Religious, Secular, and Other Temporalit

Concepts and sensibilities surrounding time, temporality, and history are major aspects of peoples’ “lived everyday metaphysics,” which is to say the myths, concepts, affects, values, rituals, and practices by which we orient ourselves in the world. Religious studies in the broadest sense examines these lived and material metaphysics and their emergence, transmission, and transformation in and through communities of practice. Our work falls into the “zone of inquiry” of “time and history” of the Religion Department’s graduate programs. “Zones of inquiry” seek to introduce students to a particular cluster of key concepts and various theoretical elaborations of those concepts, in order to aid students in honing their ability to reflect critically on and develop further the central concepts that they derive from and bring to the specific traditions and phenomena that they study in their own research. A main goal of this course will therefore be to expand our conceptual resources at the intersection of religious studies and theories of time and history.

This course will explore how time and history, their structures and their relationships to meaning making have been theorized in different traditions at various points in time. We will study how rituals of time, calendars, and chronologies give shape to imaginaries of history and space and how these differences influence the place of religion and religious experience. As a case study of sorts, we will examine the profound changes of metaphysics of time that the rise of capitalism effected in early modern Europe and the continued impact on social imaginaries of secular time, impending apocalyptic times, and possibilities and impossibilities of utopias and redemption.