We often think of the ancient Egyptians as obsessed with death — but were they? In this course, we will explore the extensive evidence of mortuary practices from ancient Egypt, including royal and elite tombs, grave goods, ritual practices and mummification, and religious beliefs, to understand the ancient Egyptian worldview regarding life after death. There was no strict separation between life and death, and we will discuss how living Egyptians engaged with the dead by visiting tombs and presenting offerings. Beyond learning about ancient funerary beliefs and practices, we will reflect on how those practices are understood — and often misunderstood — in modern times. To do so, we will not only consider our own understandings of death, but also how ancient Egyptian funerary material culture, including human remains, is engaged with today, primarily in museums but also in popular culture (such as mummy movies!).
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

Detailed examination of key Greek and Roman myths, their interpretations, and the influence they have exerted on literature, art, and popular culture in subsequent periods.

(IV)
Days: MO WE  10:00-10:50 AM

No description is currently available.
Days: Tu Th  11:00-12:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
The course offers the history of an idea and the effects of that idea in history. Students will see very clearly how a single idea begins, how it evolves, and how it affects culture over thousands of years. We start by identifying a general devil-ish idea in world cultures, and then we trace the development of the specific devil mythos in Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts and contexts. We will then look at the ill effects of the devil idea in medieval Christian anti-Semitism and in the early Modern witch-hunts and in the persecution of heretics. We will also study the uses of the devil idea in folklore and literature. We will then trace the iconography of the devil in eighty or so images from 1500 years of Western art. We will view select movies with devil themes from over 130 years of film making. We might even listen to modern Scandinavian Death Metal music. The course work is as follows: weekly required readings, weekly required writing, weekly class discussions, and a final comprehensive exam. Inasmuch as the class meets once a week for three hours, any absence is tantamount to missing a week of class and therefore grades will suffer for an absence. Note: the class is not an examination of or promotion of the occult.
Days: WE  03:00-05:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Process Philosophy & Environment
Process philosophy emphasizes events over things, creativity over stasis, experiential perception over cognition, immanence over transcendence, interdependence over separation, and epistemic revision over certainty. Using a historical and contemporary analysis of environmental ethics as a backdrop, we will explore how the “process philosophy of organism”— associated with the mathematician and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)—offers a constructive foundation for thought, feeling, and action in dynamic systems, societies, and multispecies communities. In addition to Whitehead, we will explore process perspectives from ancient Greece and India, the American pragmatists, and Whitehead-informed Continental philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Isabel Stengers.

Students will develop their own big question in a research project that may overlap existing work in process studies, environment, and any of the following (non-exhaustive) topics: new materialism, health care, education, climate change, physics, animal ethics, engaged mysticism, process theology, problem of evil, queer studies, the concept of God, feminism, hip-hop futures, and many other areas. Whitehead’s work is challenging and students who take up the task are encouraged to be self-driven, persistent, and release any aim of mastery. “If Whitehead's work is hard to approach,” writes Stengers,” it is because it demands, with utter discretion, that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus” (Thinking With Whitehead: A Free & Wild Creation of Concepts 2011, 7).
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Religion has had a long history of intimate relation to art-making activities in East Asia, ranging from a small votive statuette in a private shrine to a paradise-like setting for a ritual hall. This course is an examination of the interaction between religious practice, doctrinal thoughts and visual imageries of Buddhism in China, Korea and Japan. It will also introduce recent scholarship on the cultural meaning and sociopolitical function of Buddhist monuments and objects in their own time as well as their modern historiography. The course follows a thematic framework rather than a chronological order. Materials will include sacred mountains, cave temples, freestanding architecture, sculptures, reliquaries, illuminated scriptures and paintings which are thought to have been used for Buddhist teachings and rituals.
Days: MO WE  10:00-11:20 AM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
No description is currently available.
Days: Mo We  04:00-04:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.
Days: Tu Th  11:00-12:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest religions and has been the religion of the Persian Empire throughout antiquity. It has influenced immensely the development of other religions attested in Asia and the Mediterranean in the pre-modern period. Unlike other faiths professed in the ancient world, Zoroastrianism has survived to this day, and Zoroastrian communities exist in India and Iran, as well as in Europe and North-America. In fact, many believers in the Best Religion now live in Southern California. Zoroastrian religious tenets developed in constant dialogue with other traditions, during our classes we will see how this happened in the various historical periods.

The aim of the course is to introduce the history of the Zoroastrian community from beginnings to the present day while discussing its religious beliefs seen from an historical point of view. The main text that will be used is Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians. Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Other points of view will be introduced in class.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Is religion a form of race? Is race religion by another means? With an eye toward both the U.S. and global contexts, this class takes up these questions. We will consider how race and religion are inseparable and how racial formation is, in fact, a type of “political theology” that yet shapes the present. Specifically, we will examine how separating humans into groups like white, black, brown, Asian, indigenous, etc., emerged with anthropological ideas of the savage and the heathen and secular-political ideas about property, citizenship, freedom and slavery. Finally, we will consider how these new ways of understanding the human extend classical religious ideas about “the saved” and “the damned” and about (the) god(s) and myths of the origins.
Days: MO WE  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Although animal ethics were expressed in global religious traditions going back to antiquity, a sharp human/animal split emerges within Western philosophy (Aristotle), science (Descartes) and the academic study of religion (from Aquinas up to Durkheim and Eliade). We'll examine challenges to this split through philosophical approaches of (1) Identity (e.g. Singer and Regan), (2) Difference (Derrida), as well as an alternative third approaches of (3) Indistinction. Using this three-fold framework, we will explore global religious-philosophical perspectives that illuminate varied ethical approaches to animals in the food system, scientific research, hunting and wild animals, as companions, and as entertainment. We will further explore how animal ethics overlaps species, race, and gender violence. Finally, we will join our analysis with experimental modes of thought, feeling, and action capable of creating new opportunities for multi-species knowing and response.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
Myths are made of the substance of dreams and have been humanity’s companions since the most ancient of days. Mythical narratives are the earliest form of literature, still influencing today’s literary and artistic creativity. Scholars have investigated these narrations employing different methodologies, and no doubt some themes derive from universal archetypes. However, many cultures share themes that have been inherited or acquired through contact. The goal of our class is to investigate the myths of the ancient people who inhabited the vast expanse of land bridging India and Europe, including those belonging to some of the key cultures of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. We will travel from India to Iran, from Athens to Rome, from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe. following in the footsteps of scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil. Our goal will be identifying and analyzing common elements of mythical language, primarily focusing on Indo-European heritage. By the end of the  semester we will have learnt how to study and describe these phenomena according to academic standards, and how to communicate our ideas clearly and comprehensively in papers and presentations.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.