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COURSE CATALOGUE
RELIGION
Religion
219 Milbank Hall
854-2597
www.barnard.edu/religion
Professors: Elizabeth Castelli (Chair, Spring 2009), John Stratton Hawley, Randall Balmer (Chair, Fall 2008), Alan Segal (Ingeborg Rennert Professor)
Assistant Professor: Wendi L. Adamek
Adjunct Associate Professor: Celia Deutsch
Other officers of the
University offering courses listed below:
Professors: Peter Awn, Bernard Faure, David Halivni (Emeritus), Wayne L. Proudfoot, Robert Somerville, Mark Taylor, Robert A.F. Thurman, Chun-Fang Yu
Associate Professor: Courtney Bender
Assistant Professor: Michael Como, Jonathan Schorsch
Adjunct Professor: David Shatz
Adjunct Assistant Professor: Lucianne Bulliet
For a complete list of
faculty on leave see:
http://www.barnard.edu/provost/facleavelist.html
When major social theorists trained their eye on religion a century or so ago, there was often the sense that it was a dying-or at least decaying-species. Yet the years from then until now seem less to confirm this view than to refute it. Religious institutions, rituals, ideas, and communities remain a vital aspect of human culture and global politics. They are more pressingly in need of being understood now than ever.
The Departments of Religion at Barnard and Columbia marshal an array of academic approaches to the study of religion, representing the depth and diversity of the world's religious traditions, past and present. The category of religion-along with key related terms like belief, spirituality, mystical experience, and ritual-is historically and culturally contingent; many of our courses interrogate these terms and the conditions of their construction. Yet we are committed to engaging "religion," which persists so strongly in common usage and public debate, and is so hard to capture in any related domain or theoretical system.
Morningside Heights provides unique resources for the study of religion. The University's specialized programs and centers, especially its regional institutes, create a context for exploring in depth the linguistic, literary, political, and cultural milieus that bear on particular religious traditions. The new Center for the Study of Science and Religion enriches curricular offerings in that field. Barnard's Center for Research on Women often focuses on issues of ethics and policy where questions of religion and gender are paramount, and Barnard Religion faculty are particularly active in the area. Barnard and Columbia offer intensive language training in the languages of the major religious traditions of the world: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and other Indic languages, and Tibetan, among others. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Union Theological Seminary, with their world-renowned libraries, are our neighbors. And the city as a whole provides one of the world's best laboratories for the study of religion.
Our program tries to help students discover these resources and use them well. Many courses fulfill the College's general education requirements.