- Religion and Society

Catalog description

An exploration of religion and society. What is the intersection between religion and social life, and what ought it to be? What conceptual and descriptive tools do we need in order to find out? People tend to make assumptions about religion, especially when it intersects with other hot topics in public discourse—religion and society, religion and politics, religion and freedom, religion and science, etc. In this class, we think through these topics, in order to interrogate our own preconceptions and how they may facilitate or block our capacity to understand how social worlds emerge, unravel, and remake themselves. The work for the course is a series of exercises in which students consider the major research strategies of a scholar of religion. Likely topics include: the politics of classification, histories of empire and colonialism, religion and capitalism, and feminist/queer approaches to the study of religion.