Religious Theory & Experience
What makes something “religious?” This question has puzzled scholars for at least 150 years (and probably a lot longer!). Some have defined religion according to its rituals and practices, while others have focused on creeds and beliefs. Still others have theorized about experience, arguing that anything from a church service to, say, a Duke basketball game can be “religious” in a meaningful sense. Does belief in a divinity (or divinities) make something religious? Belief in the afterlife? Belonging to a religious community? We’ll consider all these questions and more in this class.
The work you will do in this course involves wrestling with two (hard-to-answer) questions: how do we define religion? And, how can we write about religious experience? To answer the first question, which will occupy much of our class time in the first half of the semester, you will read and write about major thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. As we read these thinkers, you will post short blog entries (and comment on your classmates’ posts) in which you debate the nature of religion. These blog entries, along with the discussions we have in class, will prepare you to write 2-3 more formal essays (3-4 pages) that analyze course texts. You will revise one of these essays for your first major project (6-8 pages), which will make an academic argument about how to define religion.
The second half of the course will engage the second question (how can we write about religious experience?) by asking you to conduct a significant research project resulting in an 8-10 page essay. You can choose to do either ethnographic research (in which you will visit religious services and interview participants) or historical research (in which you will read religious texts and analyze the experiences they describe). Both types of research involve complex ethical and methodological questions, such as: how can academic writers sensitively portray supernatural phenomena, like, say, speaking in tongues? How do academic writers analyze these phenomena without cheapening or exaggerating them? You’ll consider some of these questions in blog entries. You will also produce a research proposal and annotated bibliography in preparation for the final essay.
Because this is a class in academic writing, you will be expected to write frequently in response to both course readings and essays produced by your peers. Over the course of the semester, I hope you will discover the communal nature of academic writing: you will lean on your peers for advice on your writing and revise your work in response to their comments. In so doing, we will work together to write about religion in increasingly sophisticated ways.
|
