Body and Soul

Some of the greatest achievements of modern science involve understanding the human body and the human mind – functions, origins, capabilities, how they fail and how they can be mended.  However, for millennia religious and spiritual traditions have claimed their own knowledge and practices concerning these things.  What happens when traditional understandings of what it means to be human intersects with scientific approaches?  This course will examine several areas where science and religion have had or are having deep engagement over the nature of the mind and body: medicine and healing, free will, food, gender and sexuality, life and death, and the essence of religious belief itself.  We will take a cross-cultural approach to examine how body, mind, and soul are grappled with in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous traditions. One of the central themes of the course will be thinking about the opportunities and problems posed by the way the variety of global faiths can intersect with modern scientific perspectives.   Readings include: Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras; The Baghavad Gita; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; Thomas Aquinas, “Questions on the soul”; Al-Kindi, “On the intellect”; Avicenna, De anima; St Hildegard of Bingen; Anne Fadiman, The spirit catches you and you fall down; Alvord, Scalpel and the silver bear; Gyatso, How to understand the mind; Brown, et al, Whatever happened to the soul?; Obayashi, Death and afterlife; Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast; Newberg, Why God won’t go away; Griffith, Born again bodies; Mary Douglas, Purity and danger;  Greensberg, The Body in Religion: Cross-cultural perspectives; Numbers and Brooke, Science and religion around the world.