Schedule of Readings, Lectures, and Films

 
Religion
Week 1: January 9-13
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Focus on questions of definition. What is religion? What do we study when we study religion? The answers will lead to an exploration of symbol, bodily gesture, and social power as principal building-blocks of religion.

Film

    Dogma. Directed by Kevin Smith, 1999. 128 minutes. IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Friday Discussion

    Today’s discussion will focus on the overall goals for RELI 1. What are we trying to accomplish in this class? An analysis of Dogma will help us explore this question. For there is something very strange in the way that Kevin Smith assumes the literal validity of Catholic dogma at the same time that he preaches religious ecumenism.

 

The Sacred
Week 2: January 16-20
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Did you notice that god is not one of the primary categories for discussion in RELI 1? This might have surprised you, since, like many people, you might equate religion with belief in god. The sacred is a more general term than god, and as we shall see it allows for a more nuanced investigation into religion as a cross-cultural phenomenon. This week’s reading will delve into a major twentieth-century theory of sacrality. For Mircea Eliade, the sacred is primarily a matter of internal feeling. Eliade shows how this feeling becomes manifest in the human world.

Film

    The Way. Directed by Emilio Estevez, 2010. 121 minutes. IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.
    Because this is such a new release, I have made the video available on youtube through a set of private links. Go to the course readings page for the links. I will take them down at the end of the week.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    A father loses his son but finds himself. Should we believe the gypsy who says that the father’s pilgrimage, ultimately, has nothing do with religion? If the father’s quest is not “religious,” then what is he doing, walking the road to Santiago de Compostela? Does the father discover the Sacred on the way, or, step by step, does he create it?

 

Liberation
Week 3: January 23-27
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Liberation is the most abstract concept we investigate in this course. This is easily shown by the very fact that this unit’s focus and meaning changes radically, depending upon whether it is entitled “liberation” or “freedom” or “salvation” or “heaven” or “enlightenment” or “redemption.” Wednesday’s lecture will focus on how liberation, etc. speaks to a fundamental human desire, to connect, to inhabit, and to enjoy

Film

    Shortbus. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell. 2006. 102 minutes. IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    How do we know that which exists beyond our intellect? How do we experience that which lies beyond our sensibility? How do we talk about that which exists beyond the reach of words?

 

Faith
Week 4: January 30-February 3
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Faith is best understood in contradistinction to two other mental states because it partakes of both: certainty and doubt. When we have faith in something we act as if we are certain of its truth, even while we admit that there is still room for others to question and doubt. Faith, thus understood, might appear an irrational state; one to be avoided by intelligent people. Why, then, is faith so powerful? After an initial reading from the Encyclopedia of Religion, we will read one of the most important and eloquent statements of the paradoxical nature of faith.

Film

    Harold and Maude. Directed by Hal Ashby. 1971. 91 minutes. IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    How does a knight of infinite resignation become a knight of faith? Kierkegaard explains that movement, today we discuss whether Harold and Maude shows it. The two works seem to fit with each other. And yet, Kierkegaard would seem to insist that faith requires God, while the movie takes no interest whatsoever in God, let alone Christian doctrines, practices, or moral codes.

 

Experience
Week 5: February 6-10
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    In many ways, experience is the trickiest category for the scholar of religion. You cannot deny another person’s experience; nor, however, can you share it. The first two readings introduce the category, experience, as a word and concept. The second set of readings come from two important twentieth-century psychologists: William James takes religious experience at face value, as having its root and center in mystical states of consciousness, while Sigmund Freud considers such experiences to be the expression of a peculiar, albeit common, psychopathology.

Film

    Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Directed by Michel Gondry, 2004. 108 minutes IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    The investigation of identity is closely linked to that of memory and experience. For how do we know who we are except by remembering what we have done, felt, thought, experienced? In this light, it is an interesting fact that in Sanskrit – an ancient language of India – “memory” and “love” share the same word, smāra. “Experience” is our English word for that intersection of time and emotion. The discussion today will focus on how our needs and desires are made real in memory, and thus how we ourselves are made real. But can we ever be sure that we are real?

 

Ritual
Week 6: February 13-17
Assigned Readings

    1. Evan M. Zeusse, “Ritual [First Edition],” in The Encyclopedia of Religion pp. 7833-48. [click here for the online readings page]
    2. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 53-65, 143-5. [click here for the online readings page]
    3. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Unhappiest Man,” Either/Or volume 1. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 215-28, 452-3. Originally published Copenhagen, 1843. [click here for the online readings page]

Reading and Lecture Topics

    There are probably as many theories of ritual as there are scholars of religion. Some focus on ritual’s ability to coalesce communities; some focus on ritual as a source of values; some focus on the ability of ritual to create a sense of reality. The one thing all theories of ritual have in common is their focus on bodily gesture; whatever else ritual may be, it is always about action. Each of our main readings for this class is concerned with how people act in relation to time. Smith explains ritual as a means for temporarily creating a perfect world in the place of an imperfect one. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the so-called Unhappiest Man is lost in time, and thus does not know what to do, or why.

Film

    Groundhog Day. Directed by Harold Ramis. 1993. 101 minutes IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    By this point in the quarter, you should be adept at seeing how the readings relate to the film. Stuck in the unchanging eternity of February 2, Bill Murray must live a perfect day in order to restart time. Think about it!

 

Community
Week 7: February 22-24
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    The first two articles provide overviews of the idea of community, from a social-scientific point of view and as discussed in scholarly literature on religion. But the main author this week is Émile Durkheim, who describes religion as “an eminently collective thing.” Indeed, Durkheim holds that all individual experiences, even those of the sacred, are conditioned by the individual’s participation in a community. How do religious communities form, and why do people join them?

Film

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    In Fight Club we see the lengths to which a man will go, in order to create a world that he might inhabit. This film lauds ideals of naturalness, spontaneity, and receptivity. Yet it also suggests that such individual freedoms can only be developed within the confines of community.

 

Scripture
Week 8: February 27 – March 2
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    The readings this week contrast in several ways. As in other weeks, the two major readings take opposing views of the subject matter: scripture. Pache is a Protestant theologian, for whom the Bible is the revealed word of God, infallible and literally true in all particulars. Fish is a literary theorist, who holds that all texts are indeterminate and admit of multiple literal meanings. Their views could not be more different. But Pache and Fish also differ in that Pache writes about Biblical revelation with clarity and exactitude, while Fish’s prose is complex and difficult to comprehend. This difference between Pache’s and Fish’s prose styles is as important as the difference between their ideas. In short, although Fish is difficult, it is crucial that you try to read the entire essay. Even if it makes little sense and gives you a headache, read it and think about why it is difficult.

Film

    π. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. 1997. 85 minutes IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    I know that π was a difficult film to watch: gross and grainy, even a little grueling. Still, the questions for today should now be obvious. Max Cohen treats our entire world as a “scripture.” He understands the search for its truth in commercial terms – he’ll become rich, RICH, RICH if he can break the key. Others understand this key as a source of power, and still others as the way to god. René Pache’s explanations of scripture help to clarify Max Cohen’s starting assumptions. How does Stanley Fish help explain why Max Cohen must fail, and ultimately give up his search for the key to reality? What, in the end, is scripture?

 

Transgression
Week 9: March 5-9
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Note that the term for this week is transgression, not sin, not evil. In an etymological sense, to transgress is to overstep a boundary, to cross a fixed demarcation. An action is considered sinful, for instance, because it transgresses god’s laws. Our interest here is not in god, however, but in the human creation of lines and boundaries. The main reading, from Nietzsche, proposes that people create and impose moral boundaries as part of a larger struggle for social power. The reading from Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and a major religious-political figure in the 1980s, offers a counterpoint. Indeed, it might be interesting to think about how this class itself exemplifies the differing positions of Nietzsche and Falwell.

Film

    The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols. 1967. 105 minutes. IMBD description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002 at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    Why is everybody so upset with Ben? Has he really done anything wrong?

 

Doubt
Week 10: March 12-16
Assigned Readings

Reading and Lecture Topics

    Towards the beginning of the quarter we considered Kierkegaard’s view of faith: a movement of spirit in which one willingly dedicates one’s entire existence to an ideal (for K., this god), without negotiation, without holding back. Our reading for this week leads us through a consideration of faith’s opposite. Why is “faithlessness” deemed a negative virtue? How is doubt dangerous? And to whom is it dangerous?

Film

    Coming Home. Directed by Hal Ashby. 1978. 128 minutes. IMDB description
    The film will be screened on Tuesday in CSB 002at 6:30 pm.

Short Essay

    click here for the prompt for this week’s short essay

Friday Discussion

    How can one not doubt the authorities, the powers that be? Or are some lies “noble lies”?
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