Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
About the text: The Song of Songs has been a basic biblical foundation for both Jewish and Christian mysticism over the centuries. Modern readers may find it hard to understand how these highly erotic love poems were read as describing the love between God and his people and God and the individual, but the great Jewish and Christian mystics can help us to grasp this message, as we can see in the Sermons on the Song of Songs of the Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), the most influential of all Christian commentators.
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