Spring 2018

Religious Studies 001B. Death and Afterlife (4 units)
Seth Sanders

Lecture:
TR 4:40-6:00P
1309 The Grove  (Surge III)

Discussion Sections:

Course Description: Introduction to comparative religion, focusing on the theme of death and the afterlife in different religious traditions.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 001F. Religion Today (4 units)
Flagg Miller

Lecture:
MWF 10:00-10:50A
1227 Haring Hall

Discussion Sections:

Course Description: This course introduces students to the ways religious communities engage with some of the thorniest problems facing contemporary life on the planet.  Special emphasis is given to themes of civil society, capitalism, racism, sex/gender discrimination, and violence. Throughout the course, we investigate how new forms of "spirituality," especially those developed in California and the United States, have offered solutions to old problems.  We also explore the ways in which such solutions are complicated by a "spiritual marketplace" that offers not only choices and freedoms but also new forms of exclusion and exploitation.  Readings focus on Christianity in North America and the West as well other religious traditions, especially Islam.  Through case studies drawn largely from the 19th-21st centuries, students will gain insight into the rewards and challenges of studying and defining religion.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Domestic Diversity, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks: 

• Asra Q. Nomani, Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam  (HarperOne, 2006)
• Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom  (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

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Religious Studies 010. Contemporary Ethical Issues (2 units)
Meaghan O'Keefe

TR 3:10-4:00P
176 Everson Hall
CRN 78989

Course Description: Presents challenging, contemporary ethical issues from a multi-cultural perspective. Rotating topics will include Ethical Eating, Capital Punishment, Euthanasia, Poverty, and Animal Rights.

May be repeated for credit when topic changes.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 2 hours.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 012. The Emergence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (4 units)
Wendy Terry

Lecture:
MWF 10:00-10:50A
192 Young Hall

Discussion Sections:

Course Description: This class covers the period of time from the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE to the mid 600s. This period saw fundamental transformations in the religion of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, transformations that inform culture and religion to this very day. The period saw the spread of an allegiance to a single God, the emergence of heaven and hell. It also saw the rise of traditions we now call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This course is an introduction to a critical examination of these changes. It focuses on understanding religious change in general. Why do new traditions emerge? How do political struggles and economic conditions inform religious changes? How do new traditions justify themselves against older ones?

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• Martin S. Jaffee, Early Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Judaic Millennium  (University Press of Maryland, 2005)
• Joseph H. Lynch, Early Christianity: A Brief History  (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam  (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010)

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Religious Studies 040. New Testament (4 units)
Wendy Terry

Lecture:
MWF 12:10-1:00P
6 Olson Hall

Discussion Sections:

Course Description: This course is an introduction to the study of earliest Christianity, and of the documents that came to be understood as a "New Testament" in the early centuries of Christian history. In order to understand these documents, we will be looking at many different aspects of the contexts in which they were written. Students will come to an understanding of how Christian thought emerged from: the political situation of Judaism in Roman Palestine; the intellectual and cultural situation of Judaism in the wider Hellenistic and Roman world; Greek and Roman religions and philosophies; Greek and Roman literary genres. Students will also learn the basic methods of modern New Testament studies, in order to understand why the academic study of the New Testament takes the shape that it does, and why New Testament scholars ask the questions that they ask.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbook:

• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament [3rd Edition]  (Fortress Press, 2010)

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Religious Studies 069. Hindu Mythology (4 units)
Layne R. Little

TR 12:10-1:30P
101 Olson Hall
CRN 81726

Course Description: Survey of the major narrative traditions within Hinduism, including epic literature and local stories in oral, textual, visual and performative forms.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper/Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 130

Section 001. The Power and Poetry of Devotion in India (4 units)
Jamal Jones

MWF 9:00-9:50A
105 Olson Hall
CRN 81727

Course Description: What is devotion? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How does it feel? And how do devotees relate to the wider social and religious world around them? This course will explore the forms of bhakti (devotion) in South Asian religions, primarily through poetic and narrative materials. Topics will range from early notions of bhakti in the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita to the Telugu love songs to God to Tamil devotional poems. In encountering the literature of bhakti, we will pay special attention to themes such as: aesthetics, poetics, and interpretation; textuality, orality, and performance; gender and sexuality; and class, caste, and politics.

Prerequisite: RST 001 or RST 002 or RST 003A/B/C; or consent of instructor (jaajones@ucdavis.edu).

GE credit (Old): None.
GE credit (New): World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA

 

Section 002. Islam, Political Ideals, and Activism (4 units)
Mairaj Syed

W 1:10-4:00P
111 Wellman Hall
CRN 82034

Course Description: Does Islam naturally lend itself to particular political ideals and ways of acting, and if so, which ideals and acts? This course will survey different Muslim thinkers, activists, and movements from the premodern and modern periods and various geographical regions to answer the two questions above. The class will also read the works of historians, anthropologists, and social scientists on how philosophical values, historical context, ideological competition, institutional incentives, and material and social conditions may explain the political ideals Muslims have adopted and the courses of political action they have undertaken. Drawing on case studies, the course will try to develop as precise a model possible for the extent and nature of Islam’s role in Muslim political thought and behavior.

Prerequisite: Contact Mairaj Syed at msyed@ucdavis.edu.

GE credit (Old): None.
GE credit (New): World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 140. Christian Theology (4 units)
Meaghan O'Keefe

TR 10:30-11:50A
101 Olson Hall
CRN 81728

Course Description: This course examines the history of Christian thought through the lens of traditional problems in "God-talk": how have people in the Christian tradition historically attempted to describe something (God) that has usually been understood as beyond human comprehension?  We will examine the ways that Christian thinkers attempted to solve the problem of "how can humans know the unknowable" from antiquity to the present day.

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor (mmokeefe@ucdavis.edu).

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbook:

• Saint Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, translated by D.W. Robertson Jr.  (Pearson Books, 1958)

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Religious Studies 141C. New Testament Literature: Paul (4 units)
Wendy Terry

MW 2:10-4:00P
80 SS&H Building
CRN 81729

Course Description: Life and thought of the early Church as reflected by the Pauline tradition, established by the letters of Paul.

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor (wrterry@ucdavis.edu).

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• Instructor will provide materials

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Religious Studies 157. Hindu Women and Goddesses (4 units)
Archana Venkatesan

TR 3:10-4:30P
101 Olson Hall
CRN 81730

Course Description: This seminar explores Hindu goddesses and the religious lives of the women who worship them. In doing so, we interrogate specific roles that women in India assume such as the goddess, mystic, the exemplary devotee, the poetic trope of the female heroine (nāyikā) and the ways in which women resist or subvert these categories. The seminar will also engage with the unique phenomenon—the rise in popularity of female gurus (teachers) in the past two decades. Throughout the course, we will address the relationship between human women and Hindu Goddesses, the binary between “fierce” and “benevolent” goddesses as well as issues of transnational cultural appropriation, fetishizing and commodification, of female Hindu religious images.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities, Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credits (New): Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures, and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• A Course Reader

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Religious Studies 162. Introduction to Islamic Law (4 units)
Mairaj Syed

TR 9:00-10:20A
102 Hutchison Hall
CRN 81731

Course Description: The development of Islamic law in the formative centuries of Islam, ca. 600-1000, as well as its adaptation to changing economic, social, and political conditions in subsequent periods. Legal schools, legal theory, the Shari'a, reformist movements, human rights.

Prerequisite: Religious Studies 060 is recommended but not required.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities or Social Sciences; Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 163. Social Life of Islam (4 units)
Flagg Miller

MWF 1:10-2:00P
192 Young Hall
CRN 81732

Course Description: This course provides an introduction to culture and social life in Muslim societies. Special attention is devoted to family life, sexuality, youth culture, music, urbanization, race, ethics, and modern forms of public activism.  Throughout the course, we explore the extent to which religion can be considered an ordering system or, as sociologist Peter Berger puts it, a formula for “world maintenance.”  We continuously situate this approach in relation to social and economic struggles underway in the Middle East and North Africa, focusing especially on Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco.  Complementing and in tension with regional case studies we investigate how Muslim ways of life and understandings of religion have been shaped by global processes that extend beyond the Arab world, especially the United States.  Central to course goals will be developing a critical vocabulary for assessing the influences of the West and neoliberalism on Muslim selfhood.

Prerequisite: Either Religious Studies 060 or History 006 are recommended but not required.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities or Social Sciences; Social-Cultural Diversity and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities or Social Sciences; Oral Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations [2nd Edition]  (White Cloud Press, 2007)
• Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood  (Perseus Books, 1995)
• Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi`i Lebanon  (Princeton University Press, 2006)
• Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States  (New York University Press, 2016)

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Religious Studies 172. Ch'An Buddhism (4 units)
Thor Harris

TR 9:00-10:20A
80 SS&H Building
CRN 81733

Course Description: Doctrines and methods of the Ch'an Buddhism, both ancient and modern. Review of ritual techniques, including meditation.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): None.
GE credit (New): None.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA

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Religious Studies 190. Good and Evil: Comparing Religious, Atheist, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (4 units)
Naomi Janowitz

T 6:10-9:00P
109 Olson Hall
CRN 82577

Course Description: This seminar will examine a range of ideas about good and evil from the point of view of selected religious traditions, atheism and psychoanalysis. Do these approaches agree on anything about what it means to live a moral life?

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor (nhjanowitz@ucdavis.edu). Required of all Religious Studies majors.

GE credit (Old): None.
GE credit (New): None.

Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA