REL 309 - Rivers, Nationalisms, and Religion

This course explores the roles – imagined and temporal – played by rivers at the intersection of religious communities and nationalisms. Students will experience an embodied class, putting them in contact (both literally and metaphorically) with water throughout the Portland area as well as the various communities that connect to them. As we get to know our role in local watersheds around Reed, we will get our feet wet in the academic waters of discourses on religion, ethnicity, and nationalism through biblical and other religious literatures and its more contemporary reception in religious communities. From this lens we think alongside Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest and other borderlands such as the North American Southwest and the Holy Land (Israel/Palestine) about hydrology projects as paradigms of nationalist expansion. How do waters shape the “us” ancient communities envisioned themselves to be? How do bodies of water shape the histories of belonging and exclusion we now inhabit at Reed and in/around Portland, Oregon?

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 and one 100-level religion course in the study of Judaism or Christianity
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.