In this new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the birth of the modern notion of religion in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion to the Cultured among its Despisers comes two thirds of the way in. I'm not sure what I was thinking as I planned it, but in practice it looked to make sense coming after a section on the challenges of contemporary American Christianity and the question if there's a non-theological way to say some (many!) so-called Christians aren't Christians, their religion not even religion. Something like that pathos animates Schleiermacher in 1799. But the students took it in a different direction, finding a sort of blessing for the spiritual but not religious. I let them run with it, playing out the Romantic possibilities, but at the end of class I told them this was the first half a pair of classes like a sauna. The cold bath of Feuerbach and Marx await. Institution-free individual experience? Irreligion! Worse: commodity capitalism.
