Thematic Projects


For five years concluding in 2003-2004, the Center sponsored faculty members in the social sciences and humanities in directing thematic projects involving research and teaching about religion. Each thematic project involved faculty research, a graduate or undergraduate seminar, support for graduate research assistance, and a public conference.
Our current initiative for Princeton faculty members is described here.


2003-2004 Thematic Project:
"Religion, Poetry, and Memory in Ancient China" description conference

2002-2003 Thematic Projects:
"The Moral Mystic: Mysticism and Moral Philosophy" description conference
"Seventeenth-Century 'Adamolatry' and Paradisal Return: A Project on Religion and Science" description conference

2001-2002 Thematic Projects:
"Poverty and Charity in Judaism in the Islamic World in the Period of the Cairo Geniza" description conference
"Death and Dying in Buddhist Cultures" description conference on Death and Dying

2000-2001 Thematic Projects:
"Darwin and Religion, 1860-1900" description
"Cinema and Religious Expression" description conference website

1999-2000 Thematic Project:
"World Traditions of Religious Chant" description


Project Descriptions

"Religion, Poetry, and Memory in Ancient China"
Martin Kern, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the East Asian Studies Department, Organizer

Given the global importance of Chinese civilization in general, and the persistent role of religion within it, it is now an appropriate moment to put pre-Buddhist China on the map and into the curriculum of religious studies, after the newly excavated texts and artifacts have at last made such an endeavor possible. These newly discovered materials in conjunction with new approaches to the received Chinese tradition allow us to thoroughly revisit much of what had hitherto been taken for granted. While ancient (pre-Buddhist) China is known primarily for its philosophical - Confucian and Taoist - thought, we only now begin to appreciate the ways in which its culture manifested itself in, and was shaped by, a range of religious practices, including divination, exorcism, healing, meditation, and others. The center of ancient Chinese religion, however, was firmly located in ancestor worship and its characteristic fusion of sacrificial performance and commemoration, conducted through various media of expression at the complementary sites of tombs and ancestral temples. This project embarks on an integrated study to reconstruct and analyze the full complexity of ancient Chinese religious performance culture in its manifold settings. The study will embrace the media of art, poetry, and music, as all three are largely defined by their function within this religious practice. The resulting rich picture will bring to attention what is distinctively Chinese; yet it will also identify important similarities with other ancient cultures, notably that of Greece, and thereby will help to give ancient China, the classical foundation of all East Asian civilizations, a better visibility within the comparative horizon.

The undergraduate seminar that goes with this project will make ancient Chinese religious culture accessible to our students and will allow them to explore it vis-a-vis its ancient and medieval counterparts elsewhere. The seminar will be devoted to the major characteristics, issues, and tensions of ancient Chinese religious culture: the ancestral sacrifice, reconstructed in its multi-media and mulivocal complexity; the creation of cultural memory and identity through ritual performance; the relation between ritual space, historical space, and memory/identity; a survey of the genres of religious performance texts; the characteristics of religious language; commemoration as the primary religious act; the fusion of the written and the oral in religious commemoration; the relation between ritual texts and their material carriers; and the phenomenon of ritual self-reference. The conference at the end of the project will focus on similar topics, and participants will include scholars from ancient Chinese religion, literature, history, anthropology, and art history. Princeton faculty with related interests in the study of religious aesthetics and cultural memory will also join the conference in order to engage in some additional cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural exchanges within the university.

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"The Moral Mystic: Mysticism and Moral Philosophy"
Christian Wildberg, Associate Professor of Classics, Organizer

Moral philosophy has two distinct but nevertheless inseparable tasks: First, to discover and describe the norms and values human beings have or ought to have; and second, to rationally justify these norms and values. The second task is incomparably more difficult than the former, and moral philosophers have offered widely differing models of justification. Some justifications appeal to a 'moral law' or to revealed biblical commandments, others to the criterion of the expedient and useful, others again to social and political nature of human beings, and so on. The project proposed here intends to pursue an entirely different route of justification by exploring the possibility of grounding the moral life in the most profound religious experience possible: the inner experience of being one with the divine (mystical union).

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"Seventeenth-Century 'Adamolatry' and Paradisal Return: A Project on Religion and Science"
Joanna Magali Picciotto, Assistant Professor of English, Organizer

The most radical Puritan reformers in seventeenth-century England famously presented their innovations as attempts to recover paradise; experimental scientists and literary artists of the period imagined their own projects in surprisingly similar terms. This project takes as its point of departure experimentalist constructions of Eden as a specifically epistemological paradise. Entranced by the notion of the original man's insusceptibility to perceptual and rational error, early experimentalists conceived of the contemporary discoveries of magnetism, the micro-world beneath the threshold of human perception, and the earth's motion around the sun as recoveries of Adam's knowledge. Telescopes, microsopes, and instruments like air pumps revealed bodies and forces that he had been able to discern through his eyes and intuitive powers alone. This account of paradisal epiestmology provided the first systematic justification for science as a progressive inquiry. The undergraduate seminar for this project, "Imagining Eden," will focus on the following themes: Adam as a philosophical savant and noble savage; paradisal sexuality and the role of Eve; original sin and fallenness; and the work that myths of origin perform in the present. The conference to emerge from this project, "Religion and the Prehistory of the Posthuman," will focus on the richly varied concept of synthetic humanity in the pre-modern world. As a whole, the project will help promote wider and more generous frams of historical reference in discussions about the cultural impact of technology while challenging assumptions about the incompatibility of "progress" with religious faith.

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"Poverty and Charity in Judaism in the Islamic World in the Period of the Cairo Geniza"
Mark R. Cohen, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Organizer

Given the centrality of the religious duty of charity in Judaism, research on poverty and social welfare in the rabbinic period, in the Middle Ages, and in early modern times is surprisingly sparse. The richest body of material for the history of poverty and social welfare in Judaism in premodern times reposes in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. This thematic project includes a graduate seminar, conference, and research that will eventuate in the publication of two books: a monograph and a collection of representative Geniza documents in English translation (mainly from Judeo-Arabic). Themes to be addressed include theoretical issues in the problematic of poverty and charity; Jewish ideas of poverty and charity as reflected in religious sources (biblical, midrashic, talmudic); and poverty and charity in Judaism compared with Christianity and Islam. In sum, the project addresses how a faith-based community in the Middle Ages responded to poverty, as reflected in documents from the Cairo Geniza.

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"Death and Dying in Buddhist Cultures"
Jacqueline I. Stone, Associate Professor of Religion, Organizer

Death-related topics -- such as preparations for dying, funerary and mortuary ritual, and the propitiation of ghosts and spirits -- encourage a multifaceted approach to Buddhist traditions that takes into account the interrelationship of doctrine and practice, of religious institutions and the larger society, and of Buddhism and local religious culture. Thus this theme is particularly useful for gaining insight into the practice of Buddhism as a lived religion in premodern societies and for pursuing the methodological question of how Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition has been appropriated by regional cultures, simultaneously transforming and being transformed by them. This thematic project includes an upper division undergraduate seminar, a small conference, and a personal research project.

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"Darwin and Religion: One Long Argument"
William Howarth, Professor of English, Organizer

Nature and significance of topic

The course will focus on readings from the fields of religion, literature, and science to explore four episodes in the historic clash between Darwin and religion: (1) his challenge to 19th-century evangelicalism, manifest in his writings and in those of Anglo-American theologians, philosophers, and writers; (2) the response of Social Darwinism, which proclaimed evolution to justify imperial and racial dominion; (3) the rise of 20th-century fundamentalism, from the Scopes trial to postwar creationists; and (4) the fast-growing turn toward "green" ecumenicism that engages fundamentalist as well as established churches in urgent debate over the concept of environmental stewardship as well as the need to construct a new code of bioethics.

The syllabus includes selections from Darwin's three major works; responses to his writings from figures such as Carlyle, Emerson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Melville, Dickens, the Brontes, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain; scholarly sources such as Gillian Beers, Darwin's Plots (1983) and David Locke, Science as Writing (1992); general-interest books like Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (1991), Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in our Time (1995), Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997), and Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995). We will also read creation myths, Genesis, and texts on creation or evolution by such figures as John Wesley, Dwight Moody, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday. These and other readings will allow scholars from several fields to engage in a dialogue about science, faith, and history.

A grant received from the Templeton Foundation will be used to support a summer 2001 writing workshop. Students will receive funds for attending sessions in which they work on converting their seminar papers into publishable essays.

For more information about this course, the conference, or other aspects of the Thematic Project, you may email William Howarth. Information about applying for the postdoctoral fellowship associated with this project is available by clicking here. For general information about Thematic Projects sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion, please email Anita Kline, Center Manager, or phone her at (609) 258-5545.

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"Cinema and Religious Expression"
P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Visual Arts, and Jeffrey L. Stout, Professor of Religion, Organizers

Religion and Cinema Conference, March 30-April 1, 2001.

Film screenings: Nathaniel Dorsky, TBA; Philippe Garrel, Le Lit de la vierge; Jean-Luc Godard, Scénario du film "Passion"; Kore-eda Hirokazu, Maborosi.

The conference on Religion and Cinema will bring together visual artists, film critics and historians, and scholars of religion to examine religious expression in film. Avant-garde filmmaker Nick Dorsky will open the conference on Friday evening with a screening of his short films and a talk on devotional cinema. Saturday's sessions will focus on the French cinema of the late Sixties and American films of the Forties and Fifties. On Sunday a discussion of Japanese cinema will open the question of the degree to which scholarly assumptions about "religion and film" have been distorted by almost exclusive attention to Christian examples.

Speakers will include Dudley Andrew, Nathaniel Dorsky, William LaFleur, Christine Marran, Tony Pipolo, Sally Shafto, P. Adams Sitney, Jeffrey Stout, and Judith Weisenfeld.

For more information and to register for the conference, click here.

Religion and Cinema Seminar

In fall 2000, Professors Sitney and Stout offered an undergraduate course on Religion and Cinema. This seminar will examine the depiction of religious figures and forces—both good and evil, divine and satanic—in film. We will consider aesthetic and ethical issues that arise when filmmakers use their medium (1) to hold up certain individuals as saintly or virtuous, (2) to portray the culture of their audience as depraved or doomed, or (3) to express convictions about the existence, nature, and actions of God. We will also examine how the religious convictions and formations of filmmakers affect their cinematic styles.

Students admitted to the seminar are expected to read George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, before the course begins. Other readings will be assigned on the syllabus. Films analyzed include Pasolini, The Gospel According to Matthew; Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ; Capra, Meet John Doe; Chaplin, The Kid; De Sica, Miracle in Milan; Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc; Hitchcock, The Wrong Man; Kenji Mizoguchi, Sansho the Baliff, or Kon Ichigawa, The Burmese Harp; Bresson, Diary of a Country Priest; Bergman, Winter Light; Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt; Fellini, The Nights of Cabiria; Dreyer, Ordet; Bergman, The Seventh Seal; Von Trier, Breaking the Waves; Brakhage, Blue Moses, Christ Mass Sex Dance, and The Dead; Anger, Lucifer Rising; Deren, Ritual in Transfigured Time; and Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev.

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"Songs of the Spirit: World Traditions of Religious Chant"
Peter Jeffery, Professor of Music, Organizer

Professor Jeffery offered a graduate course on sacred chant, a description of which follows:

To what extent is chanting a religious "universal," practiced by many (not all) religions, and having similar characteristics and purposes? Or is it more accurate to say that chant is a very different phenomenon in each of the religions (and historical periods) in which it is found? These are the central questions of this graduate seminar, which will examine the liturgical chant traditions of medieval Eastern and Western Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, from both comparative and historical perspectives. Our primary sources of information will include recordings, notated liturgical books, and live meetings with actual practitioners, though much secondary scholarly literature will also be studied.

In the first half of the semester, we aim to deal seriously with both the kinds of texts that tend to be chanted and the kinds of music that are used to chant them. Central in the second half will be the psychological aspects of chanting—its relationship to language, cognition, emotion, and altered consciousness—and the interpretations placed on it in different religions, e.g., as metaphors for spiritual experience, ecstasy, heaven, and so on. These issues are quite timely in a world where the conventional religions of the modern West—Protestantism, Reform Judaism, and even Catholicism—make little use of chant, while emerging New Religions often promote a syncretistic view that identifies medieval European Gregorian chant with Asian practices of meditation and alternative medicine. And they are no less timely in a world where Gregorian chant recordings are increasingly being re-used in contemporary rock music as found objects—without provoking any interest in the historical or religious background of this music—at the same time that many Westerners (in a seemingly unrelated development) are newly discovering Orthodox Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, where chanting is still an important element in worship.

Conference: "Traditions of Religious Chant: Practice and Perspectives" (April 11-13, 2000)

Speakers:
Peter Jeffery, Princeton University;
Anna Gade, Princeton University;
Bilal Hyde, San Francisco, California;
Guy Beck, Tulane University;
Boaz Tarsi, Jewish Theological Seminary;
Geshe Lobzang Tsetan, Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center;
Photios Ketsetzis, Holy Cross School of Theology;
Elizabeth Tolbert, Johns Hopkins University