Studying
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REL 480
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About Online Readings
The online readings for this course are posted in the form of PDF
files (Portable Document Format), stored on the Department's "secure"
server, and are therefore not freely available on the Internet.
To open these files you must click on the links and, when prompted,
enter your Bama ID and Password.
If you have forgotten your Bama ID, but know your Campus Wide ID
(CWID), then please go here.
If you still have difficulty accessing these readings, then contact
the instructor by email.
Those who need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0
to open PDFs (a free software available on the web and which is
already installed on all campus computers) can go here.
Note: larger PDFs can take a long time to download (due to
a slow Internet connection) and a long time to print (depending
on your printer). Some students may therefore wish to download these
files in a computer lab on campus, and then either print them there
or store them on a floppy disk or zip/junk drive (to read/print
them later at home).
"You
don't even know what I am, Dad, you don't know who I am. You don't
know how I feel, what I think."
So said the actor Sidney Poitier playing one of the leading roles
in 1967's "Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner." This is a common enough rhetoric
with which most people can identify--one that effectively constructs
an autonomy for one social actor by asserting the existence of a
core of private feeling unavailable to others. In this case it is
the son, working to create his own sense of self apart from that
of his parents, their values, and their expectations for him (and
who he will marry!). Much like claims concerning this thing we term
"the
American experience," this rhetoric reinforces a presumption
that, despite the changes in historical circumstance, some inner,
original, and therefore authentic, thing forever remains the same
and can be identified to exist in multiple persons. Sometimes we
call it "identity,"
sometimes "experience,"
and sometimes it goes by the name of "human
nature."
This senior-level seminar examines the role played by these assumptions
in the history of the study of religion--a field which, from the
outset, is presumed to study the many different manifestations of
a single, unified thing: "religious experience." Beginning
with the influential work of the eighteenth-century German theologian,
Friedrich
Schleiermacher and the writings of the nineteenth-century U.S
psychologist of religion, William
James (who delivered the famous Gifford
Lectures), the course charts the development of a humanistic
discourse on religion up to the present, represented by such writers
as Charles
Taylor--the noted moral philosopher--and Diana
Eck--who leads Harvard University's Pluralism
Project, which is charting the contours of American
religious experience.
After surveying some notable members of the humanistic tradition
(up to the present), the course changes focus and offers several
examples of current scholarship that historicizes claims to experiential
authenticity and socio-political autonomy characteristic of the
humanistic tradition. Among others, students will therefore be introduced
to the critical work of such writers as the U.S. philosopher of
religion, Wayne
Proudfoot, the U.S. feminist historian, Joan
Wallach Scott, the Berkeley scholar of Buddhist Studies, Robert
Sharf, the British Marxist historian, E.
P. Thompson, the French postmodernist, Michel
Foucault, the U.S. gender theorist, Judith
Butler, along with the Slovenia intellectual, Slavoj
Zizek and our Department's own semiotician, Tim
Murphy, who examines the type of subjectivity characteristic
of our field--at best represented in the work of the University
of Chicago's influential scholar, the late Mircea
Eliade.
Syllabus
Spring
2008 (PDF)
