This seminar is required of all incoming students and offers a forum for the discussion of issues central to the field of Religious Studies. This year, there will be two sections, one taught by myself and the other by Dr. Travis Kroeker. This section of the 2006 seminar will focus on the theme "Text, history, myth, and rite: Theories for the interpretation of religious belief and practice."

As clear from the configuration of McMaster’s own Department of Religious Studies, our field is hardly univocal or univalent. The study of religion(s) involves the investigation of beliefs, practices, experiences, scriptures, rituals, communities, institutions, ideas, identities, discourses, strategies, conceptual and social systems, intellectual and social histories, and much else. Accordingly the disciplinary canopy of “Religious Studies” covers a diverse range of methods, including historical, textual, literary, philosophical, theological, ethical, political, anthropological, sociological approaches. Methodological diversity and experimentation are, arguably, hallmarks of the field. No single genealogy can describe its diachronic development, no simple map can sketch its synchronic scope.

With this context in mind, this seminar will introduce students to some of the most prominent and provocative voices in the broader conversation about methodologies for the secular study of religion(s). We will revisit past thinkers and theorists who have had a formative and enduring influence on the conceptualization of “religion” as an area of teaching and research in the (post-)modern university. In the process, we will explore how the history of research on religion(s) has been shaped in response and reaction to developments in fields such as Philosophy, Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism.

To converse across these disciplinary lines—and to make the most of the diversity within our own discipline—it is important to have a critical self-consciouness about the assumptions that we bring to our own scholarship. Hence, this seminar will focus on the act of scholarly interpretation. We will consider different hermeneutics that are brought to bear on religious texts, histories, myths, and rituals, and we will interrogate their epistemological presuppositions, discuss their concepts of “religion,” and explore their profits and pitfalls.

There will also be several informal writing assignments aimed at facilitating discussion. Before the first meeting of the seminar, students should type up a brief (at least 2 pages) intellectual biography, describing their background and interests, what they study and why, whether/where/how they see themselves fitting within the broader field of Religious Studies, and how – on the onset of graduate study at McMaster – they conceive of “religion” and its academic study within a university setting. Like the field of Religious Studies at large, our department encompasses faculty and students from a broad variety of academic and personal backgrounds, and a correspondingly broad variety of approaches to (and assumptions about) the study of religion(s). In my view, this diversity provides us with a wonderful opportunity in this seminar to investigate and explore -- as well as to challenge, press, and problematize -- the history and practice of scholarly reflection on religion(s) in terms of its relevance for research and teaching in a wide range of different subfields of Religious Studies.

In addition (and in the same spirit) each student should type up brief (at least 2 paragraphs) responses to each week’s readings -- thoughts, ideas, points of interest, critiques, questions – to be circulated via email before each class (= by midnight on Monday) to the instructor and other seminar participants. This is meant to be an informal forum and an opportunity freely to explore and express ideas, concerns, and questions raised by the readings. Students will not be graded on the content of these responses, but the prompt submission of these responses is considered to be an important part of participation in the seminar.

You are encouraged to choose a book from a field/sub-field which is new to you and/or which represents an approach very different from the one(s) in which you were trained. This is meant to be an opportunity for you to familiarize yourself with approaches and areas that you may not otherwise get a chance to explore in the rest of your graduate career, during the course of specialist training in your own sub-field.

The books that will be the focus of the Joint Sessions are all available for purchase at Titles Bookstore: