Course Catalog 2024-2025
Religion
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Corey L. Barnes, Robert S. Danforth Associate Professor of Religion; chair
Joyce Kloc Babyak, Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Associate Professor of Religion
Emilia Bachrach, Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Religion
Dexter J. Brown, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion
Cynthia R. Chapman, Adelia A. F. Johnston and Harry Thomas Frank Professor of Religion
Francesca N. Chubb-Confer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Islam
Andrew Macomber, Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions
Shari Rabin, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion
William Underwood, Assistant Professor of Religion
Visit the department web page for up-to-date information on department faculty, visiting lecturers, and special events.
The Department of Religion at Oberlin College seeks to train students in globally-engaged critical interaction with enduring topics in religious studies. Students explore religious meaning and values, history and cultures, systems of thought and practice, approaches to self and world, and the power dynamics at play in the interaction of the above.
See information about Research, Internships, Study Away, and Experiential Learning (RISE).
Explore Winter Term projects and opportunities.
Majors, Minors, and Integrative Concentrations
Curriculum
Employing various religious studies methodologies, our courses challenge students to think both critically and charitably and equip students with the skills necessary to understand and communicate effectively across differences, in diverse settings, and to various audiences.
The religion department offers courses at all curricular levels.
- Our first-year seminars and 100-level courses introduce students to multidisciplinary approaches within religious studies through specific themes, regions, or traditions.
- Our intermediate (200-level) courses have no prerequisites and offer focused treatments of the complicated and intersecting realities of religion as a lived and historically enduring phenomenon.
- Advanced seminars (300-level) provide immersive engagements with narrowly-defined topics of broad significance, cultivating depth of knowledge and skills.
- Our capstone courses (400-level) further refine this knowledge and these skills through faculty-mentored and peer-supported individual projects.
Courses- RELG 100 - Introduction to Jewish Studies: Sacred Spaces and Promised Lands
- RELG 103 - Religion and Violence
- RELG 115 - Death and the Afterlife
- RELG 135 - Introduction to Religion: Devotion and Performance in South Asia
- RELG 137 - Introduction to Religion: Buddhism in East Asia
- RELG 151 - Religion in America
- RELG 191 - Religion and Social Change
- RELG 202 - The Nature of Suffering: The Book of Job and its History of Interpretation
- RELG 203 - The Garden of Eden in Literature, Art, and Film
- RELG 204 - Biblical Prophets and Prophecy
- RELG 205 - Hebrew Bible in its Ancient Near Eastern Context
- RELG 206 - The Apostle Paul within Judaism
- RELG 208 - New Testament and Christian Origins
- RELG 209 - The Bible in American Politics
- RELG 215 - A History of Sin
- RELG 216 - Apocalyptic
- RELG 218 - Authority and Dissent in Medieval Christianity
- RELG 229 - Religious Rituals in East Asia
- RELG 230 - Religion, Wellness, and the Commodification of Yoga
- RELG 231 - Introduction to Hindu Traditions
- RELG 232 - Religion and Culture in Indian Epics
- RELG 233 - Haunted Archipelago: Ghosts, Spirits, and the Occult in Japanese Religion
- RELG 240 - Religious Objects in East Asian Religions
- RELG 241 - Literature and Ethics: British Novels
- RELG 242 - Literature and Ethics: American Novels
- RELG 243 - Roman Catholic Popes and Their Social Teaching
- RELG 249 - Medical Ethics
- RELG 253 - Jewish Pilgrimage
- RELG 254 - Judaism and the Body
- RELG 258 - Religious Outsiders and the American State
- RELG 259 - Jewish Conversions: Transforming the Self
- RELG 270 - Islam
- RELG 271 - American Islam
- RELG 273 - Drinking With God: An Introduction to Sufism
- RELG 276 - Religion in Bollywood Film
- RELG 290 - Religion, Reason, and Empire
- RELG 293 - Religion and Abolition: from Slavery to the Prison-Industrial-Complex
- RELG 303 - Jews and Greeks in Ancient Egypt
- RELG 306 - Biblical Biographies Told and Retold
- RELG 330 - Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in India
- RELG 335 - Buddhism, Healing, and the Body in East Asia
- RELG 336 - Embodied Mysticism and Negative Theology
- RELG 340 - Seminar: Ethical Issues in Death and Dying
- RELG 354 - Judaism in America
- RELG 370 - Beloved Bodies: Gender and the Erotic in Islamic Literature
- RELG 401 - Capstone Research Methods
- RELG 402 - Capstone Colloquium
- RELG 995F - Private Reading - Full
- RELG 995H - Private Reading - Half
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