RELPOL 1996 Religion & Politics Elective

This course is used for transcribing 1000-level RELPOL elective units.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring, Summer

RELPOL 2000 Religion and American Society

This course explores religious life in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Comprehensive coverage of such a diverse landscape is not our goal. Rather, we will focus on some of the basic social categories that organize our society and that make religion a social phenomenon. How do religious belief and practice relate to race, class, or gender? How do we understand the role of religion in relation to region and space? How can we understand the many different stories that Americans tell about their own country as a special-even sacred-place? Major themes include religion and race; nation, land, and migration; religion, class, and money; evangelicalism and the religious right; business, class, and prosperity; religion and gender; religious nationalism; and the enduring challenges of religious multiplicity in the U.S.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 2010 Religion and Politics in American History

In a famous 2004 article, historian Jon Butler once remarked that US history textbooks and survey courses tend to pay significant attention to religion during the Colonial Era and early Republic, yet after the Civil War religion more often appears as a jack-in-the-box that pops up in historical accounts somewhat randomly and without much elaboration or analysis. To address the gaps in historical understandings that these absences may create, this course will provide a survey of the ways theological ideas and religiously-motivated social movements have shaped US politics and civic life from the Civil War to the present. With a particular emphasis placed on how religion intersects with other social categories such as race, gender, and class, it will examine the complex role that religious beliefs, practices, and identities have played in major political events and debates from the 1860s to today. In doing so, it will also inquire into what it means to study religion as a historical phenomenon, the theoretical and methodological tools that best assist in this work, and the historiographic implications of better attending to religion in historical analyses. No prior coursework in US history or religious studies is required.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2020 Islamophobia & U.S. Politics

The presence of Muslim minorities in the West is increasingly divisive as political leaders appeal to voters' fear of the 'Other' to promote Islamophobic agendas that reshape immigration and asylum policies and redefine Western identity as Christian. Politicians further exploit the rise of extremist groups like ISIS to justify anti-Muslim rhetoric and critique multiculturalism, claiming that Islam and the West are inherently antithetical. In this course we examine the phenomenon of Islamophobia as a form of anti-Muslim racism that parallels hostility towards other religious and racial minorities in the US. We explore how while the post-9/11 context gave way to an increase in incidents of anti-Muslim violence, contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia are deeply rooted in state level anti-black racism from the early twentieth century, as well as in anti-Muslim attitudes that date back to the colonial period. By examining academic literature, political speeches, and news media sources, we situate Islamophobia within its historical context and also analyze how US anxieties about Islam and Muslims are not only gendered and racialized, but also exist across the political spectrum.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 2040 Love and Reason

Love often seems dramatically unreasonable, and reason can seem coldly rational in a way that excludes any emotion, passion, or affiliation even akin to love. The supposed opposition between love and reason has been used by Christian and secular thinkers throughout modernity to organize ways of knowing and judging, and to criticize claims of faith, belief, and desire. But are love and reason really so distinct? What does it mean to say so, and why might someone make this claim? Can love be reasoned, and even reasonable? Can reason be aided by love, and even driven by it? How might different answers to these questions affect our understanding of other possibly unreasoned categories like faith, belief, and piety? This course offers an introduction to modern Christian thought and Western philosophy through these questions and themes.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2050 Muslims in the Media and Popular Culture

In the post 9/11 context of the United States, Muslims have been a constant presence in news media, typically cast in a negative light as political others who are backwards, threatening, and inherently prone to violence. This pattern has long been replicated in films in which Muslims serve as static and dehumanized perpetrators of violence and/or as symbols of a backwards and depraved culture, antithetical to U.S. values and interests. In recent years, however, Muslims have become increasingly visible in the entertainment industry as protagonists and producers of their own media, including G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, Hulu's Ramy, and Netflix's Man Like Mobeen. This course explores a selection of recent media projects created by Muslim writers, actors, musicians, and comedians. We will be pairing films, television shows, music, and comics with scholarship on Islam and religion in the media to analyze Muslim representation and storytelling in contemporary popular culture. We will evaluate these works on their own terms, noting the ways in which gender and racial hierarchies dictate who gets to represent American Muslims while also assessing how these new media both disrupt and further reify Muslims' construction as religious and political outsiders.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2070 Puritans, Native Americans, and Revolutionaries: Empire and Encounter in Early America

This course concerns the history of colonial America from early English settlement and encounters among English and Native Americans to revolution against Great Britain. The making of colonial America involved encounters and exchanges among various people groups-Puritans, Indigenous communities, German Moravians, English liberal thinkers with different ideas about politics-with different political convictions. This course explores those encounters, with a focus especially on Puritan and evangelical missions to Native Americans, southern plantation society and race-based slavery, English notions of religious liberty, and how ideas of political liberty, including rationales for American Independence, conflicted with, criticized, or stood as contradictions to English treatment of Indigenous and African peoples. We will read primary texts that illumine new perspectives on these issues. There is no defining argument or ideological point to the course but, rather, a series of observations of how different social, political, and intellectual variables made for shifting understandings of what religious ideas mattered to public life in America and how those ideas ought to shape civil affairs. As we examine these understandings, we will pay attention especially to Anglo-Indigenous interactions, the rise of a national self-consciousness that invested America with great historical purpose, the development of different responses to racial difference in America, and the disestablishment of religion from national political power (encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution).

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 2080 African-American Religions

This course is an introduction to African-American religions. This course attends to change wrought in indigenous African religions by enslavement, the adoption of Christianity (and severe critiques of it) by slaves themselves, the building of African-American denominations, the rise of new black religious movements, and the role of religion in contemporary African-American life. At every stage of the course, religion is discussed with reference to key political developments in broader African-American history African diasporic history. The course proceeds in three parts. The course begins with a brief introduction to key themes and problems in the study of African-American religions. For example, is there such thing as a black church, and how does the study of African-American religion differ from the study of other religious groups or traditions? The second part, the bulk of the course, moves chronologically and situates African and African-American religions in their shifting cultural and political contexts from the beginning of the European slave trade to the present. We will discuss African-Americans' practice of several religious traditions: creole African religions, Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and new religious movements. The final part of the course focuses on several key issues and debates that are informed by the study of African-American religions and that have important connections with contemporary American life.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 2100 The Good Life Between Religion and Politics

What constitutes a life well lived? Where do we turn for the answers to that question? And do we ask it in the plural, "we," or as individuals? This course considers the way religious and political thought has shaped considerations of the classical ethical question of how we should live, and the way that ethics has often served to connect religion and politics in thought and practice. Do we need a religious basis to answer ethical questions, or can we determine how to live without religious sources of authority? On what basis, and with what capacities, can we imagine new answers to ethical questions-in community or on our own? Taking a philosophical approach through both classic and modern texts, we will consider of a range of answers to the question of how we should live, and a range of strategies for imagining the inquiry.    This course satisfies the introductory course requirement for the minor in religion and politics.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 2110 Religion in the African American Experience: A Historical Survey

This course introduces students to important themes in the history of African American, and thus in American, religious history, among them slavery, emancipation, urbanization, migration, consumer culture, sexuality, politics, and media technologies. Primary attention is given to Afro-Protestantism in North America and the cultural, social, and religious practices and traditions of these black communities. However, students will also be introduced to specific expressions of religious diversity and varying religious traditions and practices in African American communities.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2140 Religions of St. Louis: Communities of Faith and Practical Action Across the Region

The St. Louis region is home to a diverse array of global religious communities. This course directly introduces students to some of that diversity by revolving around fieldtrips to living institutions and meetings with religious leaders across traditions. In any given semester, our visits may include organizations that identify as Catholic, Pentecostal, evangelical, Jewish (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist), Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Vedantist, Scientological, progressive Baptist, or secular humanist, among others. We will also visit the International Institute of St. Louis and study the politics of immigration and refugee resettlement that have helped shape the city and its religious as well as political multiplicity. Through our visits and conversation, the variety within each religious community will also become apparent, as we encounter adherents across the political spectrum, embodying different ethnicities, and committed to different degrees of orthodoxy or traditional belief and practice. Students should emerge from the course with a fresh sense of the cultural and religious vitality of the St. Louis metropolitan area, illustrative of the United States as a whole. *All required site visits will take place during the regular class time.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 2150 Islam in America

This course explores various Muslim discourses and practices in America with a special focus on the intersections of race, gender, and religion. In this course, students will first study the history of Islam and Muslims in America in light of the narratives of enslaved West African Muslims and some of the early narratives of immigrant Muslims. Students will then explore some later historical narratives that represent the impact of religious and racial structures on identity formations, such as the formation of the Nation of Islam, and transnational religious connections in Cold War America. Students will also examine the construction of Muslim identities and institutions in light of some of the US structures and discourses about Islam and Muslims, with regard to the racialization of Muslims, and in connection to the broader Americas. Students will also use popular culture as a site to observe the intersection of race, religion, and gender in Muslim practices.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2300 Jews and Jewishness in Black American Thought

The history of what has been called Black-Jewish relations in the United States has a rich and contested history. The stories told about this relationship feature solidarity, controversy, and betrayal. This course will look at this history by attending to the role of Jews and Jewishness in Black thought. How has Jewishness featured in the self-understanding of Black thinkers? Have Jews been regarded as allies or adversaries, role models or competitors? What role have Jewish texts or narrative paradigms played in Black religion and Black politics? What have Black writers made of the Jewish project of national liberation i.e. Zionism? The course will likely include readings from W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X among others.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 2310 Jewish Political Thought

The question of Jewish belonging in the Christian West has played a defining role in the formation of the modern state, and the afterlives of the Jewish question in Europe, America, and Israel continue to have significant influence on how political life is understood and evaluated. This course begins with classical Jewish sources on politics--including the nature of authority, national belonging, and territory--and then moves to a consideration of several crucial modern Jewish thinkers likely including Spinoza, Marx, and Arendt. The course will consistently consider topical contemporary questions about liberal democracy, totalitarianism, nationalism, Zionism, race, and secularism.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2320 Perfoming Religion, Ritualizing Gender

What's the difference between a wink and a blink? What the difference between graduation, a sacrament, and the electric slide? We make fine-grained distinctions every day in our own enactment and interpretation of these different kinds of practices. This class will introduce you to key academic approaches to ritual, practice, and performance, and will ask whether these distinctions are important or arbitrary. Ritual studies (based in religious studies) also happens to center around the very same questions that gave birth to gender and queer studies (is gender a performance?), thus a parallel examination of ritual and performance studies necessarily brings religious identity into conversation with broader questions of identity (gender, race, class).

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2330 Religion and Music in American Culture

In this course, students will examine public discourse on popular music as a way of understanding questions of religious identity and community formation. Through case studies ranging from the Pueblo Indian dance controversy of the 1920s to post-9/11 disputes about the Islamic call to prayer, students will consider how debates over what counts as sacred or secular music reveal disputes over notions of religious authority and authenticity in American culture.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2340 Religion, Environmentalism, and Politics

This course explores the intersections of anthropology, theology, economic interests, and activism. We will draw on a range of sources including social-scientific theories about religion and ritual, discussions of disenchantment and re-enchantment, and indigenous claims to land. These theoretical frameworks will provide context for discussing contemporary religious responses to ecological disaster, including both environmentalist and anti-environmentalist movements.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2341 American Religion and the Politics of Sincerity

In the United States, most people assume that to be religious one should be sincere. You should really believe what you say you believe; don't fake it. Since the mid-twentieth century, courts have used the sincerity test for religious claimants, evaluating whether they truly believe, not whether their beliefs are true. In the twenty-first century, state legislators have passed laws protecting citizens' sincerely held religious belief. This course explores these issues of religion, sincerity, and authenticity in American politics and culture. It is not a chronological survey but, rather, a topically organized introduction to some key questions and issues. We will pay particular attention to how racial, gender, national, and religious identities intersect to inform American ideas about sincerity, authenticity, and realness. These discussions connect directly to how the law has treated religious believers and the matter of sincerely held religious belief. Finally, we will consider how sincerity might help us think about the problems of deliberative democracy and the public sphere in our supposedly post-truth era.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2350 Religion, Health, and Wellness in Modern America

Religion, Health, and Wellness in Modern America will examine changing conceptions of health and wellness in America from the late nineteenth-century to the present. With media, artifacts, and literature drawn from the histories of medicine, religion, and capitalism, this class will cover the proliferation of alternative health regimens, the rise of the medical establishment, claims of divine healing, and the impact of market forces on wellness cultures. Course topics include the raced and gendered dynamics of care, socioeconomic status, technological innovation and media, the role of nature, health activism and radical self-care, and New Age spirituality and mental health. Special attention will be paid to how the politics of the body and its regulation intersect with religious and consumer practices in the modern wellness industry

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 2360 What's Opera Doc? Music, Taste, and American Identity

This course introduces students to the different approaches and methodologies within the American Culture Studies field, including those represented by literature, history, sociology, and political science; at the same time, will learn key concepts within the field that will inform their future work. These are presented in a semester-specific topic of focus; please see Course Listings for a description of the current offering. The course is ideal for AMCS majors and minors, but others are welcome. This course fulfills the Introductory Course requirement for AMCS majors and minors.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2370 Zionism

Zionism is often thought of as a commitment to the principle that the Jewish People, as a distinct people, has a right to self-determination in its own historical land of the biblical Palestine. Yet the history of the term and the set of ideologies show a much more complex understanding. In this course we trace the emergence of a number of different Zionisms that would lead to the creation of the modern state of Israel. And we explore how the political principles at the core of these ideologies have fared in the 65 years since the founding of the modern Jewish state. The course is at its heart applied political theory: a case study of the way that ideas emerge from historical events, take on a life of their own, and then shape real outcomes in the world. The readings will weave together history, philosophy, literature and government.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2420 Religious Dissent and Reform in American Life

This course explores American religious and political history with particular attention to themes of dissent and reform. From Anne Hutchinson's challenges to the Puritan establishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to evangelical abolition movements in the nineteenth century, to arguments for a black Jesus and civil rights in the 1960s, American religion is full of trailblazers that push political boundaries and contest religious orthodoxies. This course attends to themes of gender, race, class, and economic power to contextualize movements and give students tools to understand the arrival of new movements and the cultural and political power of religious ideas. This course pays particular attention to the role of religious dissenters in movements for social and political change, how religious beliefs and practices have been mobilized (often against co-religionists) to protest the economic status quo, empower women, promote civil rights, and end war. We also examine how many of these movements were themselves disrupted or complicated through further dissension and division.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2430 The Politics of Religion, Crime, and Punishment in the United States

This course traces the relationship between religion and the politics of crime and punishment in the United States from the Revolutionary Era to the Trump Administration. We ask how religious movements and religious ideas shaped the establishment of penitentiaries, the structures of modern policing, and the prisoners' rights movement. We also explore how religion shaped the priorities of the FBI, contemporary movements for prison reform, and the contours of American debates about immigration and the War on Terror. The course highlights the unintended consequences of efforts to reform and rehabilitate and emphasizes religion's interconnections to race and citizenship. Students will leave the course with an understanding of how American religious traditions and movements from Quakers and followers of the Social Gospel to the Nation of Islam and evangelical Christianity have continually reshaped the politics of crime punishment in America.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 2520 Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis

This course explores how the Catholic Church confronted the challenges of modernity-from liberal democracy and human rights; to capitalism and modern science; to fascism and communism. We will examine also how Catholicism itself has shaped modern politics and culture. The course will draw from the experience of Catholics in different countries (with no pretense of being exhaustive) over the past two centuries. We will begin with the French Revolution and the first culture wars between Catholics and liberals and end with the ambivalent legacies of Vatican II. We will appreciate how US Catholicism cannot be fully understood without reference to this global context.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2700 Native American Religions and Politics

This course introduces students to American Indian religions and politics. We will think of American Indian religiosity as tied together with a strong sense of place and a long history of oppression. To do so, we will employ an interdisciplinary approach, reading historical, ethnographic, legal, and literary texts about Native American experiences of contact, conquest, genocide, and struggles for religious freedom and land rights. We will discuss political and legal controversies around a 1920s ceremonial Pueblo dance and the relationship between the Ghost Dance and the Red Power Movement; a US Supreme Court case about the ceremonial use of peyote in the Native American Church and an ethnography of Native American Alcoholics Anonymous. We will watch documentary films about various relationships between White Christian Americans and American Indians and ask how Native American experiences and accounts can help us to better understand (and also to criticize) Western religiosity, history, ecology, and politics.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 2996 Religion & Politics Elective

This course is for transfer credits.

Credit 0 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3010 American Religion, Law, and Sexual Politics

Following philosopher Michel Foucault's vital insight that sexuality is a major transfer point in the relations of power, this course will explore the complex ways in which theological ideas and religious movements have shaped legal doctrines relating to sex, gender, and sexuality in the United States from roughly the turn of the twentieth century to the present. It will examine how and why religious groups have mobilized within the legal arena at various points in US history, the devotional commitments that influence their activism, the constitutional claims and counterclaims that have emerged over time as a result of legal contestation, and the lived impact of various judicial decisions. To do so, the course will be structured thematically around three overlapping constitutional domains: (1) equal protection rights for women and sexual minorities, (2) substantive due process commitments to privacy and bodily autonomy, and (3) free speech principles related to sexual self-expression. The impact of religious advocacy on contemporary controversies such as drag show bans, restrictions on reproductive healthcare, religious exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws, pornography regulation, gender-affirming care access, and more will all be covered. By applying the theories and methods of critical religious studies, this course also takes questions of American religion and sexual politics as a starting point for introducing undergraduate students to legal studies more generally. Through classroom conversations and course texts, students will become familiar with the structure of the American legal system, different methods of constitutional interpretation, theoretical concerns that shape legal thinking, and critical reading skills that may be used to approach legal texts such as judicial opinions. Students from all academic backgrounds interested in gaining increased literacy in American law are encouraged to enroll-no prior exposure is required.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3020 Christian Thought and Politics in the Modern World

This course introduces students to Christian thought in the modern period and its relation to notions of social justice and political action. It takes these issues chronologically, beginning with the Protestant Reformation and challenges to Catholic monarchies, through Puritanism and revolution, evangelicalism and anti-slavery, nineteenth-century liberalism and social reform, twentieth century issues of the Cold War and civil rights, to twentieth century concerns with race and environmentalism. Throughout the course, we will read texts that relate theological claims (about, for example, the nature of God, Christ, and redemption) to social and political matters. The course will end with attention to Christian belief and contemporary political crises.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3030 Between Malcolm X & Martin Luther King Jr.: Religion & the Politics of Freedom

Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) and Martin Luther King, Jr. are both icons of the twentieth-century civil rights and black freedom movements. Often characterized as polar opposites—one advocating armed self-defense and the other non-violence against all provocation—they continue to be important religious, political, and intellectual models for how we imagine the past as well as for current issues concerning religion, race, politics and freedom struggles in the United States and globally. This course focuses on their political and spiritual lives. We will examine their personal biographies, speeches, and legacies as a way to better understand how the intersections of religion, race, and politics came to bare upon the freedom struggles of people of color in the US and abroad.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3050 Topics in Religion and Politics

How have Jewish women shaped American politics and culture? How much of our modern world do we owe to what Jewish women have created? And how have these women transformed Judaism itself? This course examines the writings, ideas, and lives of Jewish-American women. From explicitly religious organizations like Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, to more secular Jews who subtly incorporated religion into their style and their ethics, we will consider Jewish-American women in all of their fascinating variety. Students will gain a thorough picture of Jewish-American women's social impact from the ground up. Our reading will extend from colonial community builders like Bilhah Franks, to early feminists like Rosa Sonneschein, to revolutionaries like Emma Goldman and reformers like Lillian Wald; from the philosopher Hannah Arendt to the labor leader Rose Schneiderman and the novelist Ayn Rand; from America's first woman rabbi, Sally Priesand, to modern-day leaders and celebrities like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Judy Blume, Adrienne Rich, and Dianne Feinstein. Students will have the opportunity to conduct self-directed research as well as to try out creative projects and collaborative reflection. This course will teach students to thoughtfully analyze texts in historical context, to conduct sensitive conversations with generosity and curiosity, and to broaden their pantheon of American cultural giants. As we explore multiple genres, decades, and perspectives, students will build a rich and collaborative understanding of the vibrant Jewish-American women's intellectual tradition.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3060 Virtues, Vices, Values: Regulating Morality in Modern America

This course takes morality and the question of what's right seriously as a lens through which to understand and assess modern American history. Morality is, of course, a devilishly flexible rhetoric, a language invoked to tell people how to act and how to be good, or, conversely, to criticize and to shame. When the state or a community wants its citizens or members to be good, it crafts laws and creates customs to encourage or inhibit behaviors. Yet good is a contested concept, especially in a diverse, multiracial society. Thus this class examines a) how state and non-state actors, including religious leaders, have attempted to regulate the lived experiences of Americans and b) the conflicts that emerge over what, exactly, is correct, or right, or good for individuals, society, and the state. To what degree does calling something moral or immoral articulate or obstruct policy solutions? What do political coalitions oriented around values accomplish? Is it possible to hew to moral frames and remain inclusive and tolerant? Topics may include marriage, abortion, immigration, alcohol, incarceration, disease, money, and medical care.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3070 Islam, Gender, Sexuality

In this course, we examine discourses of gender and sexuality across historical period and geographical region. We analyze encounters with Western imperialism, investigating how gender informs social, political, religious, and family life in Islamic cultures. Our course materials include histories, ethnographies, graphic novels, and films, and we examine how these sources approach the study of Islam, gender, and sexuality through the lens of various topics: from women in the earliest years of Islam in 7th century Arabia to revolutionary Iran and American Muslim women in the 21st century. Throughout the course, we examine how notions of gender and sexuality have changed over time and played various roles in the political and social life of Muslim nations, societies, and communities. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically assess scholarly and non-scholarly (media) discussions of gender in Islam.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM, IS EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3080 Gender and Power in Religious Thought

Gender has often been posed as the fundamental distinction of the human condition, creating the original opportunity for relation across that distinction. In some strands of religious thought, this distinction comes second to the creation of the world distinct from the divine. Religious and secular thinkers have turned to ordinary experiences of interpersonal relations for insight into these purportedly more fundamental relations and the connection between them. This seminar examines the role of interpersonal relationships in recent religious, ethical, and political thought, with particular attention to the way they bring gender and sexual desire more centrally into view. NOTE: Students should have some training in theory or philosophy, and are welcome from any department or discipline. Experience in religious thought (in any religious tradition), ethics, or gender theory will be helpful, but is not required.Anyone interested in taking the course with concerns about their preparation should contact the instructor with a brief description of their interest and related coursework and research.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3090 Mormon History in Global Context

The focus of this seminar is Mormonism, meaning, primarily, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the largest Mormon body. Mormons in the United States have gone from being one of the most intensely persecuted religious groups in the country's history to the fourth largest religious body in the U.S., with a reputation for patriotism and conservative family values. Because of its vigorous missionary program, the LDS Church now has more members outside the U.S. than inside. This seminar will introduce the basic practices and beliefs, and explore issues regarding economics, race, gender, and sexuality within the faith. These issues include: How did conflicts over Mormonism during the 19th century, especially the conflict over polygamy, help define the limits of religious tolerance in this country? How have LDS teachings about gender and race, or controversies about whether or not Mormons are Christian, positioned and repositioned Mormons within U.S. society? What does the LDS faith look like in other parts of the world, and how does its identification with U.S. prosperity and politics shape its growth in other places?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3105 American Holidays: Civic and Religious Celebrations in American Culture

This seminar examines a variety of religious holidays and civic rituals in American history and culture. Topics include: public conflicts over Christmas, African-American emancipation celebrations, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Roman Catholic street festivals dedicated to the Virgin Mary, modern renderings of Hanukkah, as well as the memorialization of the Union and the Confederacy. Various interpretive approaches are explored, and the intent is to broach a wide range of questions about history and tradition, gender and race, public memory and consumer culture, religion and nationalism, through this topical focus on holidays and holy days.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3110 Pilgrims and Seekers: American Spirituality From Transcendentalism to the Present

This seminar focuses on the formation of spirituality in American culture from the Transcendentalist world of Ralph Waldo Emerson on through more recent expressions of the spiritual-but-not-religious sensibility. How did spirituality come to be seen as something positively distinct from organized religion? What are the main contours of spiritual seeking in American culture, especially among those who claim no specific religious affiliation? The course also explores the social, political, and cultural consequences of this turn to the spiritual over the religious: for example, the consecration of liberal individualism, the relationship of religious exploration to both environmentalism and consumerism, the politics of cultural appropriation, the negotiation of religious pluralism, and the pursuit of the spiritual in art.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3130 Religion and Race in the United States

Race and ethnicity are central to how religious pluralism is worked out in America. How do the categories of race and religion intersect to produce concepts of a normative American identity? In this course, we examine the construct of race across various American congregational communities in order to understand debates on American identity and belonging. We also explore the idea of an American civil religion, and we engage with the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of particular religious groups within this category based upon racialized criteria.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3140 Religion and the Modern Civil Rights Movement,1954-1968

The modern Civil Rights Movement is a landmark event in the nation's political, civic, cultural, and social history. In many contexts, this movement for and against civil and legal equality took on a religious ethos, with activists, opponents, and observers believing that the net result of the marches, demonstrations, and legislative rulings would redeem and/or destroy The Soul of the Nation. This seminar examines the modern Civil Rights Movement and its strategies and goals, with an emphasis on the prominent religious ideologies and activities that were visible and utilized in the modern movement. The course pays particular attention to the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, figures, and communities that were indifferent, combative, instrumental, and/or supportive of Civil Rights legislation throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3150 Religion and the Origins of Capitalism

This course examines the relationship between religion and the development of a capitalist economy in Europe, England, and America from 1550 to 1800. It relies on intellectual, social, and economic histories. We cover major thinkers from the early mercantilist thinkers such as William Petty to Adam Smith.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3180 The Abuse Crisis in Modern Christianity

For over a quarter-century, journalists have broken story after story about sexually abusive clergy in the U.S., many of them serial abusers of children and adolescents. While most accounts have focused on Catholic priests, many have also emerged of abusive evangelical and other Protestant ministers. The stories have illuminated how church bureaucrats have consistently protected abusers and subverted the efforts of victims and their families to seek recompense, accountability, and justice. These protections have often succeeded because of churches' political connections to law enforcement and legislators who have helped hide perpetrators and stymie survivors. Together we will analyze this cautionary tale about religion and politics by contextualizing it within the broader history of Christianity in the United States and beyond. Is this a case simply of a few bad apples or of institutional corruption? How has the church's response been shaped by fear of scandal, antipathy toward secularism, and theological teachings on gender and homosexuality? How does sexual abuse fit into the history of the church as a hierarchical institution? What challenges has the crisis posed to people of faith who are committed to the church, and can trust be repaired? Readings include legal case studies, internal church correspondence, victims' statements and criminal justice reports, documentary films and memoirs, and both journalistic and scholarly analysis of the clergy sex abuse crisis in the U.S. church. We will also hear directly from a variety of visting guests.  WARNING: Many of our readings contain difficult accounts of abuse as well as the subsequent trauma most victims suffer. If this subject matter is triggering for you and you'd like to speak with me about whether or not to take it, I'll be glad to help you think through it.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3190 Solidarity and Silence: Religious Strategies in the Political Sphere

Although political action is often considered a problem of making oneself heard, religious practices of silence, self-effacement, and withdrawal from certain worldly struggles have guided many significant political and social movements, particularly forms of non-violent resistance. This course considers the role of religious thought and practice in such movements in the twentieth century. The history of these movements presents an apparent paradox: how can political action emerge from the supposedly private realm of religion in the modern era, particularly its most individualistic formations in contemplative and mystical practices? Does the historical role of these practices in the political sphere complicate their portrayal in some scholarship as private, individual, and depoliticizing? With these questions animating our investigations, we will consider the work of authors and activists including Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone Weil, and William Barber, as well as the history of movements associated with their work. Toward the end of the semester, we will turn to contemporary movements against economic inequality, intimate violence, racially motivated violence, and discrimination toward transgender persons to discuss the use of religious strategies or religiously-derived strategies in current political and social activism.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 3200 Religion and Politics in 20th Century U.S. History

This course provides both a chronological and thematic overview of the history of religion, political culture, and society in twentieth century America. While moving sequentially through key transformations running from the beginning to end of the century, we will also pause each week to examine particular episodes and themes that illuminate substantive and symbolic societal turns. Specifically, this course will encourage us to think more deeply about the ways religious ideas, institutions, and individuals intersect with and weave through broad political developments like populism and progressivism, corporate and labor activism, the rise and decline of New Deal liberalism, war and American empire building, the power shift to the Sunbelt, urban and suburban power struggles, social movements of the Left and the Right, the politics of family, education, and community, civil rights and ethnic identity, conservatism and globalization. The overarching goal of this course is to place religion at the center of political development in the twentieth century, and at the center of our understanding of this recent past. Here religion will not (as is often done by political historians) be cordoned off as an agent of change worthy of consideration only under exceptional circumstances and in rare moments, but rather be considered as a consistent, powerful player that always brings competing passions and interests, drama and controversy to the political realm. This primary agenda will be accompanied by a couple of others. In addition to absorbing the historical facts and figures of religion and politics in the twentieth century (on which students will be tested), students will also be encouraged to encounter and critique different styles of historical writing, from biographies and autobiographies to traditional monographs, articles and essays to editorials. What makes good writing? Good history writing? What are the challenges inherent to writing effective religious and political history? This set of issues will be important for us to consider, because they lead to yet a final set of questions: how does one actually go about researching history? Writing it? In addition to taking time for extensive reading in this subject area, students will also be expected to complete a major term paper based on both primary and secondary sources. Students will begin this project early in the semester and, while in consultation with members of their peer group and me, see it through to its conclusion by the last week of class.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3230 Jews and Jewishness in Black American Thought

The history of what has been called Black-Jewish relations in the United States has a rich and contested history. The stories told feature solidarity, controversy, and betrayal. This course will look at that history by attending to the role of Jews and Judaism in Black thought. How has Jewishness featured in the self-understanding of Black writers? Have Jews been regarded as allies or adversaries, role models or competitors? What role have Jewish texts or narrative paradigms played in Black religion? What have Black writers made of the Jewish project of national liberation?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3300 The FBI and Religion

This seminar examines the relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and religion (i.e., faith communities, clerics, and religious professionals) as a way to study and understand 20th-century religion and politics. The course will investigate the history of the FBI as well as the various ways in which the FBI and religious groups have interacted. The course will pay particular attention to what the professor calls the four interrelated modes of FBI-religious engagement: counter-intelligence and surveillance, coordination and cooperation, censorship and publicity, and consultation.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3310 Conscience and Religion in American Politics

Conscience is as American as apple pie and baseball, but its meaning and implications are deeply contested in American religion and politics. What is conscience? To what extent is conscience laden with theological -- and, more specifically, Christian -- commitments? What role should conscience, whether religious or ethical, play in political life? By considering what conscience means and what vision of politics it implies, we will reflect on what it means to be American: how religion should relate to politics, how individuals should engage with democratic laws and norms, and how religious and political dissenters might oppose American politics. We will focus on key moments in the history of American religion and politics through the lens of conscience, from the Interwar Period, the perceived threat of communism during the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War to the culture wars on abortion, marriage equality, LBGTQ rights, and the death penalty. This course draws on interdisciplinary sources from religious studies, political theory, law, and history in 20th- and 21st-century American politics.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3320 Global Circuits: Religion, Race, Empire

This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of larger global processes. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate these entanglements through conceptual, historical, and ethnographic questions and insights on the remapping of religious traditions and communal experiences onto imperial terrain. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: colonial rule, missions, and racial hierarchies; migration and its relationship to religion; the racialization of religion; diaspora and empire; and persecution and power.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Art: SSC BU: BA, ETH

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3330 God in the Courtroom

The U.S. Constitution holds a promise to secure freedom of religion through its First Amendment. Its two religion clauses declare unconstitutional any prohibition on the free exercise of religion and laws respecting the establishment of religion. The consequence is that, whenever a group demands to be recognized as religious and to be granted the right to exercise its religion, a court, a legislature, or an administrative official must determine whether the religious practice in question is legally religious. This means that law plays a uniquely important role in defining religion in the United States. In this seminar, we will explore the relation between law and religion in America. We will study the religion clauses in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the histories of their interpretations by American courts in landmark cases, and the ways that religious studies scholars have understood and critiqued these cases.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3340 Jesus, Jazz, and Gin: The 1920s and the History of Our Current Times

This course is a historical survey of the dynamic relationship between religion and politics during the 1920s. The 1920s were a tipping point for a great deal of the fundamental issues that shaped the twentieth century in the U.S. This course seeks to investigate how religious activism, evangelism, discourse, practice, and reinvention contributed to and was shaped by such change.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3345 The Politics of Play and Protest: Religion and Sports in America

Play is an essential component of human life. Yet, while the word play evokes leisure and frivolity, it can be serious work. Cultural values, spiritual truths, and social politics arise from play, particularly when they are codified in sports. From raucous games of Chunkey in pre-Columbian North America to Tim Tebow's gameday prayers, sports have long been used as instruments of social cohesion and as a way to connect a people to their gods. This course will examine the close relationship between religion and sport in modern American history and will push students beyond the sports-as-religion paradigm to consider sport as a medium of exchange between the overlapping influences of celebrity, national politics, religion, and the economy. We will cover how sports and religion intersect with topics like nationalism, gender, race, sexuality, identity formation, commercialism, mass-media, recreation, and labor. Concepts like ritual, collective effervescence, and sacred space will be used to analyze key historical movements and organizations, such as muscular Christianity, the YMCA, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Olympics, amateurism and the NCAA, and Black Lives Matter. Key figures for examining sport as a site of piety and protest include Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams, Tim Tebow, Jackie Robinson, Colin Kaepernick, and Abe Saperstein. Throughout the course we will ask: How, where, and when do sports act religiously? What do sports and religion accomplish together that they cannot accomplish alone?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3350 Native American/Euro-American Encounters: Confrontations of Bodies and Beliefs

This course surveys the history and historiography of how Native Americans, Europeans, and Euro-Americans reacted and adapted to one another's presence in North America from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, focusing on themes of religion and gender. We will examine the cultural and social implications of encounters between Native peoples, missionaries and other European and Euro-American Protestants and Catholics. We will pay particular attention to how bodies were a venue for encounter-through sexual contact, through the policing of gendered social and economic behaviors, and through religiously-based understandings of women's and men's duties and functions. We will also study how historians know what they know about these encounters, and what materials enable them to answer their historical questions.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3370 Religion, Race, and Migration: Borders of Difference?

This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and migration through the idea of difference. We discuss how particular understandings of religion, race, and migration inform contemporary scholarship and shape national and international legal and governmental practices. Specifically, this course explores how difference-of community, body, and place-produces conditions of possibility. Over the semester, we will investigate various borders of difference, using binaries to guide our analysis. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: religion/secularism; race/ethnicity/sect; terrorist/citizen; and refugee/migrant. Ultimately, this course aims to critically unpack the relations of power by which people, places, and ideas are differentially constructed, maintained, and transformed

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3380 Slavery, Sovereignty, Security: American Religions and the Problem of Freedom

The goal of this course is to think critically about freedom as an ideology and institution. What does it mean to be free? What are the relationships among individual liberties, national sovereignty, and civil rights? In what ways has freedom been defined in relation to -- and materially depended on -- unfreedom? At the same time, this course will treat American religions in a similar critical fashion: as a historically contingent category that has been forged and inflected within the same context of white Christian settler empire. Religion and freedom have intertwined throughout American history, including in the ideal of religious freedom. Our critical interrogation of freedom should help us think carefully about power, working with but also beyond tropes of domination and resistance.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 3400 American Religion, Media, and Technology

American religious communities have often been cast as technological laggards, whether willfully ignorant or generally backwards. Such narratives, fueled by stories about religious leaders condemning cultural trends conceal the ways religions have in fact innovated in the media sphere. Ranging from the time of the earliest printing presses to contemporary social media platforms, this course reframes the question of American religions and media technologies by asking the following questions: How have media technologies shaped religious practice, identity, and belonging? Were religious critiques of mass media valid, particularly around questions of access, constraints, and consumption? And how have religious groups experimented with communications technologies to reimagine their use, message, and audience? These moments of technological encounter reveal how religious communities have not only worked with media technologies, but have driven much of what makes these technologies innovative and modern.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3405 American Religion,race, and Law

This course explores relationship between Asian Pacific Americans and American legal discourses of religion and race. In addition to examining the lived experience of Asian American religious communities in historical and contemporary perspectives, this course evaluates the racial and religious connotations and consequences of various state, federal, and international policies that directly affect Asian American communities. Students will learn to apply theories of race and religion to American law and political discourse by analyzing the language, historical context, and judicial contestations of key topics, including immigration restriction, citizenship, land laws, segregation, internment, refugee resettlement, and government surveillance. Students will be challenged to consider how state and society define and legislate religious minorities in America, as well as minority strategies of religious assimilation, political negotiation, and legal contestation. As such, students will consider how American definitions of religion and race determine religious legitimacy, legal inclusion, and cultural loyalty.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 3996 Guided Thesis Work in Religion and Political Power

This course covers thesis work on religion and political power.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 4020 American Unbelief From the Enlightenment to the Present

This course examines American secularism, humanism, freethought, and atheism from the Enlightenment forward to the present.  Topics to be explored include:  the tensions between secular and Christian conceptions of the nation's founding, blasphemy and sacrilege, women's rights, the civil liberties of atheists and nontheists, the relationship between science and religion, the battles over religion in the public schools, nonreligious child-rearing, and the politics of unbelief on both the left and right.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 4025 Muslims in the Media and Popular Culture

Since the long amorphous War on Terror, Muslims have been a constant presence in Western news media, typically cast in a negative light as political others who are backwards, threatening, and inherently prone to violence. This pattern has long been replicated in films where Muslims are static and dehumanized perpetrators of violence, or as symbols of a backwards and depraved culture, antithetical to liberal values and interests. In recent years however, Muslims have become increasingly visible in the American and British entertainment industries, as protagonists and producers of their own media, including G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, Hulu's Ramy, and Netflix's Man Like Mobeen. In this seminar, we explore a selection of recent American and British media projects created by Muslim writers, actors, musicians, and comedians. We pair these projects with scholarship on religion in the media and TV studies analyzing Muslim representation and storytelling in contemporary popular culture. We will evaluate these works on their own terms, noting the ways in which gender and racial hierarchies dictate who gets to represent American and British Muslims, while also assessing how these new media both disrupt and further reify Muslims' construction as religious and political outsiders.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4030 Christian Nation, Secular Republic

The United States has often been imagined as both a deeply Christian nation and a thoroughly secular republic, and those conjoined framings have created recurrent conflict throughout American history. This seminar is designed to introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to current discussions of religion, secularism, and unbelief in American religious and political history. The course also places a complementary emphasis on close readings of crucial primary works, say, about the rise of deistic toleration or the persisting political power of Christianity-in textual particularities. The course takes as its starting point Charles Taylor's monumental account A Secular Age and works from there through various episodes of the Enlightenment and its long aftermath.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4040 Law, Religion, and Politics

What is the role of religious argument in politics and law? What kinds of arguments are advanced, and how do they differ from one another? Are some of these arguments more acceptable than others in a liberal democracy? This course will explore these questions through the work of legal scholars, theologians, and political theorists. Our topics include the nature of violence and coercion in the law, constraints on public reason, the relationship between religion and government, and the nature of religious practice and tradition.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 4050 Readings in African American Religious History

This course is an introduction to the history and variety of African-American religions in the New World Diaspora. The approach will be chronological, from the earliest years to the New World, to contemporary expressions. We will also explore some of the major historiographical themes that have catalyzed current scholarship, the purpose and effectiveness of black nationalist movements, issues of class and gender, the persistence of African elements of new world religious practice, performance, and popular culture.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4070 Religion, Politics, and the University

This course explores in depth current issues related to pluralism, difference, and belonging in matters pertaining to religion and other important issues, with a particular focus on how these play out in the university context. The instructors, John Inazu and Eboo Patel, are two of the leading national commentators on these issues. Prerequisite: Students enrolling in this class must submit a brief statement of interest to Professor John Inazu. Details on how and where to submit this statement can be found at http://law.wustl.edu/COURSES/INAZU/seminar1/summaries/.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4080 Sabbath Politics: Rest and Refusal in Religion and Politics

The Jewish Sabbath arrives every week to disrupt ordinary life with a wholly different way of living, abstaining from some activities in divinely commanded rest. Is this different way of life strictly a break from the ordinary, or also a guide to it-and to how it might require disruption, reformation, and repair? Sabbath traditions have inspired radical political action including movements against debt, income inequality, environmental destruction, and racial injustice. This course will consider the ways that 20th and 21st century American Jews have practiced Shabbat and thought about its significance in political life. Students will read a range of texts including Abraham Joshua Heschel's classic 1951 book The Sabbath, and consider them in relation to movements of contemporary radical politics that have been inspired by Sabbath traditions, including Strike Debt, reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, and agonistic democratic politics.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 4090 Solidarity and Silence: Religious Strategies in the Political Sphere

Although political action is often considered a problem of making oneself heard, religious practices of silence, self-effacement, and withdrawal from certain worldly struggles have guided many significant political and social movements, particularly forms of non-violent resistance. This course considers the role of religious thought and practice in such movements in the twentieth century. The history of these movements presents an apparent paradox: how can political action emerge from the supposedly private realm of religion in the modern era, particularly its most individualistic formations in contemplative and mystical practices? Does the historical role of these practices in the political sphere complicate their portrayal in some scholarship as private, individual, and depoliticizing? With these questions animating our investigations, we will consider the work of authors and activists including Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone Weil, and William Barber, as well as the history of movements associated with their work. Toward the end of the semester, we will turn to contemporary movements against economic inequality, intimate violence, racially motivated violence, and discrimination toward transgender persons to discuss the use of religious strategies or religiously-derived strategies in current political and social activism.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 4100 Spiritual But NOT Religious: The Politics of American Spirituality

What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? What are the social and political consequences of foregrounding spiritual seeking and religious experimentation over the organized religion of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples? How did this contemporary view of spirituality take shape historically? The seminar focuses on a series of debates that have arisen over spirituality in American culture: the entwining of religious practices with consumer culture and corporate capitalism, the rise of therapeutic models of meditation and mindfulness, the politics of Euro-American appropriations of Native American and Buddhist religious practices, the implications of embracing religious variety and eclecticism, and the relationship between spiritual seeking and social justice.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

RELPOL 4121 American Religion, Politics, and Culture: Catholicism and Contemporary American Politics

Twenty-five percent of Americans identify as Roman Catholics, making Catholicism the largest Christian church in the country. With the exception of George W. Bush in 2000, no presidential candidate since 1960 has won the White House without winning a majority of Catholic voters. This course will examine the complex role of Roman Catholics in American politics, looking at how Catholics have shaped American history and political life and how American history and politics have shaped Catholicism. Topics will include the nature and influence of the Catholic vote, the role of Catholic social teaching in forming Catholic voters, and the influence that Catholics continue to exercise over public policy and in our national institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4122 American Religion, Politics & Culture: Commentary From Alexis De Tocqueville to Contemporary Pundits

This research-oriented seminar involves in-depth historiographical investigation of leading scholarship at the busy intersections of American religion, politics, and culture. The second semester focuses on classic and contemporary commentaries on the American religious and political scene from Alexis de Tocqueville through today's leading pundits. Some sessions will include a visiting scholar engaged in cutting-edge research--a feature that will allow seminar members to work with important scholars from beyond the university. Possible topics include: church-state relations, religion and foreign policy, religion and civil rights, religion and the science wars, the rise of the Religious Right, and the role of religion in national elections. The seminar is taught under the auspices of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and is offered two complementary parts (though enrollment in either one of the two is certainly possible). Its ambition is to build up a community of inquirers engaged in the core questions that animate the Danforth Center. PREREQ: Advanced undergraduate or graduate standing in AMCS, History, or Religious Studies or permission of instructor.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 4125 The First Amendment in an Age of Fracture

This seminar will explore the constitutional and civic dimensions of engaging across difference in a divided and fractured society. Topics will include free speech, the right of association, religious freedom, public forums, online forums, public funding, protests, boycotts, and strikes.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 4300 The FBI and Religion

This seminar examines the relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and religion (i.e., faith communities, clerics, and religious professionals) as a way to study and understand 20th-century religion and politics. The course will investigate the history of the FBI as well as the various ways in which the FBI and religious groups have interacted. The course will pay particular attention to what the professor calls the four interrelated modes of FBI-religious engagement: counter-intelligence and surveillance, coordination and cooperation, censorship and publicity, and consultation.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

RELPOL 4305 Religion and the State: Global Mission, Global Empire

This course explores the complex intersections among U.S. political power on a global stage, and religious institutions and identities. Readings and discussions are organized around two very broad questions. First: how has this nation's history been shaped by religious others both inside and outside its borders? Second: How have perceptions of those others in turn affected U.S. responses to circumstances of global consequence--including, for example, foreign policy and diplomacy, missionary activity, and economic practices?

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4310 Monuments, Museums, and Mountains: Religion and the Politics of Place in Modern America

Some of the most intense battles in American culture are fought over hallowed places and public memory. This class will examine various contested sites on the borders of pilgrimage, tourism, religious display, and civic commemoration. Among the topics to be considered are: Confederate monuments and plantation tours, Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, the Museum of the Bible and evangelical visions for the nation's capital, the public display of the Ten Commandments and the Satanic Temple's monumental interventions, Holy Land pilgrimages, and such alternative religious landscapes as Sedona and Salvation Mountain. Students will also have the opportunity to identify and explore sites of their own choosing as places of religious and political drama within modern American culture. There are no prerequisites for this course, and it is open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4996 Love and Reason

This is an elective course covering love and reason.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

RELPOL 4999 Independent Study in Religion and Politics

This course is for independent study in Religion and Politics.

Credit 4 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring