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REL 121 - Introduction to Islam through Film

An introduction to the rise and formation of Islam as a prophetic religious tradition, this course is intended to highlight the manifold expressions of Muslim life through diverse historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. We examine the emergence of Islam in late antiquity and study the development of Muslim intellectual traditions and sociopolitical institutions. To do so, this course integrates the medium of film in order to ground conversations on themes such as ritual practice, gender, and diverse regional and national practices of Islam as a lived religion. In addition to readings that build historical and content knowledge, students can expect to watch at least one filmic media piece (including documentary, narrative, or short films) each week. Three broad aims of the course: 1) to provide students with basic knowledge of Islamic history, belief, and ritual life; and 2) to equip students with knowledge for critically and actively analyzing discussions of Islam in media and contemporary world events; and 3) to do so especially by learning and applying techniques of filmic analysis, using films as an opportunity to engage with diverse representations of Islam.��

REL 131 - Introduction to Hinduism

This conference will explore the foundations and developments of the South Asian religion called Hinduism. Our sources draw from the vast corpus of mythic and epic literature: cosmogonic Vedas, philosophically speculative Upanishads, duty-focused (dharma) epics, and later devotional (bhakti) poetry. Through primary sources as well as ethnographic accounts of diverse lived traditions we will familiarize ourselves with several gods, goddesses, heroes, ideas, and practices that persist throughout South Asian history.

REL 132 - Introduction to South Asian Buddhism

This course is designed to explore the foundational "three jewels" of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma (the teaching), and the samgha (the Buddhist community). This survey of Buddhist thought and practice in its Indic context will introduce various philosophical and practical currents that have made an indelible mark on the variety of Buddhisms historically practiced throughout the world. The emic "three jewels" framework will organize our inquiry: special attention will be given to 1) the centrality of the idea of the Buddha and the Buddha biography; 2) the canonical teachings, didactic narratives, and ethical and philosophical systems of the Theravāda and Mahāyāna schools; and 3) the practical impact of the samgha in history, including Buddhist nationalism and activism today.

REL 141 - Ancient Christian Mercy: Texts, Traditions, and Critical Approaches in Religious Studies

This course introduces the history of early Christianity and the critical study of religion through the examination of the concept of mercy from its origins in Greek-speaking Judaism and the Hellenistic world through the formative centuries of early Christian thought, reading primary texts in translation from the Septuagint, the New Testament, and the patristic tradition. Students will engage some of the most rigorous moral writing of the ancient Mediterranean -��on poverty and the socially marginal, the conditions and limits of social obligation, the body as the locus of charity, and the nature of the Christian good -��before turning to examine that tradition through the critical methods of contemporary religious studies: historical analysis, ideological critique, comparative religious ethics, and the social-scientific study of altruism and benevolence. The course is designed as an introduction to the discipline of religious studies and presupposes no prior training in Christian history, theology, or religious studies. All primary texts are read in translation.��

REL 151 - Introduction to Judaism

This course introduces students to the history, practices, and thought of Judaism. We will survey the history of the religion through representative texts, considering the features of the ancient, medieval, and modern communities of Judaism. In so doing, we will consider the ethnic/racialized representation of Jewish communities throughout the history of the religion. Furthermore, we will undertake our exploration in tandem with occasional field trips and guest lecturers to add an experiential dimension to our learning. We will ask, "What do Jewish communities have in common and in what ways do these communities��diverge?"

REL 152 - Introduction to the Hebrew Bible

This course introduces the text and historical contexts of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretive approaches. We will read widely across 24 biblical books, considering the major features, themes, and genres of textual collections. Additionally, we will explore the reception of the biblical texts we read throughout history-seeking to understand these texts in conjunction with Jewish and Christian reading communities who claim them. We will ask, "What is in the Hebrew Bible and what is the function of its texts through time?" We will see a complex mosaic of biblical texts that interact with a myriad of historical circumstances, producing a wide array of interpretive traditions.

REL 167 - Introduction to Religion through Video Games

This conference explores the medium of video games within the context of the intersection of two dynamic fields of inquiry: religious studies and media studies. Readings drawn from video games studies will encourage students to think about the narrative themes of select games as well as the procedures that games require from their players. Readings drawn from the study of religion will support a critical examination and analysis of various video games, paying particular attention to myth and ritual, both inside the game and out. Games explored include: Doom, Dark Souls, the Red Dead Redemption Series, and Cyberpunk 2077. The semester ends with a focus on esports and game fandoms as analogues to religious communities and challenges students to ask: what makes a community religious?

REL 201 - Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion

An introduction to various interpretive frameworks and methodological issues that inform religion as a critical, reflexive, academic discipline. Texts pertaining to the definition and scope of the inquiry and methods of investigation will be critically engaged and their applicability tested with an eye toward their utility for understanding religion and religious phenomena.

REL 226 - Islam in America

This course will examine the history of Islam in America from the colonial period to the aftermath of 9/11. Through examination of select primary sources, the course will contextualize the phenomenon of American Islam at the intersection of American religious history and modern Islamic history. It will inquire into how the history of American Islam could enrich conventional understandings of religious pluralism in the United States and the relationship between Islam and modernity. Topics to be discussed include the relationship between race, ethnicity, and religion in the United States; the influence of comparative theology and religious studies on American conceptions of religious diversity; the relationship between missions, colonialism, and industrialization in the late nineteenth century; the role of Islam in the civil rights movement in the United States and in nationalist movements in Muslim-majority societies; and the rise of militant Islam as a matter of global concern.

REL 309 - Rivers, Nationalisms, and Religion

This course explores the roles -- imagined and temporal -- played by rivers at the intersection of religious communities and nationalisms. Students will experience an embodied class, putting them in contact (both literally and metaphorically) with water throughout the Portland area as well as the various communities that connect to them. As we get to know our role in local watersheds around Reed, we will get our feet wet in the academic waters of discourses on religion, ethnicity, and nationalism through biblical and other religious��literatures and its more contemporary reception in religious communities. From this lens we think alongside Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest and other��borderlands such as the North American Southwest and the Holy Land (Israel/Palestine) about��hydrology projects as��paradigms of nationalist expansion. How do waters shape the "us" ancient communities envisioned themselves to be? How do bodies of water shape the histories of belonging and exclusion we now inhabit at Reed and in/around Portland, Oregon?

REL 327 - Erasure and Location of Muslims in Western Humanities

This course inquires into how the erasure and forgetting of the connections Muslims have historically created between Europe, Africa, and Asia have been central to the making of the idea of the West. Using Reed's iconic humanities program as a case study, in the first half of the course we explore the making of racialized and civilizational humanities "general education" courses as a framing mechanism for understanding and explaining the modern era. Here we work to theorize the concept of erasure and understand its significance in shaping contemporary conceptions of religious, racial, and cultural differences. In the second half of the course, we aim to locate Muslims within the context of the exchanges and rivalries that have historically and genealogically connected Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Drawing on recent advances made in the study of religion, we work to conceptualize a more cross-cultural and global approach to the humanities. Students who have previously taken REL 227 should not enroll in this course.

REL 328 - Muhammad and the Qur'an

This course introduces students to the Qur'an (Koran) through diverse perspectives, including through its revelation, its assembly as a text, its interpreters, and the Qur'an as a material object. Students will examine the life of the Prophet Muhammad in conjunction with the revelation of the Qur'an as well as the importance of the Prophet's own sayings and example in Islamic law and practice. We will examine interpretations of the Qur'an from different chronological, geographical, and gendered perspectives. Students will leave the class with an understanding of the role of the Qur'an for Muslims and Islam historically and in contemporary times, as well as debates surrounding it. We will also examine contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, considering how misunderstandings of the Qur'an and its contents contribute to fears of the text and Islam.

REL 331 - Lives of the Buddha

This course trains attention on the central story at the heart of the Buddhist tradition: the biography of the (historical) Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, as rendered in narrative and material forms. We will explore the role of hagiography, narrative, and epic poetry (���屹�ⲹ) in creating and sustaining Buddhist thought and practice. Our sources include the early Sanskrit texts Buddhacarita and Lalitavistara Sūtra, the fifth-century Pāli ����ٲ��첹�Ծ�����Բ�, the twelfth-century Pāli Jinalankara, and the twentieth-century Nepal Bhasa Sugata Saurabha, as well as bountiful sculptural examples from Buddhist sites in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. We will ask, "What do the variety of retellings and representations reveal about the concerns and aspirations of their respective communities?" We will find that the category of "biography" extends beyond the representation of a singular life, in terms of both content (previous lives are included) and form, as biography is the vehicle that conveys Buddhism's central teachings, the dhamma.

REL 334 - Gender and Buddhism

In this conference, we will consider the ways in which categories such as "woman," "man," "ubhatovyanjañaka" ("intersex"), "paṇḍaka," "feminine," "masculine," "gender," "nun," and "monk" have been explained and imagined by Buddhist communities through various historical and cultural locations. We will begin with an examination of early Buddhist sources, including depictions of the Buddha as a sexualized "bull of a man," and the stories surrounding the founding of the nun's order and the songs of women saints (Pāli Therīgāthā). We will then explore gender(ed) imagery in Mahāyāna sources, with a focus on the gender transformation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in India to Guānyīn in China and Kannon in Japan, as well as the feminine principle envisioned by Tibetan Vajrayāna traditions. Key questions drive our inquiry: how do Buddhists, especially those who have taken vows, understand theoretical and practical tensions inherent in the Buddhist tradition? How do sacred images relate to social realities?

REL 335 - South Asian Religious Nationalisms

This conference will explore legends and legitimacy, specifically the use of Hindu theologies and mythologies in the formation and perpetuation of South Asian religious nationalisms. By examining how nationalist discourse invokes and applies historical and theological sources, we will question layers of legitimacy, and explore how and why religious narratives and mythically-infused histories are conceived, preserved, explained, and employed. Sources range from pre-independence novels to political treatises, classical religious texts to modern documentaries. Issues to consider include: How is religion used to explain or justify political action? How do images operate in augmenting the discourse? What is the broader context of postcolonial identity formation? What is the impact of Subaltern Studies on historiography and religion?

REL 341 - Ascesis in the Benedictine and Orthodox Monastic Traditions

The course focuses on a complex set of literary, communal, and embodied practices concerned with training and self-regulation, or ascesis, that promises the possibility of self-transformation and an experience of God. With an eye toward understanding contemporary Benedictine and Orthodox Christian monastic thought and practice, the literature of ascesis will be explored in a number of contexts: the late ancient Mediterranean; the medieval West and Byzantium; and the United States, Russia, and Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Academic theories of asceticism and works addressing social-historical contexts will provide the basis for critical reflection and sustained comparison.

REL 344 - Augustine of Hippo

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Augustine of Hippo for Western religious thought, political theory, and understandings of human interiority. This course is devoted to the careful reading of a limited number of his major works, supplemented by recent scholarship that addresses Augustine's social-historical context, philosophical and theological commitments, and anthropology.

REL 345 - The New Testament

Although the works comprising the canonical New Testament represent but a fraction of the extant ancient writings that attest to Christian origins, the task of understanding them has long been a discrete field for students of Christian antiquity. This course serves as an introduction to various modes of critical New Testament study and offers students the opportunity to explore the five major classes of works in the collection: the Epistles of Paul, the synoptic Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, the Deutero-Pauline epistles, the Catholic epistles, and the Johannine literature.

REL 348 - Works of Mercy in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Christian Traditions

This course focuses on historically important examples of Christian literature that are concerned with alleviating human suffering caused by poverty, disability, and various forms of social exclusion. With an eye toward an understanding of contemporary Roman Catholic and Eastern Christian thought and practice concerning works of mercy, contemporary scholarship addressing social-historical contexts and theoretical concerns will provide the basis for critical reflection and sustained comparison

REL 349 - Mysticism in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Traditions

Far from being a timeless, universal or near-universal feature of religion, "mysticism," a word that has its first known English usage in the early eighteenth century, has a history. One can at this point in time easily trace the rise and dramatic fall of mysticism as a central category for organizing scholarly knowledge and understandings of religion. "Mysticism" and its cognates and closely related terms, however, have also been and presently are used by some Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians to classify certain texts that treat ritual, theology, and structures of human interior organization and ��movement. The course explores this Christian tradition and related scholarship and historically situates representative examples of mystical works drawn from late antiquity, medieval Europe, the Byzantine Commonwealth, and the twentieth century.

REL 354 - Bible, Race, and Empire

This course focuses on the role of biblical texts as deployed to support and/or resist the racialized colonial projects of "Western" empires. We will consider the literary and historical features of various biblical texts alongside historical analysis of biblical reception in colonial societies. To aid our exploration, we will chart the contemporary contours of research into race/racialization. We will ask, "What are the roles of biblical texts in the racialized realities of 'Western'��colonial projects?" We will find that biblical texts are malleable traditions-able to empower both imperial racialized projects and localized forms of resistance.

REL 363 - Holy Sh*t: Religious Things

What makes a thing, a place, or a person sacred? This course focuses on the tangible elements of religion: the materials, objects, spaces, art, blood and guts that inspire belief and community. We will explore the way "things" interact with humans in their processes of creation, interpretation and the (re)definition of the religious, the sacred, the natural and supernatural, the holy, the profane, the secular, the immaterial, and the transcendent, grounding our exploration in case studies. Our work will raise our awareness of the significance of materiality in religion across religious traditions and raise questions of authenticity, replication, and commodification. This course will include small-group discussions, field trips, and multimedia presentations

REL 364 - Religion in the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

This course focuses on the lived religious practices of Latine/x and indigenous peoples in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that��spans a variety of approaches to histories of religion and race within Latine/x religious history. This course has four units. Unit 1 focuses on historical approaches to indigenous survival and Spanish interactions with indigenous communities in the modern U.S.-Mex borderlands. Unit 2 focuses on racial reconstructions post-1848 and how religion is implicated in the process of establishing racial orders in these new borderlands as well as resistance from below against imperial projects. Unit 3 moves on to the discussion of the creation of a distinct Latine/x identity in the��US and how religion factored into and influenced Chicano movement activism and theorizations of mestizaje within the movement. This section also considers the role of religion in the establishment of Latine/x identity and place, before moving into theorizing the mobility of these identities and places. Unit 4 examines modern migration at the U.S.-Mexico border and explores how Latine/x and indigenous peoples engage with the sacred within the act of migration and the fight for migrant rights itself. This blends new literature on sanctuary and immigrant rights activism with themes of survival and resistance discussed earlier in the course to explore how the racialized criminalization of immigration inspires new religious practices around the process of migration both by migrants and allied activists.��

REL 365 - Understanding Religion

This course provides students with an opportunity to consider religion from a variety of perspectives employed in the contemporary study of religion. Evidence for religion and religions will be examined from multiple traditions, geographical locations, and historical periods, but the course is not intended to be a survey of "world religions" or a historical overview of classic books in the academic study of religion. Instead, exemplary humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of religion will provide a basis for empathetically exploring religious self-understandings while critically examining them within larger social, political, cultural, and epistemological contexts.

REL 374 - Entanglement: Environment, Ethics, and Religion

This course weaves together interconnected discourses to interrogate the premise, and obligations, of interconnectedness - environmental and social - in this age of climate crisis. In��The Great Derangement,��Amitav Ghosh wonders how future generations will frame this period of "derangement" - our willful ignorance of human responsibility for, and "imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of," the climate crisis. What roles have religions played in conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the environment? We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks, from Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, to Ian Hodder's entanglements, to Buddhist discourses on interconnectedness and codependent origination,��paticcasamuppada.��We will focus on Buddhist discourses on the first noble truth,��dukkha��(dis-ease, unease, suffering), in light of solastalgia��("the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape," coined by Glenn Albrecht) and related eco-anxiety. We will read the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder (Reed '51) as we imagine what the amelioration of suffering (social and environmental) might entail, and what the interdisciplinary study of religion might offer.

REL 402 - The Junior Seminar in Religion

This course offers intensive study of a particular topic, drawing on various methodologies in the study of religion. While the course is intended to prepare department majors for the senior program, it is open to all qualified students.

REL 470 - Thesis

REL 481 - Individual Work in Special Fields