Freshman Seminars
The Center solicits proposals from humanities and social sciences faculty for new freshman seminars on topics significantly concerned with the study of religion. Freshman seminars provide a unique opportunity for students to work in a small setting with a professor and a few other students on a topic of special interest. Such seminars are in high demand by students and often result in new regular courses being added to the curriculum. Prior to the Center’s efforts in this area, very few freshman seminars were offered on religion. This gap is now being filled, as the Center provides incentives for faculty to teach in this area.
The Freshman Seminar for 2011-2012 is:
FRS 129 Forgiveness, taught by Olga Peters Hasty, Spanish and Portuguese, Fall 2011.
How to respond to wrongdoing is a complex issue, and one on which human coexistence depends. For millennia, forgiveness has been the domain of religious and philosophical thinkers, but recently it has also attracted the attention of sociologists, historians, political scientists, legal scholars, psychologists, and even medical professionals who are interested in reactive attitudes that foster individual and collective well-being. In this seminar we will explore how creative artists and thinkers from a broad variety of cultures struggle with translating the ideal of forgiveness into real-life settings. The narratives of forgiveness around which the seminar is structured serve as points of departure for discussing how forgiveness works (or doesn’t) in diverse contexts, including personal relations, want of due process, social injustice, retributive justice, and restorative justice in the aftermath of historical wrongs (e.g., war and colonialism). As we study narratives of other times and places that offer different perspectives on forgiveness, we will reflect on the pertinence of the questions they raise to our own world: How is “forgiveness” variously defined? What generates the need for forgiveness? Are there wrongs that cannot be forgiven? What consequences does forgiveness have for the forgiver and the forgiven? Is forgiveness contingent on repentance and atonement, or can it be unconditional? Who can rightfully extend forgiveness? What motivates someone to seek forgiveness? What constitutes apology? What sort of moral or ethical obligation is placed on those of whom forgiveness is asked? These and many other questions that a study of forgiveness opens have no single, unequivocal answer and must be revisited time and time again in the course of working out a good and just course of action that can help to rectify past wrongs and forestall new ones. (Wednesday 1:30 – 4:20 p.m.)
FRESHMAN SEMINARS OFFERED IN PAST YEARS:
2010-2011:
FRS 168 "Morality in America," taught by Sarah Rivett, English.
This course examines the place of morality in American culture. We explore the power of morality to shape social conduct, the responsibility of an individual toward society, revolutions, and different ways of imagining the role of America in the world. The course considers two distinct—and at times competing—traditions of morality in America. One develops from Enlightenment concepts of reason, universalism, and individualism, and one emerges through the unique history of Protestantism in America. We begin with the moral codes that shaped two founding phases of America and the United States. Early immigrants to the New World struggled to establish a godly society based on Christian values of virtue and charity. Our readings invite us to consider how these values have persisted, even as the Enlightenment and the American Revolution contested and reconfigured society according to principles of reason, sentiment, and individualism. For example, we will examine the relationship between Christianity and political action in literature of the American Revolution by Thomas Paine and Phillis Wheatley. The culture of dissent evident in this literature forecasts centuries of American thought from antebellum reform movements to abolition and the American Civil War, from the Social Gospel movement to Civil Rights. How has morality intersected with the history of dissent represented in writings by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Shelden?
2009-2010:
FRS 151 “Art and the Lifecycle in Africa” taught by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Art and
Archaeology and African American Studies, Fall 2009.
The seminar explored art and rites associated with birth and childhood, initiation and rites of passage, marriage, manhood and womanhood, death and ancestorship in Africa. The course was enhanced by Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art, a special art exhibition organized specifically for this seminar by the Princeton University Art Museum.
2008-2009:
"The Varieties of Religious Experience Today" taught by João Biehl, Anthropology.
2007-2008:
FRS 116 “People of the (Comic) Book: Jews and Their Images in American and French Popular Culture” taught by Andre Benhaim, French.
“Thou shalt not make (engraved) images” says the Second Commandment. Yet, this injunction has always been challenged and redefined by Jews. Here, we explore the role and the representation of Jews and Jewishness in one of the most popular art forms of the 20th century: comic books. We do so by comparing two cultures, American and French, each seminal in the birth of the genre, but in very different ways, and in very contrasting historical contexts for Jews. In America, comics, with virtually all its iconic superheroes, was created by children of European Jewish immigrants fleeing persecutions, yet it is only recently that Jewishness, long effaced behind pseudonyms and apparently secular characters, has become more visible. And after the war, it was Jewish authors addressing Jewish issues who gave the genre its legitimacy with the modern “graphic novel,” epitomized by the Pulitzer Prize-winning testimony of the Holocaust, Maus. In Europe, on the other hand, where the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée matured much sooner, Jews had long been represented in comics, but mostly in depreciatory images: from the Wandering Jew to the caricatures of the Dreyfus Affair, to subtle clichés in the most popular works, including Tintin. Only recently have Jews begun to appear in a positive, assertive light, especially in the influential works of the Nouvelle Bande Dessinée, by authors like Joann Sfar, with The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer, who encompasses Sephardic and Ashkenazi cultures, and Christophe Blain, with Isaac the Pirate, the epic story of a fictitious Jewish painter in pre-Revolution France. From superheroes to (invented) self-portraits, this course will thus examine how “Jewish” comic books offer a paradoxical and artistically stimulating response to the ambiguous interdiction of representation that lays at the heart of Judaism, and even a challenge to the domination of images in Western culture.
2006-2007:
Kevin Kruse, History, “The Religious Right in Modern America”
2005-2006:
Leora Batnitzky, Religion, "Religion and Science: Biology, Minds, and Souls"
Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, Sociology, "God of Many Faces: Comparative Perspectives on Migration and Religion"
2004-2005:
Adam Elga, Philosophy, "Religious Conviction, Religious Disagreement."
2003-2004:
Michael Cadden, Theater and Dance, "Strange Angels: Some Twentieth-Century Annunciations."
Maria DiBattista, English, "Modern Heresies and the Literature of Belief."
Wendy Heller, Music, "The Music of the Jews: Worship, Culture, and Spirituality from Ancient to Modern Times."
Tom Leisten, Art and Archaeology,"Reconciling Unity and Diversity: Islamic Art and Islamic Culture."
Negin Nabavi, Near Eastern Studies, "Islamic Movements in the Modern Middle East."
Carolyn Rouse, Anthropology, African American Studies, "Engaged Surrender: Race, Gender, and Religion in the U.S."
Valerie Smith, English, African American Studies, "Religion and Resistance in Narratives of Slavery."
Tim Watson, English, "Conversions."
2002-2003:
Negin Nabavi, Near Eastern Studies, "Islamic Movements in the Modern Middle East."
2001-2002:
Isabelle Nabokov, Anthropology, "Violence and Anguish in Religious Experiences."
Susan Naquin, History, "Religious Movements in Modern China."
Francois Rigolot, Romance Languages and Literatures, "Religion, Renaissance, and Reformation."
2000-2001:
Ze’eva Cohen, Humanities, "Body and Spirit: A Comparative Approach to Sacred Dance."
Andrew Feldherr, Classics, "Literature and Sacrifice in the Greek and Roman World."
David Sussman, Philosophy, "Is It Rational to Believe in God?"