Contemporary Theories of Religion (481-2-20)

Topic

Secularities: Thinking with, through, and against

Instructors

Brannon Ingram
Crowe Hall 4-135

Meeting Info

Crowe 4-130 Rel Studies Sem Rm: Tues 3:00PM - 5:30PM

Overview of class

Secularities: Thinking with, through, and against "Religion":

This course will introduce students to a range of approaches to theorizing the category of "religion" in recent interdisciplinary scholarship. In this course, these approaches will revolve primary around theories of secularity - that is, theories of how the category of "religion" is produced, negotiated, maintained, and/or contested in its intersections with other domains of human life against which it is often defined, e.g. "culture," "society," "economy," and so on. We will also see some of the ways scholars have approached the ways that the category of religion informs, intersects with, and/or is constitutive of law and politics. We will begin with pioneering work in this subject from Talal Asad, Winnifred Sullivan, and Saba Mahmoud. We will then proceed to explore how a second wave of scholars on secularity put these foundational texts in conversation with a range of archives, drawing on scholars such as Elizabeth Hurd and Mayanthi Fernando. Finally, we turn our attention to the most recent scholarship in this vein from the likes of J. Barton Scott, Joseph Blankholm, Elayne Oliphant, and Charles McCrary.