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Critical Perspectives on Religious Speech

(or: the Genesis of Suspicion)

REL 399: Majors Seminar

Spring 2008

David Albertson

Tuesdays 2:00-4:50pm

VKC 261

Since all religions involve beliefs as well as practices, religious traditions naturallymake claims about the gods or the divine, giving rise to distinctively religious speech. But within modern universities, other types of questions are asked about religious speech – questions not about its truth, but about its other possible meanings. What desires or fears are encoded in religious speech? How do religions go about verifying their claims about the divine? What structures of social power does a given religious belief inadvertently reveal? What can the form of religious claims teach us about the human condition?

Like the religious traditions themselves, this line of questioning itself has a history, beginning around the “Enlightenment” in seventeenth-century Europe and moving into the twentieth century. As such, we can study its historical development and reflect upon its premises and limits. How have the critical perspectives of the academic study of religion evolved out of the re-evaluation of religious speech which took place in modern Europe? Wewill study a series of influential critics of religious (and especially Christian) discourse, mostly from Germany, ca. 1750-1950. These authors converted the Enlightenment’s suspicions of anticlericalism into deeper suspicions of religious speech itself. For them religious speech ceased to resolve intellectual problems, as it had in previous millenia of western religious thought, including the “Age of Reason.” Instead, “God” suddenly became a problem threatening human life.

This class is not a lecture, but a seminar. This means that all participants take turns presenting materials and guiding the common discussion. In each class, part of the time will be spent working together to understand the texts, and part of the time will be devoted to presentations of students’ individual research projects.

Texts

  1. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11 (Chicago)
  2. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge)
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge)
  4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Penguin)
  5. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Norton)
  6. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (Zone)
  7. Course Reader

Assignments

  1. Short reading quizzes
  2. Kickoffs: Brief presentations on the week’s assigned reading on a rotating basis (15 minutes)
  3. Research presentation (30 minutes)
  4. Final research project: Analyze an instance of religious speech through the lens of one or two critical perspectives (8 page draft; 15 page final)
  5. No midterm, no final

Class Schedule

Reason and Religious Speech

  1. January 15: Introduction
  2. Overview of the course
  3. Lecture: God in the Age of Reason – Introduction to Kant
  1. January 22: Kant
  2. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Prefaces and ch. 1
  3. Holy Terrors, ch. 1-2
  1. January 29: Kant
  2. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ch. 2-3
  3. Holy Terrors, ch. 3-4

Due: Research project proposal

  1. February 5: Kant
  2. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ch. 3-4
  3. Holy Terrors, ch. 5-7

The Function of Religious Speech

  1. February 12: Feuerbach
  2. (Selected texts)
  3. Student presentations
  1. February 19: Feuerbach and Marx
  2. (Selected texts)
  3. Student presentations
  1. February 26: Marx
  2. (Selected texts)
  3. Student presentations

Religious Speech and Power (and Weakness)

  1. March 4: Nietzsche
  2. The Genealogy of Morality
  3. Student presentations
  1. March 11: Nietzsche
  2. The Genealogy of Morality
  3. Student presentations

(March 18: Spring Break)

  1. March 25: Nietzsche
  2. Twilight of the Idols
  3. Student presentations

Due: Draft of research project

  1. April 1: Nietzsche
  2. The Anti-Christ
  3. Student presentations

Religious Speech and Desire

  1. April 8: Freud
  2. Future of an Illusion
  3. Student presentations
  1. April 15: Freud
  2. (Selected texts)
  3. Student presentations
  1. April 22: Bataille
  2. Theory of Religion
  3. Student presentations
  1. April 29: Bataille
  2. (Selected texts)
  3. Festival!

Final draft of research project due: Monday, May 5