An aesthetic exploration of national cinemas with an emphasis on filmmakers and their unique contributions to film form. How is cinematic language a refractive storytelling practice? How are filmmakers leveraging narrative storytelling as a vocational journey? We will explore the sociocultural and sociopolitical context of works, parsing out religious contexts more broadly and the intersectional meaning of vocation from various religious and non-religious traditions. This examination will give particular attention to women as filmmakers and their interrogation of the cinematic apparatus: inclusive of the gaze, spectatorship, race, class, and gender.

Myth, ritual, and religious experience across cultures. Special attention to the problem of religious symbolism and meaning, religious conversion and revitalization, contrasts between traditional and world religions, and the relation of religious knowledge to science, magic, and ideology.

The subject of this course is the cultural anthropological and missiological study of culture. It is designed to both challenge and support students to grow in their cultural awareness, and to also develop cross-cultural competence for building healthy and God-honoring relationships with diverse communities.

An historical and ethnographic survey of many centuries-old Christian traditions in Africa. It begins with an outline of the trajectory of Christianity's origins and presence in Africa from its beginning in ancient Mediterranean lands through the early period of European missionaries to the contemporary period. The course provides the ethnography of the old mission churches, indigenous independent African churches, and contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Charismatic movements. It explores the role of Christianity in relation to historical, cultural, social, and material realities of the African continent. The course examines a broad range of topical issues related to conversion, missionization, and the development and growth of Christian agencies in Africa in relation to the construction of social, theological, and cultural identities, as well as Christianity's response to cultural pluralism, nationhood, citizenship, and civil society.

This course will contextualize The Cross and the Lynching Tree within the larger hermeneutical framework of the study of Black Religion.  TCLT provides an important foundation for thinking about the religious structure and context of Black theology and Black religious studies. Beginning with origins in African American freedom movements, we will explore the existential, sociocultural, and sociopolitical horizons that influenced Black theological and religious thought. In doing so we will come to terms with the "bluesground" of Black religious experience in America and (re)imagine Black prophetic praxis.  We will explore the works of James Cone, Charles Long, Delores Williams, James Baldwin, M. Shawn Copeland, etc.

This course examines women's studies within the broad and circulating framework of the Black Atlantic. We consider the significance of theories of African diasporas in conjunction with discussions of feminist theories, religious materiality, as well as dance and performance studies. Class materials draw from rituals, performances, and visual and expressive cultures to emphasize notions of the body as an altar and performances as processes of mapping and problem-solving. Looking closely at altar-making practices, ritual performances, religious coalitions, and resistant narratives, we will learn how women seek economic gain, resist oppression, express political opinions, and create tenable lives in difficult situations. By engaging with scholarship from multiple disciplines, festivals, films, and novels, we will ask how religious practices enrich the lives and inform the identities of Afro-Atlantic women in nations including Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Congo, France, Germany, and the United States.

1. Nationalism is not simply an ideology: it is also a set of practices by which territory, political power and the cultural identity of the people that inhabit this territory are constituted in a unique and singular fact. The religious dimension of nationalism has been infrequently analyzed by historians and even less so by social scientists who, operating under the influence of theories of modernization, have perceived nationalism and religion as incompatible. In the last three decades however, with the growth of religious claims in diverse national and international contexts, scholars have started to explore the connection between religion and nationalism. In this course we shall:analyze the historical links between religion and nation in Western Europe and the United States from the rise of the nation-state until today. 2. explore the diffusion of the concept of nation-state worldwide and its consequences on the politicization of religion in diverse countries: Turkey, India, Russia and China. 3. discuss religious nationalism “beyond nations” as exemplified by the globalization of religiously-based political claims from Islamism to evangelicalism. The scope of religions and national cultures covered in class will help students understand the major issues at stake such as state and religion relationships, religiously based political parties and movements, populism, anti Semitism and Islamophobia.

Conjure Feminism explores the long history of black women's active construction and maintaining of a generative cosmological framework that centers spirit work as that sacred space where the physical and spiritual worlds meet. Conjure feminism privileges diasporic women's knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work, inclusive of U.S., Caribbean, and South American, as well as West & Central African spiritual traditions in which women of African descent engage.

What is “magic”? Is it different from “religion”? Is magic a “way of knowing”? In this course, we will look at “magic” from an anthropological perspective. We will focus, in particular, on contemporary magic in Europe and North America, addressing e.g. Contemporary Paganisms, Wicca, Chaos Magic, New-Age Spirituality, and contemporary Esotericism. By engaging with ethnographic works, students will get acquainted with or deepen their knowledge of the main issues, traditions, debates, and research in the field of the Anthropology of Religion and in the Anthropology of Magic. Students will analyze contemporary magic vis-à-vis e.g. popular culture, feminism, globalization, medicine, social media, history, and well-being. They will do so through ethnographic readings, films, music, arts, discussions, and independent research. 

What is the relationship between religion and healing? How is this important for scholars of religion, health workers, and for chaplains? In this course, we will look at the intersections and entanglements between religion and healing in the contemporary world, in particular (but not only) in North America. After unpacking some of the meanings of “religion,” “healing,” and “disease,” we will concentrate on issues regarding e.g. the nature of healing, the role of individual and collective agency in healing processes, the sites of healing, healing from structural violence, and the gendering of suffering and healing. We will do so through ethnographic readings, films, music, arts, discussions, and independent research. 

This course engages with theoretical and methodological debates in the field of public health in Colonial India to analyze how the advent of Christianity, particularly through the work of medical missions, not only challenged the traditional notions of body and illness but also fundamentally transformed the public perceptions of health, body, and illness. In doing so, this course deals with scholarly literature on conflict between religion and modern medicine at the intersections of gender, missionary medicine, social stereotypes and structures of social inequalities in India. It critically examines how public perceptions of body have undergone radical changes through the work of two prominent and pioneering women medical missionaries that served the Telugu-speaking region in the erstwhile Madras Presidency by establishing some of the finest hospitals in British India.