SPRING 2012 COURSES

How do religious beliefs, symbol systems, and ritual behaviors shape human perceptions of, and interactions with, the nonhuman environment?  How might the primary models provided by western, eastern and indigenous religious traditions help us to address specific local and global environmental concerns?  For answers to these questions we’ll look to a variety of sacred traditions, drawing on primary and secondary resources in ecotheology, deep ecology, ecofeminism, nature mysticism, new age religious movements, bioregionalism and social ecology

RE 330-001  Seminar in Kabbalah  -  M. Segol

In this course we will explore Jewish Mysticism from its earliest sources in the Torah and the Talmud to its manifestations on the self-help literature in the present. We'll focus on the development of its symbols, where they came from, and how they signify. We'll look at the role that bodies play- how much does it matter what its practitioners do, and how they do it? In that same vein, we'll look at gender categories, and how they organize thought and action in a kabbalistic cosmos. Finally we'll consider the notion of authenticity. Who has a right to claim its symbols, its texts, its cosmological models, and its powers as their own? By the end of the course students will be familiar with the core texts in kabbalah, they will have a good grasp of its cosmological models, knowledge of the range of ideas about how the texts work, for whom, and why people think so.RE 330-002  Feminist Theologies  -  M. Stange
A critical exploration of the various ways in which feminist theory is transforming discourse about religion.  Topics include the feminist critique of conventional theological methods and assumptions, womanist theology, liberation theologies, goddess-oriented “theology”, lesbian spirituality and ethics, ecofeminism, radical or “cosmic” feminism, and neopaganism.  This is not an introductory-level course; it presumes some prior acquaintance with the study of religion and/or women’s studies.