Religious Studies

In this course, we use the academic perspectives of religious studies, history, and political analyses to understand how people have imagined the devil as a character, a lived presence, and a political-spiritual threat. Readings will focus primarily on the modern era in the Americas, and, in particular, the United States' emphasis on the demonic. Students will learn about varied case studies such as the Salem Witch Trials, slave insurrections, Cold War Era apocalypticism, the Nation of Islam's figurations of the white devil, the satanic panic in the 1980s, Satanists' religious freedom court cases, and how contemporary queer performances appropriate and adapt diabolical symbols. Together, we will ask how ideas about the devil, the demonic, and hell have shaped modern politics. A careful consideration of the devil offers new ways to critically analyze the emergence of modern nationalism, forms of racial supremacy, and ideas about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity. 

 

This is survey course that explores the relationship between religion, prisons, and crime in American history. We first explore punishment and penology in the early modern era, when the civil government rarely incarcerated people for extended periods of time. We then examine the larger intellectual and theological trends that created political and social spaces for the modern penitentiary, where religious socialization became a staple inside this new institution. For the remainder of the semester, we explore major trends in prison religion, focusing specifically on religion in the era of mass incarceration. Our studies intersect with the study of religion and law, as the relationship between religion and prison is inseparably tethered to legal considerations.