2025 Summer
RLG205H5F - Key Themes in South Asian Religions (Instructor: TBA)
Description: TBA
RLG351H5S - Major Themes in the Study of the Quran (Instructor: H. Helal)
This course will introduce students to the Qur’ān, its content, form, structure, and history, as well as the development of traditions of Quranic interpretation and commentary, including tafsīr and ta’wīl. It will also situate the Qur’ān within the larger framework of the genre of Scripture. What does it mean for a text to be revealed? What is revelation? As such the course will both study the Qur’ān as a seventh-century C.E. text and as a revelation that has a history of reception among the community of believers.
RLG388H5S - Special Topics: Graphic Religion: Myth and the Spiritual in Graphic Novels and Sequential Art (Instructor: D. Perley)
Today our lives are preoccupied with textuality but we still rely on and crave graphic stories that combine text and image. This course examines how graphic novels, comic books and similar-styled sequential art evokes, invokes, facilitates, and creates religious experiences. By the end of the course we will have analyzed scholarship on the relation between religion, literature and comics; synthesize religious and comic cultures; and investigate how graphic, sequential art is not only commentary on religion but perhaps itself a form of religious/spiritual expression in a variety of traditions and cultures.
RLG440H5S - Advanced Topics in Christianity: Studying the Gospels (Instructor: C. Kokot)
This course equips students with the necessary skills, methods, and theoretical frameworks needed to study the Gospels from a historical perspective. The course focuses on (i) textual criticism and manuscript studies; (ii) source criticism, especially the Synoptic Problem; and (iii) literary criticism, specific attention is given to intertextual allusions to the Hebrew Bible, the literary structure of each gospel, and its main themes. Throughout the course students are required to read (in translation) the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Thomas, and some of the important scholarship on those texts.
RLG470H5F - Advanced Topics in Buddhism: Visual and Material Culture (Instructor: TBA)
Description: TBA