A Hindu temple can be a simple structure by the side of the road or a large complex including many buildings. Temples serve as dwelling places for deities, surrounded by markets selling offerings and flowers. The inner sanctuaries are small and intended for a few worshippers at a time. Above the sanctuaries are central towers, shaped like the mountain home of the gods and brightly painted.

This course examines the development of the western intellectual tradition from the fall of the Roman Empire through the High Middle Ages. Our basic premise will be that the triumph of Christianity in the west was not the inevitable outcome it might appear from hindsight. Our attention will therefore be focused not only on the development of Christian thought and practice, but on its challengers as well. The core themes of the course include the emergence of a uniform Christian orthodoxy in late antiquity; the development of monastic practice and its attendant intellectual traditions; and the geographical spread of Christian beliefs. Working in opposition to those trends were other forces, which we will also address in our readings. In particular, we will consider the persistence of northern paganism; the rise of Islam; the solidification of a separate Byzantine orthodoxy; indigenous heretical movements; and the ambiguous position of Jews in all of European society.

Short Description:
A new, 21st century verse translation of Homer's epic work, translated by Michael Heumann.

Long Description:
There is no greater introduction to world literature than Homer’s Iliad. The great epic poem tells the story of the Bronze Age war between the Achaeans (Greeks) and Trojans, the great warriors who did the fighting, the woman they were fighting for (and fighting over), and the gods who egged them on.

This is a new, 21st century verse translation by Michael Heumann. It seeks to retain the spirit and language of Homer’s original Greek while making it readable and enjoyable for a modern audience.

Michael Heumann is a Professor of English at Imperial Valley College in California. He holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside. This is his first translation.

Word Count: 149411

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If you have any trouble with the audio, try this version: https://youtu.be/mQWpO889MrQ(it is the same video with enhanced audio).

The Mexica were an incredibly advanced society……. but their religion and cosmovision is immensely layered and complex.

So in this brief lecture we’ll introduce Mexica philosophy, religion, and their worldview.

We’ll also introduce the most important deities, and talk about which deities are related because in many ways, the Aztec gods are a family history.

This course examines the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) as an expression of the religious life and thought of ancient Israel, and a foundational document of Western civilization. A wide range of methodologies, including source criticism and the historical-critical school, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and literary and canonical approaches are applied to the study and interpretation of the Bible. Special emphasis is placed on the Bible against the backdrop of its historical and cultural setting in the Ancient Near East.

Word Count: 129816

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This course is an introduction to Islam from the perspective of media and sound studies, intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam in its various manifestations has had a complex relationship with media. While much contemporary writing focuses on Islam in the media, this course explores how many aspects of Islamic practice and thinking might be understood as media technologies that facilitate the inscription, storage and transmission of knowledge. Central questions include: How do Islam and media technologies relate? What kinds of practices of inscription and transmission characterize Islam in all its varieties across time and place? How might Islamic thought and practice be understood in light of databases, networks, and audiovisual sensation? Given the rich diversity in Islam historically and geographically, emphasis will be placed on these interconnected but divergent practices from the earliest revelations of the Qur'an to contemporary Islamist political movements, with geographies spanning from Indonesia to the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Europe and North America. In addition to exploring these themes through reading and writing, students will be encouraged to complete course assignments and projects in media, using audiovisual documentary or composition as a means of responding to the course themes.

This course explores how our views of Jewish history have been formed and how this history can explain the survival of the Jews as an ethnic/religious group into the present day. Special attention is given to the partial and fragmentary nature of our information about the past, and the difficulties inherent in decoding statements about the past that were written with a religious agenda in mind. It also considers complex events in Jewish history -- from early history as portrayed in the Bible to recent history, including the Holocaust.

Short Description:
Knowledge for Humans is a textbook aimed at introducing students to fundamental questions about knowledge and skepticism. Many topics often covered in epistemology textbooks are also covered here, such as radical Cartesian skepticism, phenomenalism, externalism, and naturalism. But the text also covers useful topics that are not usually included, such as the social conditions for knowledge, common fallacies, Bayesianism, the internet, conspiracy theories, and how we should go about arguing with one another. It’s written in an easy-going style with clear examples and funny diagrams.

Long Description:
Knowledge for Humans is a textbook aimed at introducing students to fundamental questions about knowledge and skepticism. Many topics often covered in epistemology textbooks are also covered here, such as radical Cartesian skepticism, phenomenalism, externalism, and naturalism. But the text also covers useful topics that are not usually included, such as the social conditions for knowledge, common fallacies, Bayesianism, the internet, conspiracy theories, and how we should go about arguing with one another. It’s written in an easy-going style with clear examples and funny diagrams.

Word Count: 42952

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This video provides a brief history of Latin American Liberation Theology and explains why the Vatican condemned it.

This website provides the film script, reviews, a discussion forum, and 15 essays on Hasidism.

Une approche théologique et psychopédagogique - A Theological and Psychopedagogial approach

Short Description:
Comment peut-on conceptualiser la pauvreté au sein de l’église ? Quelle doit être l’attitude du chrétien face à la pauvreté ? Plus précisément, partant de l’hypothèse qu’il existe un lien entre la pauvreté et le sous-développement, le livre tente de répondre aux questions suivantes : Comment peut-on conceptualiser le terme de développement ? Quelles sont les attitudes qui encouragent et qui favorisent le développement ? « L’église et la lutte contre la pauvreté en Haiti », invite les leaders religieux à conjuguer leurs efforts en vue de réduire la pauvreté à son plus bas niveau dans la société haïtienne en général et au sein de l’église en particulier. ------How can we conceptualize poverty within the church? What should be the attitude of the Christian towards poverty? More precisely, starting from the hypothesis that there is a link between poverty and underdevelopment, the book attempts to answer the following questions: How can we conceptualize the term development? What are the attitudes that encourage and promote development? "The Church and the Fight Against Poverty in Haiti" invites religious leaders to join their efforts to reduce poverty to its lowest level in Haitian society in general and within the church in particular.

Long Description:
Comment peut-on conceptualiser la pauvreté au sein de l’église ? Quelle doit être l’attitude du chrétien face à la pauvreté ? Plus précisément, partant de l’hypothèse qu’il existe un lien entre la pauvreté et le sous-développement, le livre tente de répondre aux questions suivantes : Comment peut-on conceptualiser le terme de développement ? Quelles sont les attitudes qui encouragent et qui favorisent le développement ? « L’église et la lutte contre la pauvreté en Haiti », invite les leaders religieux à conjuguer leurs efforts en vue de réduire la pauvreté à son plus bas niveau dans la société haïtienne en général et au sein de l’église en particulier.

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How can we conceptualize poverty within the church? What should be the attitude of the Christian towards poverty? More precisely, starting from the hypothesis that there is a link between poverty and underdevelopment, the book attempts to answer the following questions: How can we conceptualize the term development? What are the attitudes that encourage and promote development? « The Church and the Fight Against Poverty in Haiti » invites religious leaders to join their efforts to reduce poverty to its lowest level in Haitian society in general and within the church in particular.

Word Count: 36649

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Spiritual, magical, and "occult" aspects of human behavior in anthropological and historical perspective: magic, ritual curing, trance, spirit possession, sorcery, and accusations of witchcraft. Material drawn from traditional nonwestern societies, medieval and early modern Europe, and colonial and contemporary North America.

Short Description:
The book examines the work of Terence Grieder, an early pre-Columbian art historian of wide-ranging interests and often provocative stances. His students and other intellectual descendants discuss his major ideas through examples drawn from their own work. The work of those he mentored is in the end the most important testament to his continuing influence in the field.

Word Count: 77114

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This assignment is designed as a mini-research project with the purpose of having students engage with marginalized actors in history. The purpose is to help students find themselves in the archives by focusing on self-representation that is important to their own socio-economic and ethnic groups. By providing historical research in the form of primary and secondary documents on figures that have been historically "left out" of the historical narrative, the students will help fill the gaps in the archive, be active in the creation of new curriculum, and gain a better understanding of marginalization and the power of historical memory in the process.

This course provides an exploration of colonial and postcolonial clashes between theories of healing and embodiment in the African world and those of western bio-medicine. It examines how Afro-Atlantic religious traditions have challenged western conceptions of illness, healing, and the body and have also offered alternative notions of morality, rationality, kinship, gender, and sexuality. It also analyzes whether contemporary western bio-medical interventions reinforce colonial or imperial power in the effort to promote global health in Africa and the African diaspora.

Short Description:
This book is about Islamic history and how it pertains to us in the world forum of Christians and Muslims as well.

Word Count: 105883

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Mind the Gap encourages you to be mindful of that gap that takes place in various transitions in life: when you go away to college, travel to a foreign country, move to a new city, or start a new job. Until you start to feel at home in your new environment, you must negotiate feelings of discomfort. Mindfulness draws attention to your experience of transition, enabling you to cultivate an embodied presence, receptivity, and awareness of whatever arises in yourself and your surroundings, without judging or rejecting your experience. All too often, when we feel uncomfortable or unsettled, we immediately want to alleviate our feelings of discomfort by seeking comfort or distraction. When we do this, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow and develop in new ways.

An Open Access Anthology of Greek and Roman Myth

Short Description:
Mythoi Koinoi: An Online, Open-Access Anthology of Greek and Roman Myth provides undergraduate university students with free, easy access to primary source texts and images for Greek and Roman mythology. Mythoi Koinoi means "Mythology for the People" in Ancient Greek, and it is intended to give everyone who engages with it access to the writings and artistic creations of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Long Description:
Mythoi Koinoi: An Online, Open-Access Anthology of Greek and Roman Myth began with the observation that many of the texts that we study in our Greek and Roman mythology classes have translations that are available online, either in the public domain or under open access copyright, though many of them are archaic, unreadable, and therefore inaccessible to modern students. Accessibility, then, has been the guiding principle for the book. We set out to update these open access translations, providing clear introductions that situate each text according to time, place, and genre, and organizing them into thematic chapters. We have adapted all translations that are more than forty years old for readability, while maintaining the integrity of the text and its faithfulness to the original languages.

Additionally, while there are thousands of primary source images related to Ancient Greek and Roman mythology available online, they are generally uncontextualized and scattered across multiple platforms, including museum databases, open access media collections, and popular webpages. We collected and organized these images, situating them within their respective chapters and providing necessary context for identification and interpretation.

The anthology contains more than 80 primary source texts from 35 authors, along with hyperlinks to online translations of many more. It has more than 600 high-resolution images of artwork from ancient Greece and Rome. In crafting the book, we have followed best practices for Universal Design for Learning. All images come with captions, descriptions and alternate text, for those that are unable to view them. There are over 500 glossary entries that are accessible either through links within each of the primary texts, or through the glossary section at the back of the book.

The book contains 43 chapters, organized into 7 parts, starting from the myths of creation and destruction, and going through the aftermath of the Trojan War. The sixth chapter focuses specifically on mythology unique to Ancient Rome, and the seventh chapter focuses on the mythology and archaeology of cities and spaces. We have also included mythology from Mesopotamia and the Levant in two chapters, “Aphrodite” and “Flood Myths.” We hope that these chapters will give instructors and students the opportunity to explore some of the ways in which ancient Greek and Roman myth is connected to earlier mythology from ancient West Asia.

Word Count: 386906

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Excerpted primary texts from the East Asian philosophical traditions, including: Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, Sikhism, and historical Zoroastrianism.