REL 3150 - Religion and Literature

Goals: To show both how imaginative secular literature can be religious—e.g., communicate a religious vision, help shape one’s character and inform one’s deepest self-understanding, legitimate or de-legitimate social forms and practices—and how the study of such literature has become a key element in the field of religious studies.

Content: The specific topic and genre will vary from year to year. The focus may be plays, novels, short stories, poetry, or auto/biography. It may range in scope from an exhaustive study of a single literary work (e.g., Melville’s Moby Dick), to the works of a single author (e.g., Margaret Atwood, Jon Hassler, Flannery O’Connor), to a comparison of different authors (e.g., C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James). Or it may be thematically arranged: e.g., Jewish Stories of Wonder; The Poetry of Prayer (Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, Dickinson, Berryman); Love and the Novel: A Critique of Power; How We Die; Modern Apocalyptic Literature; or Living With the Land: An Ecology of Fiction.

Taught: Annually

Credits: 4