Religion & Race in Phila

Catalog description

This course examines the co-constitution of religious beliefs, racial identities, and regional cultures from an historical perspective primarily in the urban Northeast. We will examine how transatlantic and transnational African and European religious traditions (real, imagined, historical, invented) shaped that history. Because this is a religious studies course, we will think about religions as institutions that profoundly influence individual's epistemologies and actions, as well as the communities, societies, and nations, in which they are located. We will understand race as a social construction that emerged in recent centuries in concert with religious (and scientific) ideas about human origins and anthropologies. Most importantly, we will see how these two constructs - "race" and "religion" - developed and evolved in a particular region of the United States to make visible place-based distinctions and geo-cultural histories. A complicated, multi-scalar picture will emerge of the varied ways in which beliefs, identities, and places influence and are implicated by one another.