Explores how the colonial encounter shaped the academic study of Buddhism and the image of Buddhism in the West. Reading popular and scholarly accounts of Buddhism written from the early nineteenth century to the present day, the course analyses how the legacy of and response to colonialism have coloured our understanding of Buddhism as a […]
Explores Buddhist responses to the changing conditions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Seeking to understand Buddhism as a living religion, it investigates how Buddhists have drawn on religious narratives, symbols and rituals to respond to social and political challenges from the nineteenth century to the present, including issues of religious reform, colonialism, nationalism and ethnicity. […]
This course explores the relationship between gender and religion through the examination of contemporary religious movements such as men's and women's spirituality movements, new religious movements, LGBTQ movements, and fundamentalist movements. RELIGIOUS TRADITION(S) COVERED: Multiple
This seminar explores the establishment of Christianity among the indigenous peoples of colonial Latin America, with a primary focus on Mexico and Peru. RELIGIOUS TRADITION(S) COVERED: Christianity Cross-listed as AP/HIST 4753 6.00.
This course offers an exploration of distinctive Jewish approaches to questions of gender, sexuality, and the body, as formulated in their historical, religious, ethical and social dimensions. While we begin our journey with Biblical and other traditional sources, we focus most of our attention on contemporary encounters between gender/sexuality and Jewish life and the gendered […]
Examines the status, roles, and rights of Muslim women in the Quran, the Prophetic traditions, and the diverse Islamic laws. It explores the development of different schools of laws in diverse societies and examines the changes regarding Muslim women's identity. RELIGIOUS TRADITION(S) COVERED: Islam This course is offered as both 3.00 and 6.00.
Allows students to pursue a supervised program of research in the advanced study of religion. Topics can include focused projects in specific ancient religious texts; contemporary religious issues; or religion and literature, philosophy or psychology. RELIGIOUS TRADITION(S) COVERED: Varies by year
This public history seminar explores the origins, development and paradoxes of the Canadian Jewish community from its inception in the 18th century to the present. It pays particular attention to the complexities of immigration, relationships between Jews and non-Jews, inspiration and anxiety about religious change, the Holocaust, Zionism & the State of Israel in public […]
No one has had a greater impact on Chinese culture than Confucius. His ideas about self-cultivation, the proper ordering of society, the role of the individual in the social order, the relationship between humanity and the cosmos et cetera not only shaped the underlying fabric of Chinese civilisation, they deeply influenced several neighbouring cultures as […]
This course is an interdisciplinary investigation of how religion is mediated in culture through mass media (television, radio, the press) as well as through electronic media (internet, video games) and popular culture (film). To de-construct cultural texts through significant practices of communication, within symbolic universes and the symbolic interpretation of meaning. To describe individual religious […]