Material Spirituality - Rethinking Religion

This course will make the case that religion must be understood as shaping how we experience the world and not simply as a distinct kind of experience (e.g., religious experience v. artistic experience v. ethical experience). In doing so, the course will bring together work in religious studies, phenomenology of religion, phenomenological philosophy, secularism studies, and Continental philosophy of religion to show that religion is both constituted within historical and material conditions and is partly constitutive of those conditions. In that way, what it offers is not simply a materialist account of religion, but an account of material spirituality in which religion can be located and contextualized. Please note that the course will not assume prior familiarity with phenomenology.