Month: November 2021

Why Study Religion? with Interim Director Dr. Hannibal Hamlin

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, and staff what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Hannibal Hamlin, Interim Director of the Center and Professor of English, think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “I’m Hannibal Hamlin. I’m the Director for the Center for the Study of Religion and a Professor in the English Department specializing in literature of the English Renaissance–Shakespeare’s time. And I’m particularly interested in literature and religion and in the influence of the English Bible on English literature.

“Why study religion? Well, in my particular period, in the English Renaissance, everybody was required to attend church by law. And there was only one Church–the Church of England. After the Reformation, there was a minority Catholic population, but religious belief and practice was virtually universal. And religion gets at the heart of what people think and believe, what they hold to be most important. It’s not just a sort-of ‘weekend thing;’ it touches every aspect of life in the period I study. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any work of literature that doesn’t, in some way or another, connect with religious questions, religious ideas. Salvation, sin, and death. More broadly speaking, religion is still a central part of so many aspects of people’s lives across the world. The majority of Americans are believers, are practitioners in one religion or another, and that percentage increases as you go across the world. And centers like Pew [Research Center], or people who keep that sort of data, tell us that over the next decades, that percentage is even going to increase. Religion simply gets at the heart of what is most important to people. Life; death; life after death, if you hold that sort of belief; sin; salvation; love; grief; forgiveness: all of these things connect to religion, and so, why not study religion?”

Why Study Religion? with Dr. David Brakke

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, and staff what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. David Brakke of OSU’s Department of History think it’s important to study religion? Watch the video below to find out!

Transcript: “You should study religion, not just because it’s a ubiquitous and important phenomenon of human culture and history–that is, that it really motivates and explains, if we can use that word, a lot of what has happened in our world. And so, it’s a basic motivation for why people do what they do. But the other reason you should study religion is because it is the quintessential interdisciplinary topic; that is, you do a little history, you do some anthropology, you do literary criticism. We look at religion in a variety of different ways, and it really introduces an undergraduate student to the different ways the Humanities are studied, rather than to just one single approach. And, of course, you should study religion because, in the end, we really don’t know what it is. And that‘s what makes studying it so fun and interesting. Because the whole time you’re doing it, you’re like, ‘what is this thing we call religion?’ and ‘does it really exist?’ and so forth, so there are just many great reasons to study religion.”

Interested in sharing with us what brought you to the academic study of religion? Send us an email at religion@osu.edu!

 

Spring 2022 Courses are Live!

Our website has been updated to include all of our course offerings for Spring 2022! As a friendly reminder to undergraduate students, Dr. David Brakke will be offering Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, a mandatory course for all Majors and Minors, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:20-3:40pm. Watch the video below to hear a little bit from Dr. Brakke about what you’ll be studying!

Transcript: “In the spring, I’ll be teaching RELSTDS 3972, which is Theory and Method in the Study of Religion. It’s required for all Religious Studies Majors because it really talks about what religion is in a kind of more abstract comparative sense than looking at any one specific religious tradition. But the class, I think, could be really useful to anybody who’s working in the Humanities because it asks very basic questions about how we interpret human phenomena like religious beliefs, religious activities, religious rituals, organizations, and the like. So, we’ll be reading what religious studies people call the ‘classic’ theorists, which are people like Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and so forth. And this is a 3000-level class, so we’re going to be reading Freud, not other people telling us about what Freud said, which should be lots of fun. But then we will work on problematizing, or kind of thinking about what these people missed, by reading some more recent theory in anthropology and feminist/womanist studies, African American theory, and the like, so that we can kind of see how religious phenomena are studied from a wide variety of perspectives.”

You can view a PDF of all of the Religious Studies courses on offer next semester here: SP2022 RELSTDS Courses

You can view a PDF of all courses that count toward the Major and Minor here: SP2022 Course Flyer 2

View a list of courses on our website HERE.

We look forward to seeing you next spring!

Community Lecture: “The Gnostic Jesus” with Dr. David Brakke

The CSR is gearing up for our upcoming Community Lecture: “The Gnostic Jesus: The Divine Savior in the Gospel of Judas and Other Early Christian Writings” with the Department of History’s Dr. David Brakke at 7pm EST on Nov. 4, 2021 at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Watch our brief interview with Dr. Brakke below and visit go.osu.edu/gnostic-jesus for more information about the event and location. Not located in Columbus? Registration is free via Zoom! We hope to see you there!

Transcript:

“My Lecture on the 4th will be on the Gospel of Judas, which is an early Christian gnostic text that first appeared in 2006, so it’s still relatively new. I’m going to focus narrowly on the question of how Jesus appears in this work. That is, what we traditionally call Christology, the study of who Christ is and what he does. So, we’ll be looking at the divine and human natures of Christ. Is he a divine being? What god sent him? And what does Jesus do to save people according to the Gospel of Judas? So, that will be our topic!”