American Religious Thought and NYC

Catalog description

From Puritan precedents for tolerance to socially progressive elements in the Religious Left, this course explores internal challenges to dominant Christianities and other critiques of mainstream of American religious thought, as revealed by the histories of our own neighborhood institutions. In this civic engagement course, students will engage in research projects based in the archives of Trinity Church and other downtown communities, historic and present—such as the city’s first African American congregation, the Mother AME Zion Church, which split from the John Street Methodist Church in 1796—reinterpreting historic materials for classroom and public use, while assisting with direct service such as weekly/monthly community meal and food pantry services in Chinatown, the Seaport, and other sites which are supported by Trinity Church and other community partners. To contextualize these different modes of experiential learning, we will be studying major debates, events, and movements that have transformed American Christianity, including but not limited to: the white church’s resistance to abolitionism and relationships to the spiritualities of enslaved peoples; relationships to Indigenous peoples and Lenape land stewardship; women’s traditional exclusion from leadership roles; failures to respond to postbellum manifestations of white supremacy; the ongoing struggle for LGBTQIA+ acceptance; confronting and defining Antisemitism and Islamophobia. The cultural study of American religious thought can teach us about how to rethink and overcome established orthodoxies by directly engaging fundamentalism and learning from religious difference, starting with one neighbor at a time.