History of Religion Seminar

Catalog description

Taught by SFTS. Topic Spring 2019: The Evolution of Religion. The seminar will examine religion as an element of cognitive and cultural evolution, and it will examine the implications of new insights from paleo-anthropology, neuro-psychology, and the history of hominids for the study of religion in traditional complex societies in past and present. The seminar will address questions such as these: when did religious belief emerge among hominids, what was its character, and what was its role in the cognitive evolution of homo sapiens? What do answers to these questions imply for the nature of religion at more recent stages of human life, and what do they imply for the study of theology? An international workshop on 12-13 April 2019 will examine "Touching Things in the Middle Ages," bringing a group of scholars from the Center for the Comparative Study of Monasticism in Dresden, Germany, to meet with seminar members and scholars from Berkeley and Stanford. The workshop will provide a laboratory for seminar participants to explore the implications of recent work in human evolution and religion for our understanding of theology, ritual, emotion, politics, etc. in later time periods. Students will produce a final project/paper on a topic at the intersection of one's particular interests and the material, cognitive, and evolutionary dimensions of religious belief and practice studied over the semester.