The concentration in the Comparative Study of Religion invites students to explore the most consequential and momentous questions relevant to the understanding of individual and communal human life. Undergraduates may also pursue a Secondary Field.
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Courtney Lamberth
Director of Graduate Studies: Amy Hollywood
Gateway Courses
Spring 2024
FYSEMR 37Y: Muslim Voices in Contemporary World Literatures
Ali Asani
What do Muslims think of acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, the mixing of religion with politics, the rights of women, the ``West''? This seminar investigates the viewpoints of prominent Muslim writers on these and other ``hot button'' issues as reflected in novels, short stories and poetry from different parts of the world. Explores a range of issues facing Muslim communities in various parts of the world by examining the impact of colonialism, nationalism, globalization and politicization of Islam on the search for a modern Islamic identity. Readings of Muslim authors from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Europe and America.
FYSEMR 60H: Faith and Fiction in American History
David Holland
This seminar uses key literary works to explore some of the most difficult and demanding questions in the religious history of the United States: Does God have a special relationship with the United States? Is sin an individual responsibility or a social flaw? Why has American religion been so frequently concerned with sexuality? How has religion shaped racial identities and tensions? How does it inform domestic relationships? How do non-Christian immigrants find a place and a voice in a nation with deeply entrenched Christian traditions? To explore these and other areas of concern, we bore into the faith-inflected cultures of American history through the imagined narratives of some of its most celebrated writers, including the likes of Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Wilson, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, Pearl Abraham, Ayad Akhtar, and Marilynne Robinson. I will offer mini-lectures to contextualize these works in their historical moment. We will read some scholarly work to sharpen our tools of analysis, but mostly we will read and talk about the novels themselves. The seminar aims to be both analytically rigorous and aesthetically rewarding.
FYSEMR 63E: Religion, Neuroscience, and the Human Mind
David C. Lamberth
More than 150 years after Darwin’s epochal account of evolution, over 85% of the world’s 7 billion people are still religious, and the percentage is growing. What does religion do for human beings? What does an evolutionary and biologically informed understanding of the mind and brain lead us to think about where religion fits in human life? Harvard’s first psychologist, William James, engaged these questions in the late nineteenth century, bringing the cutting edge of empirical psychology to the philosophy of religion. Today these same questions animate the field of neuroscience, where researchers are showing how affectivity, emotions, and our evolutionary past come together to form the “self” philosophers have long thought to be primarily “rational.” This seminar brings together the thought of James, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, with the work of contemporary neuroscientist Antonio Damasio to ask what kinds of beings we are, how our minds function, and what religion contributes to human individual and societal experience? The seminar takes up the philosophy of belief, affect, and emotion, and touches on the biology of the brain and homeostasis. We conclude by assessing contemporary views of religion from evolutionary psychology (Boyer, Atran) and cultural anthropology (Geertz, Luhrmann, Asad) in light of James’s and Damasio’s models of the human mind.
FYSEMR 71D: Zen and the Art of Living: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary
James Robson
This seminar explores the rich history, philosophy and practices of Zen Buddhism as it developed in China, Korea, and Japan. We will first consider the emergence of the Zen tradition out of the Buddhist tradition and then explore the full range of its most distinctive features (Zen monastic meditation), cultural practices (painting, calligraphy, and poetry), and radical—even iconoclastic—innovations (such as the use of kōans, which are seemingly nonsensical sayings that defy rationality). We will also critically evaluate some less well-known facets of the Zen tradition, such as gender issues, the veneration of mummified masters, and the question of how Zen was implicated in modern nationalistic movements in Japan during World War II. During the mid-20th century, Zen became a global phenomenon as Zen masters began to move around the world and introduce the practice of Zen meditation to those in search of religious alternatives to Western organized religions, rationalism, and materialism. Zen attracted the attention of writers, musicians, artists, and athletes. Why did Zen develop such a trans-cultural appeal at that moment in history? Why are there so many books with the title: “Zen and the Art of…..”? Why do so many computer and tech companies have Zen in their names? How has Zen meditation fed into the current “meditation/mindfulness” boom? These are some of the questions we will explore in this seminar through readings, film screenings, museum viewings, and a visit to a Zen meditation center.
REL 12: Ritual and the Life Cycle
Diana Eck
How do we grow and change along the path of life’s journey? How do practices of ordering shape our lives? How do we create the bonds and build the communities that give us meaning? In this course, we will look at the stages of the life journey, asking how we shape the things that matter most with practices, gestures, words, and symbols. This is a comparative course, drawing on several cultural and religious traditions as well as secular culture and our own experience. We will consider: Creating the space we live in; Daily meditation, prayer, or exercise; Beginnings and blessings; Rites of childhood, make-believe, and competition; Rites of friendship, bonding and belonging; Rites of Initiation and coming of age; Rituals of Marriage and fidelity; Ritual dimensions of protest and resistance; Facing illness, suffering, and healing; Coping with aging, grief, and loss; Rituals of renewal and beginning again. We will read scholars who have given us tools to think with, but we will also treat our exploration as a creative workshop, thinking together about the journey of life, its challenges, and the things we do to shape its meaning.
REL 44: Bible and Sexuality
Ben Dunning
This is a course about reading, religion and sex – more specifically, the dynamic interplay between how Christians have read and interpreted their Bibles on the one hand, and how they have understood sex and human sexuality on the other. (We will deal briefly with the Bible and sexuality in the Jewish tradition, but the majority of the course focuses on Christianity.) Thus, the questions that will drive our inquiry are fundamentally questions about interpretation. What does it mean to make the claim that a particular perspective on human sexual experience is ‘biblical’? How are we to understand the sheer variety of ways that a fixed set of canonical scriptural texts have been used as an authoritative resource for discussing and regulating sexual ethics, identity and practice? How do changing notions of what ‘sexuality’ is (and why sexuality matters) impact the way that biblical texts have been interpreted? We will explore these questions through the study of key texts in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and an examination of how these texts have been interpreted from antiquity to the present. Topics to be covered include marriage, gender identity, desire, same-sex relationships, and sexual renunciation. No previous study in religion or biblical studies is assumed, and there are no prerequisites for enrolling in the course. Limited to undergraduates only.
REL 55: Denying and Defending God: Classical Texts of Modern Western Religious Thought
Charles Lockwood
Drawing on thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course considers questions that continue to shape modern Western religious reflection: Is religion a liberating force or one of oppression? Is religion rational or the antithesis of reason? What is the relationship between religion and morality? Can all human beings be called religious? Texts are drawn from Kant, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Barth, Tillich, King, Cone, Gutiérrez, Daly, and Williams. Special attention will be given to the rise of the modern category of religion, especially in relation to Christian theology; modern suspicion and critique of religion; and the transformation of European theological frameworks by liberation theologians in North and South America.
REL 120: Religion and Nationalism in the United States: A History
Catherine Brekus
Many Americans have imagined the United States as having a religious identity as a “city on a hill,” a “redeemer nation,” or “the new Israel.” We will ask several questions in this course: How and why have Americans conceived of the nation in sacred terms? How have religious images of the nation developed and changed over time? Does the United States have a “civil religion”? What is white Christian nationalism, and what are its historic roots? Readings will cover the period from the American Revolution to the present.
SAS 106: Introduction to Tamil Literature
Martha Selby
This survey course will introduce students to Tamil literature from its earliest texts of the Cankam age to contemporary experimental fiction and poetry. We will begin with readings from the early cankam anthologies, studied in tandem with the Tolkappiyam, Tamil's earliest extant work on grammar and poetics. We will then explore links between cankam and the bhakti poetry of the Shaiva and Vaishnava saints. We will follow this with an exploration of medieval and early modern genres. In the final weeks of the course, we will consider the emergence of the Tamil novel, the novella, and the short story, a form in which modern Tamil writers truly excelled. (All texts will be available in English translation.)
Gen Ed 1161: If There is No God Then All Is Permitted: Theism and Moral Reasoning
Jay Harris
For centuries in the West, Jewish and Christian thinkers (among others) have asserted that moral judgment is impossible without some concept of the deity. So convincing were they that one important character created by a Russian author of the nineteenth century was led to express the idea (if not exactly the words), "if there is no God, all is permitted." In more recent times some thinkers have challenged this assumption, and insisted that removing (or reducing) the role of God is indispensable to proper moral discourse. This course will examine the ways in which a concept of God has informed Western moral discourse, trying to help students engage the literature as they confront the basic question, why might one think "if there is no God, all is permitted?" and why might one think if there is a God human moral achievement is diminished or impossible. Further, we will examine ways in which the differing paradigms actually affect the moral conclusions we might generate.
Belief in God and denial of God's existence have each figured prominently in Western moral discourse. Arguments have been advanced that: autonomous human reasoning is incapable of arriving at moral truths without a supreme principle to ground the system (which is sometimes invested with "personality" and called God); that autonomous human reasoning can have no impact on moral behavior due to human failure that only God can "correct"; that autonomous moral reasoning is impossible, and morality can only be understood as the submission to the will of a superior moral being; that a concept of God is necessary to direct and regulate moral reasoning, but the actual confessional versions of theism are metaphysically implausible or impossible; that autonomous human moral reasoning is impossible with God, and thus only a-theism can lead to moral conclusions. This course will engage all these different themes.
GenEd 1083: Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments
Eugene Wang and Jinah Kim
Why do Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space? Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences. Ironically, however, many of these same communities have attempted to express these teachings in the form of monumental structures meant to stand the test of time. Some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage sites are a legacy of this seeming contradiction between the impermanence that is a central presupposition of Buddhist thought and the permanence to which these same monuments seem to aspire. If the world is characterized by emptiness and the Self is illusory, how does one account for the prodigious volume of art and architecture created by Buddhists throughout history? This Gen Ed course takes a multicultural and reflective engagement with the challenges presented by this conundrum through a study of Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space. Pertinent topics such as cosmology, pilgrimage, materiality, relics, meditation, and world-making will be explored. Through these Buddhist monuments in South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.
Class Notes:This course has an enrollment cap and is a part of the coordinated, ranked-choice Gen Ed lottery. To participate in the lottery, you must first request permission to enroll and then rank your choices through my.harvard by 11:59 p.m. EST Wednesday, November 8, 2023. The Gen Ed lottery will run Thursday, November 9; if you are successful in the lottery, your course petition in your Crimson Cart will turn to a green check that allows you to enroll. For timely updates and detailed instructions about entering the Gen Ed lottery, please see https://gened.fas.harvard.edu/spring-2024-courses-and-lottery
GenEd 118: The Holocaust
Kevin Madigan
Who is responsible for genocide? Through the lens of the Holocaust – perhaps the most-studied genocide of the modern era – we will grapple with the issues of good and evil, blame and responsibility, duty and dissent as they pertain to violence enacted at the personal and state levels. What is the responsibility of “citizens and citizen leaders” in the face of local and global crises brought on by genocide, refugee catastrophes, terror, neo-fascism, etc.? And how do we make meaning out of what seems senseless? The course will address the historical background and context of the Holocaust, competing theories about who was responsible and why, and representations of the Holocaust in film and literature. Undergraduates only.