RELI 5850 L: Screening Religion: Religion and Public Life
Instructor: Dr. Deidre Butler
Course Format: Blended
This seminar in the academic study of religion explores film as a rich site for thinking about religion generally and religion and public life specifically. As such our approach to film is grounded in religious studies and is separate from and fully distinct from the approaches of film studies. The seminar will view and critically reflect on a series of films, in class and outside of class, including: documentary and narrative film, Hollywood, independent, Canadian and world cinema. Films will focus on and represent various religious traditions while engaging diverse religious themes and questions.
A series of linked questions set out the theoretical territory and the screening choices of this seminar: (1) How does film participate in the construction of our understanding of the category of Religion? How are films implicated in key religious studies binaries such as secular / religious, insider / outsider, religious / spiritual, public / private? How are these binaries complicated through film? (2) How do films participate in religion and public life through representations of religion, religious themes, and individual religious traditions? How do they disrupt the distinction between public and private expressions of religion? (3) How do certain faith communities wield film to represent themselves and their worldview? How do members of religious communities engage film as an internal form of critique and activism? (4) How do films participated in contested public religious discourses around political and social conflict, atheism, sexuality, colonialism, gender etc.