In this year's iteration of "Theorizing Religion" I haven't just included the MOOCs again and added readings which speak to recrudescent imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (to borrow bell hooks' phrase) but also brought back some of the old texts I put aside last year. You know, the eighteenth century guys: David Hume and Friedrich Schleiermacher! I thought a mini-lecture was enough since who really wants to slog through a text so obviously written for a different time?Well, it turns out, we do. My academic fellow conducted a midterm survey of the class and found that these gnarly old texts were particularly appreciated. Unlike some of the other classic writers whom students have heard but never read before my class (Marx, Weber, Freud) these aren't people they'd heard of before. Nor is the eighteenth century a place they're been to, let alone what preceded it. The curriculum we offer them at this school is pretty relentlessly presentist; even the early twentieth century is hazy. What a pleasure to be offering them some sense of historical depth, distance, perspective.
The image above is of an artifact of Theorizing Religion past - 2010, when we had a particularly close cohort of majors whom I invited over for a party each semester. One proposed we have a "hat party" so I fashioned this "religious studies hat" of papier mâché, inspired by the cluster of heads atop a statue of the bodhisattva Kuanyin.
