Religion 101

What is religion?  This course will seek to engage a range of answers to this question, beginning with some of the reasons we might want to ask it.   Acknowledging the urgency of the matter, the class is not a survey of all religious traditions.   Rather, it will seek to address religion as a comparative problem between traditions (how does one religion compare with another?  Who invented comparative religion?) as well as between scholarly and methodological approaches (does one live–or ask about–religion the way one asks about Law? Culture? Science? Politics?).  We will seek to engage the problem of perspective in, for example, the construction of a conflict between religion and science, religion and modernity, as well as some of the distinctions now current in the media (news and movies) between religion and politics, religion and economics.   Historical and textual material, as well as aesthetic practices and institutions will provide the general and studied background for the lectures.