Summer 2009

L23 1150 Re St Intro to the World's Religions
A basic guide to the world's religious traditions, including readings from the sacred scriptures. Topics include primal religion; ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China; Maya and Aztec religion; Judaism; Buddhism; Christianity; and Islam. Places of worship in the St. Louis area are visited. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00.
AS:> TH
SB:> ETH
FA:> SSP
21 MTuWThF 11:00a-12:45p
6/8/09 - 7/10/09 Flinn

L23 3155 Re St Politics and Religion in Contemporary Society
Religions are on the move. Globalization has meant that larger numbers of people are finding new places to live, and in the process, setting up churches, mosques, temples, or other ways to worship in new cities and town. Muslims move to Europe and North America; new Protestant and Catholic churches appear throughout Africa and South America; Chinese communities blossom everywhere. As they do, so they raise new questions: How do global migrations lead to adaptations of religious traditions? How do states manage new degrees of religious diversity, and in some cases, new levels of religious demands? How do transnational religious structures fit with national politics? We will explore these issues by looking outward from our base in Paris. France has the highest percentage of Muslims of any country in Western Europe or North America. It has fast-growing arrays of evangelical churches and Buddhist temples; and it is a nation of both Catholic heritage and secularist politics. How do all these ideas and people mix? We will visit some of Paris' religious institutions and learn from both religious figures and French scholars. We will also study religion and politics in a comparative way, focusing on the issues mentioned above, and looking at case studies from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 3 units. Same as home course L48 Anthro 3155.
AS:> TH
SECT 09: This course will take place in Paris, France and is scheduled from June 1 through July 1.
09 TBA Bowen

L23 3294 Re St Anthropology of Religions in St. Louis
This course is an introduction to religions in America with a focus on urban U.S. and Saint Louis ethnic experiences during the twentieth century and into the present. Combining methods of history of religions with anthropology of religion, this course considers the everyday life, rituals, and imagination of religious peoples, communities, and movements. Students will be introduced to observant participation in order to comprehend religious events and to describe a particular religious community of cross-cultural interest. The course will involve students doing observation/participation in a religious tradition or ethnicity outside of their own. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as home course L48 Anthro 3294.
AS:> SS
31 MTuWTh 1:00p-2:30p
6/8/09 - 7/31/09 Scandrett-Leatherman

L23 329F Re St Religion, Ritual and Worldview
A survey of ideas and practices in both tribal and world religions with emphasis on key rituals, symbols and the place of religion in the modern world. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as home course L48 Anthro 329F.
AS:> SS
SB:> BA, ETH, HUM
FA:> SSP
41 MTuWThF 11:00a-12:45p
7/13/09 - 8/13/09 Rudner

L23 365F Re St The Bible as Literature
This course comprises lectures and occasional smaller discussions to read the various Bibles of Western tradition (Jewish and Christian, in a variety of translations) as a cultural document. First, we attempt to read biblical texts closely and to understand how others have read them at different points in history. How did the Bible come to be constituted as an authoritative book, and how was its authority understood to work through language? Second, we place our reading in wider contexts of the history of interpretation, of political and ethnic conflict, of intellectual and social change. We explore historical multiplicity, and do not engage with timeless truth, as we examine the power of biblical myth. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as home course L14 E Lit 365F.
AS:> TH
SB:> ETH
FA:> Lit
21 MTuWThF 1:00p-2:45p XXXIV
6/8/09 - 7/10/09 Travis Scholl

L23 380 Re St Topics in Religious Studies: Tibetan Buddhism
The course focuses on a wide range of elements of Tibetan Buddhism. We will start with a brief discussion of such basic Buddhist themes as constituents of external and internal universe, cyclic existence and nirvana, conventional and ultimate realities, etc., and then will proceed to a discussion of elements comprising the Tibetan Buddhist world, such as Tibetan Buddhist history, monastic education, Tibetan astrology, Buddhist art, relationship of Buddhist learning and practice, Tantric meditations, and lives and practices of Buddhist yogis. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as L03 East Asia 380.
AS:> TH
SB:> ETH
FA:> SSP
21 MTuWThF 3:00p-4:45p
6/8/09 - 7/10/09 Yaroslav Komarovski

L23 3801 Re St Topics in Religious Studies: Who are the Shiites?
This course explores the religious and symbolic world of the Shiite. Beginning as a political and moral question of loyalties, Shi'ism emerged as a powerful sectarian movement of social protest in the wake of the tragic massacre of the prophet Muhammad's grandson and his family members in the seventh century. Following an existence as a major undercurrent of agitation, this movement crystallized over a period of time into a number of fully differentiated sub-sects, each identifying itself according to its own distinct notion of a divinely guided leader, the Imam. Very soon an elaborate body of symbolism arose in this Shiite world--symbolism that raised manifest facts of history to an occult domain of metaphysical unfolding, generating not only traditions of passion play and rituals but also yielding an enormous cultural harvest. All readings in English. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as L75 JNE 381.
AS:> TH
FA:> SSP
41 MTuWThF 3:00p-4:45p
7/13/09 - 8/13/09 Haq

L23 394 Re St Just War, Holy War: Bin Laden and the Roots of Islamic Radicalism
This course seeks to answer a simple question: Why is the membership of the world's most notorious terrorist organization entirely Muslim and largely Arab? To answer this question we will explore the development of this organization within historical, philosophical, and political contexts, paying particular attention to the interaction between Muslim and non-Muslim populations and examining the crucial differences between Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. 3 units. Tuition: $2,385.00. Same as L97 IAS 3940, L75 JNE 394.
AS:> CD, TH
11 MTuWThF 1:00p-4:00p
5/18/09 - 6/5/09 Asad Ahmed

University College Courses

U66 4131 Re St Topics in Islam: Alchemy, Magic, and Occultism in Classical Islam
A dramatic peculiarity of the dominant tradition of alchemy in the Islamic milieu is that it arises at the intersection of religious politics and genuine science, astrological propaganda and naturalistic cosmology, magic and chemical craft, occultism and experimental methodology. What is the nature of these oscillations? How has religious thought informed and shaped the scientific concepts of Islamic alchemy? How has occultism as an Islamic sectarian principle and symbolic device determined the evolution of an enduring matter theory in the history of science? How did the messianic ideas of the apparition of a divinely guided Imam feed into theories of transmutation of base metals into gold? Basing itself on primary alchemical-magical texts, the course will explore these questions in detail. All readings in English. 3 units. Tuition: $1,545.00. Same as U94 JNE 413.
31 TuTh 6:00p-8:45p
6/8/09 - 7/31/09 Haq