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Fantasy Religion

Animated films or anime in Japan are a fascinating part of pop culture that attracts a huge audience of fans. As part of a global leisure industry, anime can offer an imaginary space not only to entertain, but to explore key questions about spirituality, religion, and the sacred.

Way of the Gods: Shinto in Modern Japan

Shinto or the “Way of the Gods” has long been viewed as the “archaic indigenous religion” of Japan. This course explores how, in fact, Shinto is an invented religion that changed radically throughout modern Japanese history as it evolved from local cults worshipping kami to state Shinto and new religious movements in the pre-war period to its modern guise today as religious organizations independent of state control.

Cross Cultural Healing

This class uses healing traditions as the lens with which to examine culture. During the semester students will have the opportunity to meet healers from around the world. In a typical semester presenters include a Traditional Chinese Medical practitioner, an Ayurvedic physician (from India), a shaman from Peru, an exorcist, a native American Healer an allopathic physician, new age healers, a Christian Scientist and others. This course cannot be used to fulfill the requirements for the biology major. Also offered as REL 412 and GS 412.

Religious Life of China

This course surveys China’s unique religious heritage through a selective survey of major thinkers, texts and cultural expressions. The primary emphasis is on the historical development and mutual influence of the “three teachings”— Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism — with special attention given to the relationship between philosophy and popular practice, and to the interaction among political and religious institutions. Topics include gods and the sacred, ritual, ethics, human nature, meditation, mysticism and salvation. Offered every other year. Also offered as ASIA 223

Religious Visual Culture

This course considers the interaction between visuality and religion: the role that seeing might play in religious practice and the role that religion might play in visual practice. It explores not just the ways that images and objects can embody and communicate meaning, but also how they can elicit powerful responses (e.g. fascination, excitement, faith, desire, or fear) in those who view them, and how they help humans to constitute the worlds that they inhabit. The course draws upon case studies from multiple religious traditions. Also offered in Asian Studies.

Mystery and Meaning

What is religion? Why are people religious? What power does religion have for individuals and societies? How does religion function as a way of knowing, acting, and being in the world? How did the study of religion arise in the modern West, and how scholars of religion go about studying it? What ways have they devised to grasp the rich varieties of religious experiences and expressions that they classify as religions?