexts of the writings, the events and ideas they narrate, and the use of scripture in sustaining and contesting modern social practices, especially those related to colonization, cultural violence, and race/gender disparities.

The New Testament – composed of Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and an Apocalypse – was written and compiled about two thousand years ago, in the first and early second centuries of the Common Era (CE), by a handful of Jesus-believers, many of them Jews. It is also a “living document” honored as sacred Scripture by Christians – members of the largest religious group in the world, currently numbering over two billion persons across the globe. As Scripture, the New Testament has served to inspire countless Christians to engage in great acts of love and charity, devotion and self-sacrifice, and the creation of artistic masterpieces and folk traditions throughout two millennia. As Scripture, it has also been used by Christians to sanctify colonization and conquest, enslavement and race/gender/class disparities, torture and genocide throughout those same two millennia. In light of this challenging complexity, this course employs both historical lenses and theological/social justice lenses to explore the ideas, contexts, and movements that gave rise to these writings, as well as some of the ways in which New Testament texts have been used to sustain and resist cultures of violence.

What does it mean to call an object or monument a work of Islamic art? The term has been applied to a global geography of visual cultures and works made between the seventh century and the present day. In this introductory course, we will explore the question by analyzing key works ranging from the c. 692 CE Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to contemporary art that challenges Orientalist assumptions about Muslim identities.

This course explores the influence of Greco-Roman notions of heroism on the stories and lives of early Christian saints and martyrs. Students study the commonalities between representations of figures such as Socrates, Ajax, and Lucretia with tales of Christian martyrs and saints such as Sebastian, Andrew, and Perpetua. They also consider the differences between the Greco-Roman definition of the self as a rational mind controlling the body and emotions and Christian notions of the self as a soul joined to a suffering body needing guidance. In so doing, students explore how literary and historical figures understood themselves and their world and why they risked their lives to pursue an inner drive, divine imperative, or ethical commitment. Recommended background: any course in Classical and Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, or History.

From John Winthrop to Donald Trump, Americans imagined themselves as a chosen people, a righteous empire, and a city upon a hill. The course examines this religious view of America and its role in shaping American ideas regarding politics, education, work, women, ethnic groups, and other countries.

This course focuses on the doctrinal and social developments of Buddhism across a range of communities, from early Buddhism in India and the rise of various Buddhist schools of thought throughout Asia, up to modern Buddhist traditions as practiced in North America. The course considers how Buddhism has been (re)interpreted in each new location, and the role of rituals, meditation, and other forms of religious expression across the Buddhist world.

This course engages with a range of Tibetan religious practices, doctrine, and cultural contexts to better understand how Tibetan Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Indigenous traditions have developed over time. This course focuses on the history, doctrines, practices, literatures, major personalities, and communities of the different religious traditions that are expressed in the Tibetan Buddhist world, including monastic and tantric forms of Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religions practices. The relationships between religious and other social influence ethics also are explored.

This introductory course focuses on visual cultures of the European “Middle Ages” (c. 350-1450). We will explore how objects like illuminated manuscripts, precious metal reliquaries, painted icons, silk textiles, and funerary sculpture shaped medieval understandings of faith, community, and power.

The study of medieval churches enables us to address many historical questions: how people used architecture to define their communities and their places in the cosmos, how traditional building practices and technological revolutions shaped spaces in different cultural contexts, how a monument’s users navigated spaces layered with images and symbolic meaning, and many intersecting concerns. This introductory course surveys churches built in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Caucasus between 300-1500 CE.

From antiquity to the present day, people have traveled to local or far-off sites to approach holy figures, to appeal for divine intervention, and to fulfill obligations. This course explores the material dimensions of these journeys, from the spaces entered and sites encountered to the things travelers brought or took away. The class focuses on shrines built and used c. 300-1500 CE.

This course examines the origins, historical development, and diversity of African American religious traditions from the colonial era to the present. Throughout American history, African Americans have used religion not only as a means of expressing complex views of themselves and their world, but also as a form of cultural critique, social reform, economic independence, and political activism. Among the movements and topics discussed are African and Caribbean religious influences, slave religion, the rise of African American denominations, the Nation of Islam, the importance of spirituals and gospel music, Afrocentricity, and the civil rights movement. Given the complex nature of African American religious experience, this course adopts an interdisciplinary approach and draws upon scholarship on religion in sociology, politics, history, art, literature, and music.

A consideration of major issues that arise in philosophical reflection upon religion. Particular issues are selected from among such topics as the nature of faith, the possibility of justifying religious beliefs, the nature and validity of religious experience, the relation of religion and science, and the problem of evil.

This course begins by interrogating the terms "Islamic", "Muslim", and "Civilization" in order to unpack the concept of "Islamic civilization" as a term relevant to the global order of things. Drawing on anti-colonial and decolonial thought, this course will follow Islam's movement from Arabia, through western Asia towards the Mediterranean, southern Europe, and the Sahel, and its simultaneous spread eastward towards Russia, central asia, India, to western China, south east Asia, and Oceania. We will look at cultural production in the arts, architecture, literature, and music from around the world in order to assess the utility, scope, and limits of the term "Islamic civilization." At the same time, we will examine the way in which Islam shaped and was shaped by the cultures, peoples, intellectual traditions, and practices that Muslims encountered. At the end, we will return to assessing the utility of the term "Islamic civilization" and, if needed, imagine other ways of conceptualizing the global life of Islam.

For many, "medieval" is simply another word for "superstition"” and the Middle Ages were consumed by delusion punctuated with witch trials. This course instead focuses on religious and folk practices beyond orthodox Christianity in the Middle Ages, to understand the realities of "magical" practice and supernatural beliefs during the period and move away from misconceptions based on Enlightenment polemic and modern fantasy. Students discover the variety of beliefs associated with the concepts of magic and supernatural and come to understand that these concepts were not always seen as evil, or even wrong, by contemporaries. Students consider the differences between how learned and unlearned magic were perceived and the gender dynamics at the heart of this dichotomy. They explore the syncretic relationship between medieval Christianity and paganism and other traditional beliefs, as well as the overlap between "magic" and primitive science. Recommended background: prior coursework on the pre-modern world.

The goal of this course is for you to acquire a global perspective on Islam in the Western hemisphere—its origins, the manner of its dissemination, and the varied experience of Muslims in the Americas, particularly the differences between Islam’s arrival in Anglophone and Hispanophone contexts. We will begin with Muslim life in West Africa on the eve of the Atlantic slave trade, focusing particularly on Muslim intellectual and spiritual history. We will then move to the Iberian peninsula, its role in the slave trade, and the Spanish empire’s regulation of Black and Muslim bodies in its colonies. We will then explore the experiences of the first Muslims in the US and their descendants; the first immigrant Muslims from south Asia and the middle east; and the formation of distinct threads of Islam in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will end the course with a series of discussions on the implications of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Doctrine of Discovery have had on the history of Black life, Muslim life, and Black Muslim life in the US.

What is the Qur’an? How did it come to be? Why is it so important to nearly 2 billion people worldwide and what does it actually say? We will spend 14 weeks reading excerpts from the Qur’an and scholarship about the Qur’an originating from a number of different perspectives. We will begin by talking about the origins of the Qur’an, studying both history and the Qur’an itself to understand how it unfolds as a text. We will look at the Qur’an in its own time, seventh century Arabia; its transformation from oral recitation to codex; its use as ethical guide, liturgy, history, and law; and its instrumentalization and weaponization in politics, rhetoric, and myriad functions of global, local, and interpersonal power.

The period of Mediterranean history stretching from ca. 300 to ca. 700 C.E. saw both change and continuity, radical transformation and sociocultural resiliency. Often maligned as the "Dark Ages," this period has attracted a great deal of scholarship, and looms large in the construction of modern national identities. The central question is not only how the ancient world became the medieval, and what that meant, but how and why this understanding has changed over the years, and why it matters. This course examines the period through the analysis of primary sources, key secondary sources, and historiography.

The Aztec state encompassed millions of people, featured a capital whose size and towering pyramids left the first Spanish visitors in awe, and developed a culture that continues to influence contemporary Mexico. Yet Aztecs are more often remembered for their cannibalism than their complex civilization. This course examines the Aztec world: what it was like to live under Aztec rule, how society was organized, what people believed about how the cosmos worked, and why Aztecs practiced ritual human sacrifice.

Benjamin Elijah Mays, Class of 1920, is remembered for his eulogy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his presidency of Morehouse College, and his famous declaration, "Bates College did not emancipate me; it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself." Seldom mentioned are his multiple roles as a minister, educator, social activist, journalist, advisor to three American presidents, leader in international organizations, and scholar of American religion. This course examines the life, career, and writings of Dr. Mays as lenses through which to view American religious thought and history. Prerequisite(s): FYS 152 or one course in religious studies.

This course explores the interconnections among race, liberation, and theology in the Americas. We begin with a historical study of the material and ideological relationship between Christian theology and the formation of racial consciousness, from the advent of the global colonial period to the establishment of the United States. This study will enable us to examine the interrelated processes of racial and religious formation in the US, Caribbean, and Latin America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Focus will be given to the social, economic, and political dimensions of these processes; that is, on issues of colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and capitalist extractivism. We then consider the ways theology has served as a means to critique and resist these processes during the 20th and 21st centuries throughout the Americas. We will especially attend to how Black, Womanist/Mujerista, and Latinx theological frameworks contribute to struggles against these forms of injustice. Recommended background: one course in Religious Studies or American Studies.

This seminar involves the close reading and discussion of a number of texts representing a variety of Buddhist traditions. Emphasis is placed on reading across genres, which include canonical sutras, commentarial exegeses, modern-day texts for lay practitioners, philosophical treatises, and popular legends. Prerequisite(s): one course in religious studies.

This course examines the role of gender in Buddhist communities from the inception of the religious tradition to the modern day. How has gender identity influenced the development of this tradition? Where do we see gender in Buddhist literature, doctrine, and art? How do modern ideas of what "Buddhism" is affect change in the North American context, and how is this different from the Buddhist past? The course draws on a variety of sources, including literary, cinematic, and visual materials, to answer these questions. Special attention is given to how gender is presented in doctrinal texts, and the (dis)connection between these documents and the lived experiences of Buddhist people, as presented in interviews and autobiographies by Buddhist practitioners from a variety of moments and communities.

This course examines religion from a social-psychological perspective, focusing on current psychological science to understand why some humans find religion compelling and the implications of religious faith (or lack thereof). Topics include the psychological benefits of religious faith, negative outcomes of religious faith, the role of religion in inter-group conflict, how thoughts of the divine affect perceptions of physical space, and how mental systems make sense of information about religion. Prerequisite(s): PSYC 218.

This course explores questions about suffering through the lens of the biblical book of Job, with subsidiary attention to the first three chapters of Genesis and the New Testament book of Revelation. Students consider issues of justice, belief, morality, and meaning in response to human suffering and bring together personal knowledge and reflections, community-based learning, and close reading of texts in wrestling with these issues. In addition to the biblical books and scholarship on them, readings include works by Archibald MacLeish, Bill McKibben, Stephen Mitchell, and Catherine Keller. Prerequisite(s): one course in Religious Studies.

Were witches and heretics really tortured in the Spanish Inquisition's infamous jails? This course examines both the institution of the Spanish Inquisition and the lives of those who came before it. Students read and analyze original Inquisition cases as well as consider the ways historians have used cases to investigate topics such as sexuality and marriage, popular beliefs, witchcraft, blasphemy, and the persecution of Jewish and Muslim people. The sins that concerned the Inquisition depended on the time and place, and the crimes prosecuted in sixteenth-century Spain or eighteenth-century New Spain reveal a great deal about early modern (ca. 1500-1800) culture and society.

This course examines the four central terms of the title in several combinations. We first explore the human-human and human-divine relationship as framed in the Qur’an and the Hadith, studying key feminist thinkers on equality, personhood, and women’s humanity. The second part of the course surveys key questions about women, sex, and gender that have vexed the study of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—sex in and outside marriage; punishment for ‘sexual’ crimes; licit and illicit sex; homosexuality, bisexuality, and queerness; transition and third genders; ritual leadership; and mourning. In the third and final part of the course, we will examine gendered and racialized representations of Muslim women and Muslim bodies in popular culture and the news media. By the end of this course, you will be able to engage and analyze the major debates around women, sex, and gender in Islam; and theorize the functions of power on all levels of human life.

Medieval people were passionate travelers. They traveled as much as they could, from day trips to local shrines to epic journeys that lasted years. That is not the modern conception of the Middle Ages, where many of us believe that most medieval people were born, lived, and died within a few square miles. This class challenges those modern assumptions and focuses on the travel narratives medieval people themselves composed about their travels, especially those that trace journeys “between” medieval worlds. Medieval people negotiated, traded, and simply visited with those of different religious and cultural identities—reminding us that not all such encounters were violent or negative. Together, we will read the stories these travelers wrote and consider how they viewed themselves and others, and how they reacted to different environments and experiences. This is an intensive writing class and will include significant amounts of close reading. Recommended background: prior coursework in pre-modern topics.

This course considers the intersection of religion and society in Asia through the lens of popular Asian myths. Students examine how religious doctrine, ideals, and art have influenced the creation and interpretation of this unique narrative form, while also learning about specific Asian traditions. Close study of several tales, including narratives from India, China, and Tibet, include reading texts in translation as well as viewing cinematic and theatrical representations of myths intended for popular audiences. Students explore the dialogic process of myth by creating their own modern versions of one text.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is one of the twentieth century's leading American educators, political activists, scholars, and cultural critics. Du Bois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, a founder of the NAACP, author of the first major sociological study of an African American community, a crucial precursor of the American civil rights movement, a spokesperson for Pan-Africanism, and a supporter and eventually a citizen of the African state of Ghana. He witnessed and, in many instances, played a role in shaping contemporary perspectives on the major historical, political, and social events of American society. This course offers a chronicle and critical examination of Du Bois's life, career, and role in the formation of American culture. Prerequisite(s): REL 100 or AFR 100.

A course designed to give senior majors a common core experience in research in religion. Through writing, presenting, and discussing several papers, students explore topics of their own choosing from different theoretical and comparative perspectives. Required of all majors. Enrollment is limited to junior and senior majors and minors and, by written permission of the instructor, to interdisciplinary majors.

Research for and writing of the senior thesis, under the direction of a member of the department. Majors writing a regular thesis register for REL 457 in the fall semester or REL 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both REL 457 in the fall semester and 458 in the winter semester.

Research for and writing of the senior thesis, under the direction of a member of the department. Majors writing a regular thesis register for REL 457 in the fall semester or REL 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both REL 457 in the fall semester and 458 in the winter semester.

This course considers representations of Jesus through select feature films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Questions and insights brought to bear on these films derive from New Testament and historical Jesus studies, religion and film studies, and other cultural-studies disciplines. Students gain a broad introduction to the Jesus film genre, critical film-viewing skills, and an enhanced understanding of the possibilities and challenges of representing Jesus in the modern era.

In this course, students learn about religious practice through firsthand interaction with traditionally Buddhist communities in rural and urban Ladakh, India. Students conduct ethnographic fieldwork relating to modern Buddhist practice, and examine these practices from historical, archeological, and literary perspectives. They observe rituals, interview practitioners, and participate in the daily life of the Buddhist community. This course includes a significant community-engaged learning component. Prerequisite(s): one course focused on Buddhism.

Religious diversity is increasingly the norm in societies all around the globe. How can people from different religious and non-religious communities support one another in living, thriving, and working together toward a better world for all? This course is built around the same case-study method commonly used in law schools and business schools to enable students to hone real-life research, decision-making, collaboration, and leadership skills – in this instance, focused on interreligious relations, but applicable to a wide variety of intercultural interactions.

The city of Lewiston has been home to a growing Muslim community since the arrival of the first major wave of Somali immigrants at the turn of the millennium. The city has two mosques, a downtown lively with Somali and Muslim life, and the complex visual culture of a diverse northern community. This short-term course will be a thoughtful look at Islam in Lewiston, beginning with how the city’s media read and understood Islam and Muslims in the 20th century; moving to the arrival of Somali refugees in Lewiston, their struggles and settlement; then the response of both the civic leaders and the existing public; and the building of a new life and new generations of Muslim Mainers over the last quarter century. Field trips to and speakers from the local community will provide grounded knowledge of Muslim ritual life, business, farming, housing, aspiration and celebration.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.