Religious Dimensions in Human Experience: Apocalypse, Sports, Music, Home, Sacrifice, and Medicine

What is religion? Why does it show up everywhere? Using archaeology, religious studies, and social thought, this course studies the major themes in the history of religions including encountering the holy, sports and ritual, crossing borders, sacrifice as creation, pilgrimage and sacred place, suffering and the quest for wisdom, music and social change, and violence and cosmic law.

Readings originate from Native American, African American, Latinx/+, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu traditions.

The course focuses on the tension between individual encounters with the holy and the social construction of religion.

Readings include works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Toni Morrison, Judith Sherman, Arthur Kleinman, the Popul Vuj, Mircea Eliade, and Michael D.

Jackson.