Instructor(s): William Schweiker Terms Offered: Winter Through investigation of primary texts-biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary-students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history.
A central question for the course would be how to think about historical distance and anachronism in our use of theoretical lenses with the interpretation of sources. An overview of the development of Chan and Zen Buddhism in China and Japan, focusing on the philosophical and doctrinal underpinnings of distinctive Chan and Zen practices and rhetorics (including basic Buddhist premises concerning impermanence and non-self and specifically Mahāyāna ideas such as Emptiness, Two Truths and Buddha-nature) as they morph through the stages of early proto-Chan, East Mountain Chan, the Northern School/Southern School split, the development of "Recorded Sayings" and gong-an (kōan) literatures, and the Linji (Rinzai) and Caodong (Sōtō) schools. The most important aims of this course are that students understand images convey meaning in very unique ways and learn how to decode their visual messages. What does this relationship disclose about human agency and creativity? Instructor(s): A. Palmer Terms Offered: Autumn It is expected that this paper will normally be written as part of the student's course work for the minor. To what degree can religions address environmental crises?
1750 to the present, focusing on Western military, economic, and ideological encroachment; the impact of such ideas as nationalism and liberalism; efforts at reform in the Islamic states; the emergence of the "modern" Middle East after World War I; the struggle for liberation from Western colonial and imperial control; the Middle Eastern states in the cold war era; and local and regional conflicts. 950 to 1700, surveying works of literature, theology, philosophy, sufism, politics, history, etc., written in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, as well as the art, architecture and music of the Islamicate traditions. It will continue examining pioneering work that established a new style of scholarship and ethical argumentation during the "quiet revolution" when the study of religion gained an institutional footing in North American colleges and universities. We will consider Freud's views on bisexuality as well. The latest University of Chicago Press catalog in Religious Studies is available on this page in PDF form and as a hyperlinked list. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky adapts suspense strategies to create a metaphysical thriller, while in The Demons he pairs a study of nihilism with the deformation of the novel as a genre. How were South Asian discourses of toleration by such leaders as Gandhi and Nehru different from their European counterparts (e.g., John Locke and John Rawls)? The course surveys major texts in Christian thought and culture from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and it focuses on how these authors understood despair-a central theme in the writings of many women and men, secular and religious-and how, if at all, despair may be remedied. Rather than thinking of Time and temporalities in South Asia as part of an outdated and disproved world-view, this course will strive to present South Asia and the non-European world not only as subjects to Western temporalities, but as important places where theoretical propositions were made about time-space and its divisions.
In many works of traditional Chinese religion, philosophy, and art, however, we find something quite different, a picture in which the human being is seamlessly of the world.