NOTE: Course information changes frequently, including Methods of Instruction. Please revisit these pages periodically for the most recent and up-to-date course information.

The course proceeds in three overall units. 

(1)       We begin with a study for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, held at the Columbian Exhibition at Chicago in 1893, because it is so often regarded as one of the great annunciatory moments for the field.  A number of the 19th-century European “founding fathers” were invited or present, as was Swami Vivekananda, who has been at least as significant as any of them for the development of the field as a global idea.  The WPR’s American location not only relates to the course’s own location in obvious ways; it also serves lays a basis for asking whether scholarship on the history of the field (e.g., that of Tomoko Masuzawa) may have been more Eurocentric than it should have been.  In addition, the WPR serves to introduce students to each of the aspects of the course featured in its subtitle:  the conceptual content of the idea “world religions” and problems classically associated with it (e.g., Barrows, Clarke, Ellinwood); the element of display involved (continuing forward to millennial events in 2000 and the ongoing meetings of the organization that claims the WPR as its direct ancestor; and the institutional aspect (organizations who contributed delegates; the special role of the University of Chicago in the framing of the academic field that would be known as Religious Studies; and funding institutions related to both of these, and beyond).

(2)       In the second part of the course we investigate the consolidation/invention of the conceptual entities that comprise “world religions,” as well as debates about just how many of them they are, and by what principle of accounting.  To exemplify the production of “isms” that are said to comprise the world religions, we investigate the conceptual origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Judeo-Christian Tradition.  Others are in the wings.

(3)       In the third part of the course we turn to several academic institutions in the United States that have played significant roles in the production and maintenance (to use the industrial metaphor that is now typical) of “world religions.”  Again, the list cannot be exhaustive, but by anyone’s standard it would have to include Chicago and Harvard.  Columbia belongs there too, arguably, at least in relation to the larger complex