RLST 081 SC -Precol Afri Chrstian Spiritualit

Institution: Scripps

Description: Precolonial African Christian Spiritualities. There is a widespread and unfortunate perception that African Christianity is a relatively modern phenomenon, that African literature began largely in the twentieth century and only as a response to European colonization, and that African cultures of the last two millenia have had little appreciable impact on the flow of human history. This course will upset these perceptions by drawing on an immense corpus of African Christian writings penned between the second and seventeenth centuries on spirituality, the body, and ritual traditions that were written as much in native African languages (e.g., Coptic, Ge’ez, Old Nubian, Amharic)as they were in foreign lanugages (e.g., Greek and Latin), and that transformed the contours of Christianity in ways still evident today. This course is designed to be appropriate for first-year students and will offer a basic introduction to critical methods in religious studies, including post-/decolonial studies, queer theory, and discourse analysis.