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  • REL 291: Religion and the American Environmental Imagination

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course examines the relationship between religious and environmental thought in the modern United States. Focusing on the complex and closely linked legacies of Christianity, secularism, and popular spirituality, we will explore the religious and anti-religious roots of contemporary environmental discourse. Along the way, we will pursue a set of vexing questions about environmental thought: Is environmentalism a religion? If so, what kind of religion is it? If not, why not (and why do we even ask)? Is anti-environmentalism religiously motivated? Could religion be the cause of our ecological crisis? Could it be the solution? For answers, we will look to the writings of thinkers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry, as well as a number of lesser-known authors. We will read these authors alongside recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities to understand how their thinking was influenced by social and environmental trends such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and globalization. We will also ask how religion has intersected with gender, race, class, and ethnicity to shape environmental politics in the twenty-first century. Finally, we will pay particularly close attention to episodes of conflict and cooperation between the environmental movement and religious conservatives during the past forty years, and we will analyze popular religious media from this period alongside the writings and visual productions of environmentalists. Prerequisite:    Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
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  • REL 292: Sirens in the Synagogue: Real and Imaginary Encounters in Jewish Narratives Antiquity to Present

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Jewish culture, like culture in general, is shaped by a variety of encounters between groups. The image of the Sirens--half-birds (or fish)/half-women--serves as a point of departure to other perhaps no less surprising encounters. In this seminar, we shall read texts in English translation from the Hebrew Bible, and especially from the Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity--Talmud and Midrash--as well as later periods, to explore the creative encounters that have shaped Jewish literature and culture. We shall study the continuous presence of Biblical interpretation in Jewish literature, as well as the dialogical exchanges with neighboring cultures, especially the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, emerging Christianity, the Mediterranean region, the Moslem and the European civilizations. Throughout our readings, we will explore cultural concepts such as ethnicity, gender, the sacred, social institutions (such as kingship, priesthood and marriage), individuality, and imagination. Our interpretations of a selection of texts will lead to a deeper understanding of the continuous tradition of Hebrew and Jewish literature and culture.
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  • REL 305: Foucault

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Michel Foucault was first and foremost a scholar of power. His ironic "genealogies" of how the Enlightenment promised freedom but instead delivered intricate and perilous technologies of control have inspired philosophers, intellectual historians, and even novelists. Yet for all of this Foucault is often thought of as having posited a helpless subject trapped in an inescapable web. Worse, scholars such as Rosie Braidotti have seen this subject as a uniquely masculine maneuver-ignoring women's struggles. This course will consider Foucault and his own "mentors," Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kant, among others, as well as exploring such central questions as Foucault's views on gender and sexuality. We will also examine whether Foucault was able--as he intended--to move beyond "resistance" in his later writings and help post-Enlightenment individuals engender a more empowered sense of subjectivity. Prerequisite:    Although some work in Continental Philosophy will be helpful
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  • REL 308: Nietzche and Religion

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Few thinkers have been as controversial or as outspoken about religion as the nineteenth century German theorist/philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. His work was not understood during his lifetime, or so he thought, and there are definitely controversies surrounding the way the writings of Nietzsche ought to be applied in the early twenty-first century. We will see Nietzsche as a lonely curmudgeon who hated his rigid, Lutheran upbringing, as well as his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. But we will also see the many fruitful dialogues created by his fractured personality and vitriolic books which, perhaps despite his intentions, speak to religion in both a destructive and constructive way, as well as to later thinkers.
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  • REL 309: Scriptures and Race

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    What are ?scriptures,? and what is ?race?? How and why did these two terms come to have any relationship to each other? How and why do peoples engage ?scriptures?? In what ways have ?scriptures? informed how peoples imagine themselves and others? How did ?scriptures? and race? inform each other in modern colonialisms and imperialisms? In this course, we will examine the ways that ?scriptures? have been employed in order to understand and develop notions of ?race,? and we will examine how ideas about ?race? have informed the concept of ?scriptures? as well as practices of scriptural interpretation. While this course will focus on the relationships between constructions of ?race? in the post-1492 American world and ?Christian scriptures,? we will also consider a few other historical moments and places where ?race? is engaged, as well as other texts and practices identified with ?scriptures.?
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  • REL 318: California: Myths, Peoples, Places

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    "Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory...I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." As far as we know, the name "California" was first written in this passage by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ca. 1510. Within a few decades, it came to be placed first on the peninsula of Baja California and then upon a region stretching up the Western coast of North America. What aspects of this vision are still drawn upon in how we imagine California today? How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west."
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  • REL 324: Religion, Identity, and Place

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this course, we will explore the role that religion has played in answers to the question of identity, specifically focusing on the peoples of the four continents surrounding the Atlantic. We will begin with an introduction to some important theorists in the social sciences and how they have explained the relationship between religion and identity. Then we will focus on the narratives of five individuals as case studies through which to explore this question, using their personal writings as well as biographies. All of these individuals have adhered to a religious tradition, have moved across countries and regions, and are exemplary of larger movements of people throughout the Atlantic World. The course will also serve as a basic introduction to three major religious traditions: Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religion.
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  • REL 325: Memory, Repetition, Forgetting

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Plato famously argues that all learning is recollection; during the period of Roman antiquity, a robust training in memory practices was an essential aspect of formal education. This course will examine ancient, medieval, and modern discourses on memory, forgetting, and repetition. Starting with Greek sources we will consider the philosophical relevance of memory and forgetting. We will then consider the role of memory and forgetting in medieval Christian sources, examining the place of memory in the search for God and the role of memory and repetition in religious practice. We will then ask the following questions: how do modern accounts of memory and forgetting differ from ancient and medieval accounts? And how do we construe memory and forgetting differently today, when so much information is archived or at least potentially archivable, and when the availability/suppression of information is such a charged political topic? Authors include: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Peter Damian, Hugh of St. Victor, Pascal, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Freud and Derrida.
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  • REL 326: Queer Temporalities

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples.
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  • REL 385: Ethics after the Shoah

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    The Destruction of European Jewry during World War II has had an enduring impact on philosophical and literary work in Europe and elsewhere. Can any meaning be gleaned from it? How can it be represented? In so far as it changed our conception of what it is to be human, does it also change how we participate in the humanities? In this class we will consider these questions, by focusing on the surge of ethical inquiry that followed from the disaster. We will treat post-World War II works by authors who consider the impact of the Shoah on notions of the other, election, representation, forgiveness, and universalism, with particular attention given to the French context. Emmanuel Levinas will be a central figure along with Primo Levi, Emil Fackenheim, Hannah Arendt, Georgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida.
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