We offer a broad and diverse undergraduate curriculum focusing on the intertwined relationship between religion and politics across U.S. history, from the colonial era to the present. We also support early career scholars with fellowships that offer teaching and research opportunities at the Center.
Courses
Our courses range widely in topics, but all focus on the cultivation of research and interpretive skills necessary for analyzing and responding to issues that shape society and culture in the United States.
Gateway Courses
Gateway courses are required for the minor in religion and politics and serve as an introduction to the field of study.
This course traces how conceptions of “religion” and “the state” changed in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of a new millennium.
This course investigates the intersections of the law and the social history of religious freedom in America. It examines issues such as constitutional principles of religious freedom and the rights of religious groups to dissent, from America’s founding to the present.
Please check back soon for a gateway course offering!
Please check below for our other course offerings this semester. Read more about gateway courses and the undergraduate minor in religion and politics here.
Our courses cover a wide spectrum of topics related to the intersection of American religion and politics both historically and in the present. Select a semester to see our most recent course offerings or scroll to the bottom to view past courses.
The Midwest is the crossroads of America, a major driver of industrial, economic, and political change in the United States since the early nineteenth century. Viewed from St. Louis, what makes this region such a rich place of religious encounter, experimentation, and reinvention?
This course pursues two major lines of inquiry in modern Western political thought: the relation between the individual and the state, and the means of holding state power accountable.
This course traces how conceptions of “religion” and “the state” changed in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of a new millennium.
This course considers religion and politics in the founding period of English settlement in America through the American Revolution. It pays particular attention to ideas about the good society, interactions among Indigenous (or Native) Americans and English settlers, and revolution.
This course will examine the close relationship between religion and sport in modern American history and will push students beyond the sports-as-religion paradigm to consider sport as a medium of exchange between the overlapping influences of celebrity, national politics, religion, and the economy.
What does theology have to do with politics? This course attempts to answer that question by reading and discussing important texts from the western Christian tradition and investigating what they have to say about issues such as political revolution, loyalties to the nation, economic policy, gender, and race.
This seminar will explore the roots and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both inside the U.S. and abroad. We will pay particular attention to beliefs, economic and social values, gender, and race as variables within the religious community.
This seminar focuses on the formation of “spirituality” in American culture from the Transcendentalist world of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman on through more recent expressions of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” sensibility.
