REL 105
Honors Introduction to Religious Studies
Benjamin Franklin's proposed seal for the United States,
"Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" (1856
drawing pictured above; enlarge;
for the history of the Great Seal, go here
and here
[PDF])
Dr. Russell McCutcheon
e-mail: russell.mccutcheon@ua.edu
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Course Books
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Carl
Olson (ed.), Theory
and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical
Readings
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John
Locke's "Letter
Concerning Toleration" (1690 edition)
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Interested in applying for admission
to the University of Alabama's Honors
College?
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About Online Readings
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The online readings for this course are posted in the form
of PDF files (Portable Document Format), stored on the Department's
"secure" server, and are therefore not freely available
on the Internet.
To open these files you must click on the links and, when
prompted, enter your Bama ID and Password.
If you have forgotten your Bama ID, but know your Campus Wide
ID (CWID), then please go here.
If you still have difficulty accessing these readings, then
contact the instructor by email.
Those who need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0
to open PDFs (a free software available on the web and which
is already installed on all campus computers) can go here.
Note: larger PDFs can take a long time to download
(due to a slow Internet connection) and a long time to print
(depending on your printer). Some students may therefore wish
to download these files in a computer lab on campus, and then
either print them there or store them on a floppy disk or
zip/junk drive (to read/print them later at home).
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Links of Interest
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The following alphabetically arranged links provide a sampling
of various current US representations of the Church/State
issue.
Note: the following sites are offered as contemporary
data for analysis in this course; they are not listed
because of any viewpoints or positions that they endorse.
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American
Center for Law and Justice
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American
Civil Liberties Union: Religious Liberty
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American
United for Separation of Church and State
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Coverage
of Judge Moore archived at CNN.com
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Defending
the 10 Commandments: Judge Roy Moore Timeline
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Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives
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Foundation
for Moral Law, Inc.
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Introduction
to the Principle of the Separation Between Church and State
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Judge
Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments, and the Law
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Montgomery
Advertiser, list of articles on Judge Moore and the
Ten Commandments legal debate
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Myths,
Misconceptions, and Misunderstandings: Separation of Church
and State
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New
York Times article on the court-ordered removal
of biology textbook stickers in Georgia
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Television
News Archive
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What's actually on the Alabama Supreme Court Office's Ten
Commandments Monument? See here
and here.
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As the honors introduction to the academic study of religion,
REL 105 examines in greater detail than REL
100 theories of the historic origin and contemporary social
function of religion in relation to wider sets of human beliefs,
social practices, institutions, and culture in general.
REL 105 carries a "Humanities" Core designation;
its goal is therefore to prompt students to learn to define,
accurately describe, and compare in a non-evaluative manner
so as to find similarities and differences in various forms
of human behavior--findings that have prompted scholars to
develop theories to account for how social movements persist
and change over time and place.
The course is structured around lectures and student presentations.
It therefore provides Honors, and "Honors eligible"
students (those not enrolled in the Honors
College but holding a 3.3 GPA), with a smaller class setting
to study in greater detail such things as influential U.S.
Supreme Court Judgments on prayer in the public school system,
as well as read Plato's Euthyphro,
along with selections from the works of a number of important
classic and contemporary theorists of religion.
The course begins with a consideration of how scholars go
about defining religion and then moves on to a survey of the
different approach scholars have used to study religion. It
ends with a case study: an examination of the so-called "wall
of separation between Church and State" that characterizes
the U.S.--one of the few industrialized liberal democracies
where public confessions of religious sentiment continue to
play such an profoundly important political role. The goal
is to employ one of the theories explored in the course to
consider the effects of this way of classifying, and thereby
dividing up, social life--a classification that can be traced
to both the US Constitution's First Amendment as well as an
1802 letter of Thomas Jefferson's, in which he wrote:
"... I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole
American people which declared that their legislature should
'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation
between Church and State...."
Depending how one defines religion, do "Church"
and "State" refer to two distinct zones, one private
and experiential while the other is public and behavioral?
In other words, do the words correspond to pre-existing realms
or, instead, could the classification itself be considered
a public way that groups establish or construct different
sorts of social spaces? The goal of this course is to sort
out this very issue.
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Spring
2005 course flyer (PDF)
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Spring
2005 syllabus (PDF)
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Readings
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Apart from Plato's and Olson's books, course readings will
be posted on this page as PDFs. (For further information on
opening these files, see the section to the left, "About
Online Readings.") Consult the syllabus to determine
when we will tackle each of the following readings.
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Introductory
Handout (PDF)
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The
Problem of Definition (PDF)
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Religion:
Some Basics (PDF)
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Handout:
Plato and Eusebia (PDF)
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Roland
Barthes
The
Death of the Author" (PDF)
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Diana
Eck, NPR Interview of the Diana Rehm Show, August 17, 2001
(RealPlayer
required)
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Diana
Eck's Pluralism Project
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Michel
Foucault
"What
is an Author?" (PDF)
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Christopher
Hill
"Toleration
in Seventeenth-Century England: Theory and Practice" (PDF)
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James
Hitchcock, "Belief and Action" (PDF)
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David
Hollinger
"Among
the Believers: The Politics of Sin and Secularism"
(PDF)
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Thomas
Jefferson
Documents
and letters concerning the "wall of separation between
Church and State"
See a draft of Jefferson's letter here.
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Jane
Kramer (listen to a 2o minute Real Player interview
with Ms. Kramer on her 2002 book, The Lone Patriot;
read an excerpt)
"Letter
from Europe: Taking the Veil" (PDF)
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John
Locke
"A
Letter Concerning Toleration" (1689) (PDF)
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Russell
McCutcheon
"'Religion'
and the Governable Self" (PDF)
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Russell McCutcheon
"The
Spirit of Politics and the Lust of Dogmatic Rule"
(PDF)
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J. R.
Milton, "Locke's Life and Times" (PDF)
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Mark
Muesse
"Making
the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange" (PDF).
More information on Heaven's Gate can be found here.
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Jonathan
Z. Smith
"God
Save this Honorable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse"
(PDF)
Learn more about this essay, which was presented as Smith's
2003 Aronov
Lecture at the University of Alabama. See also REL
490 which examines Smith's work in detail.
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U.S. Supreme Court Cases on Religion and the Civic Space
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Abington
Township v. Schempp (1963) or see the PDF version: part
1 and part
2
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Church
of Lukumi v. the City of Hialeah (1992) or see the
PDF version
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Lynch
v. Donnelly (1984) or see the PDF
version
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