Religion, Drugs, and Culture

Catalog description

What's the different between a drug and medicine? Is there a relationship between legality and morality? Throughout human history, various types of natural and synthetic mind-altering substances have occupied central roles in a variety of cultures, religious rituals, and laws. Religion 327 explores the spiritual potentials as well as dark recesses that some of these substances have come to assume in specific cultural contexts. The first half of the course will interrogate differences between "hallucinogens" and "entheogens" by focusing on the sacrmental importance of peyote, ayahuasca, and psychedelic mushrooms in particular indigenous rituals- as well as the modern western appropriation of these plants and/or their active psychotropic chemicals for the purpose of psychological exploration and medical experimentation. The second half of the course will focus primarily on alcohol, especially from the lenses of Islam, Christianity, and the contemporary American context, by exploring alcohol as a legally circumscribed and/or sacramentally sanctioned substance. Part of this exploration will involve the religious dimensions of addiction and recovery in both Native American and modern western settings, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Through a critical analysis of "drugs" in their cultural contexts, Religion 327 will illuminate the central importance of mind-altering substances in religious thought and practice while at once questioning the boundaries between drugs and medicine, religion and culture. Your ability to benefit from this class will neither be hindered nor aided by your religious affiliations or lack thereof. The same goes for your personal experience with substances we learn about in the course. What will benefit you is your ability to seriously entertain a multiplicity of worldviews-some of which may strike you as illogical, grotesque, and strange, and others beautiful, compelling, and natural.