RELG 041B. Religion and Nature: Wonders Signs & Portents

Wonder is the province of the wide-eyed child in the woods, and the wild-eyed scientist in the lab. Wonder at the world is prompted by the odd and uncanny, the strange and novel, the transcendent and sublime, as well as encounters with the monstrous and horrific. This course centers the experience of natural wonder in American history as a primary religious impulse. Through an affect theory frame that approaches religion through embodied emotions, we will chronicle the formation of modern American religious communities and ways of knowing and doing that arose from encounters between indigenous Americans, European settlers, and enslaved Africans with the other-than-human spectacular.
Topics covered include: diverse cosmologic perspectives on celestial events (eclipses, meteor storms); plant medicine (ethnobotany/ethnopharmacology), psychedelics, and entheogens; human-animal relations; levitation and trance reports, spectrality (hauntings, monsters, UFO sightings); the mysteries of quantum entanglement; the apocalyptic imagination and the Anthropocene.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for ENVS
Fall 2024. Padilioni.
Catalog chapter: Religion
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/religion

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