RELI 1

Welcome to RELI 1: Introduction to Religion, with Professor Richard S. Cohen.

Class lectures meet on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, from 3:00 – 3:50, in Pepper Canyon 122.

Every student is required to attend one (1) discussion section every week, on Friday. The choices are:
          9:00 – 9:50 in Center 205
          11:00 – 11:50 in H&SS 2150
          1:00 – 1:50 in Center 218

Weekly films are the third required component of the course. The film will be shown on Tuesday. Even if you cannot make it to an official screening, you still must watch every film. Films will be available at the library’s Film and Video Reserves. Or you can rent and watch them at home. All films are open to the public, so you may invite friends to join you to the screening. Films will be screened in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm on Tuesdays.

Please consult the upper tabs for information that normally would appear on a printed syllabus: a course description, schedule of readings, information on class policies, grading, and assignments, and my office hours and email. I strongly recommend that you read through all these pages at the beginning of the quarter.

Also please note that you will need a password in order to access the Online Readings. I will give you this password in class.

This quarter, RELI 1 has the subtitle, “Religion Through Film.” We are all familiar with films about religion. Films such as The Passion of the Christ, The Ten Commandments, and Little Buddha retell stories sacred to their respective traditions. Those are not the kind of movies we will discuss in RELI 1. Rather, the course will introduce several of the major categories with which we think about religion through the medium of film, by considering movies that seem to have little or nothing to do with “religion” per se.

The class takes this counter-intuitive approach in order to help students develop basic strategies of interpretation within the academic study of religion. The class adopts a structural view of religion, examining the “building blocks” that go into the creation of religion, rather than the finished edifice. Because of this attention to structure, RELI 1 will not focus on specific religious traditions, or communities, or sets of belief associated with, for instance, Christianity or Buddhism or Islam.

Instead, by breaking “religion” down to ten elements – religion, the sacred, liberation, faith, experience, ritual, community, scripture, transgression, doubt – the class will explore how religion may be treated as an integrally human phenomena; how religion involves the fullness of the human world; how religion emerges from literature, history, social organization, imagination, emotions, culture, even the physical body itself.

As of now, the list of movies is: