Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An in-depth investigation of a specific case of religious history and tradition. Religions will be studied through the cultural and historical contexts that pervade and structure religious meaning and expression. Students may repeat this course for further credit under a different topic. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Rough Gods: Death, Disease, and Disaster in Religion 

One semester, I was asked to teach a local college’s ‘Introduction to Natural Disasters’ course. The class was listed with a geology course code, and even as an interdisciplinary scholar, I felt a bit unqualified. However, my immediate supervisor suggested I teach it from my own perspective in the Humanities. With a little bit of trepidation, I agreed. We still used a standard “Natural Disasters” textbook, but I decided to organize the course around the basic elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Ether. At the beginning of each section, I discussed the way earth processes converge with culture, religion and myth. 

During the Ether module, Ether referring to air or space, or for my purposes, the human mind, we spent time discussing the emerging anthropogenic disasters that have unfolded in recent decades under the moniker of the ‘Anthropocene’—the age of human domination. Whereas the dinosaurs most likely went extinct because of the impact of a massive asteroid, in our own era, it is the overwhelming presence and power of industrial humanity that is inching the world toward another mass extinction. 

While the impact of disasters is related to both the magnitude of the event, and the social arrangement of the societies they impact, diseases can have vastly different impacts depending on the society within which they spread. Diseases do not emerge from geological processes. Rather, these biological agents interact with and respond to human societies, inequalities and even religious practices. Diseases have social, biological and ecological implications. Wherever humans go, our companion species, domesticated or otherwise, influence the illnesses we are susceptible to. Cattle, pigs, dogs, cats, pigeons, roaches, rats, mice, fleas, each have their own pathologies which influence and are influenced by human beings. For example, the waves of Black Plague that devastated medieval Europe and Asia were made worse by the standard of living in cities. The colonial invasion of North America by European settlers not only eliminated 10% of the global population at the time, but impacted the global climate.  

Related to both disease and disaster is the universal and inevitable end of human life: Death. The world’s religions teach, respond to, and defy death in their own ways. From the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Zoroastrian Sky Burial, from Jewish mourning customs to Malagasy exhumations rituals, diverse cultures present us with a variety of means for confronting the stark knowledge that our lives are finite, fragile and in each moment marching toward their apparent end.  

Today, we find ourselves in what feels like a dark night of the collective soul. Limping toward an endemic COVID-19 outbreak with climate change on the march, democratic political systems are being challenged from left and right. This course will generate conversation around the human embeddedness in geological, biological, and ecological-political systems. We will look at the social ecology of disease and disaster and the humanities death and dying.  

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Explore religious cosmologies/ecologies of personhood, death, dying and afterlife.  
• Explore the connections between natural disasters and social ecology.  
• Discuss the entanglements between diseases, ecology and climate.  
• Challenge colonial and capitalist narratives of human nature, disease and disaster.  
• Unsettle the anthropocentrism of academia toward the more-than-human-world(s).  
• Re-imagine, Re-story possible human futures.  

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Disclaimers 

• We will be dealing with heavy themes and material.  
• We will not be naively optimistic about the future of suffering, injustice, death or the urgency of the present global situation. However, neither will we promote defeatist, nihilist, conspiratorial or alarmist stances.  

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: