Religion 226 - Romanticism and Religion

This course investigates the three-way convergence between religion, environmental thinking, and democracy through the loose and often plural tradition of romanticism in the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Romanticism’s central features—including the exaltation of the ordinary and common, the unlimited creative potential of the individual, a discontent with limits on the freedom to become who one is, and an equal participation of all in the public realm—have been simultaneously celebrated and maligned since romanticism first crossed the Atlantic. Its emphasis on self-reliance and the political project of remaking society into something better have fueled a variety of social and political projects in the United States, including movements for racial and gender justice, as well as environmental justice. A central question for this course will be to what extent romanticism supplied what could be considered the social material for a democratic and environmental culture—traditions, practices, beliefs, characters, habits, and virtues (as opposed to a romanticism that primarily offered a solitary individual with a purely aesthetic appreciation of the natural world). This course will try to access romanticism’s impact on political, religious, and environmental thinking in the United States by reading some of the most influential classical sources of the movement in the nineteenth century, its pragmatist evolution in the twentieth century, and some of its most powerful adaptations in the present.

Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Friesner.