This course approaches American religions through historical study of the pursuit of ecstatic, utopian, and healing experiences. We will seek to understand America’s religious past by investigating specific contexts in which Americans have sought radical release from everyday consciousness, social disorder, and pain. These pursuits, while distinct from one another in crucial ways, share an intense uneasiness with life as it is and an equally intense hopefulness in a particular solution. Sometimes people explicitly theorized these pursuits, but often they simply lived them as extensions of practical knowledge. In all cases we will explore the reasons for their hope as well as their responses to its triumph and its all-too-frequent failure. Whether successful or not, those driving these endeavors remained (sometimes despite their desires) permeated by and influential upon the worlds around them. Accordingly, we will explore the ways their hopes and desires—while often expressed with unique assertiveness and addressed with solutions considered radical—linked them with the wider communities from which they emerged.
This syllabus was created for the Young Scholars in American Religion program.
John C. SeitzAuthor
Fordham UniversityInstitution
Private College or University Institution Type
Syllabus Resource Type
Undergraduate Course Class Type
2014 Date Published
Religious Studies, History Discipline
Catholic, General Comparative Traditions, Indigenous, New Religious Movements, Protestant Religous Tradition
Gender/Women/ Sexuality, Health/Death, Pluralism/Secularism/Culture Wars, Race/Ethnicity Topics