2025/05/30
全球開唱之反戰經典：Losing My Religion
R.E.M. - Losing My Religion
(Official HD Music Video)
Gregorian - Losing My Religion
(Official Video)
非關宗教：以下摘錄宗教系所的專業說明
Columbia University in the City of New York
Department of Religion
Spring 2021
Losing My Religion, 3 pts, UN1320
Losing My Religion
The R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe explained that the phrase “losing my religion” in the song of the same title does not refer to what we might commonly understand by “religion.” Rather it cites the expression used in the Southern U.S. for losing one’s temper, feeling frustrated, exasperated, and desperate. The loss present in John Legend and Common’s song “Glory” from the movie Selma are the lives lost to the unattenuated history of racist violence and in the struggle against structural white supremacy. In this context, for Blacks “freedom is like religion.” Like religion. Even if the song does not shy away from Christian theological tropes, “religion” here too remains elusive. Living through a major global pandemic as we are (although arguably, racism and capitalism are also ongoing—albeit mostly unacknowledged—global pandemics), we are witnessing the losses attributable to Covid-19 precipitating changing practices and rituals of marking losses, mourning, and building community in the present. Apart from impacting practices that we generally term “religious,” loss and living with losses also reveal what may have been our individual and collective “religion” lost and what may emerge as the “religions” we hew to newly or nonetheless.
In this course we will explore how various meanings of “religion” might offer us conceptual tools for thinking about loss, community, and damaged life. We will examine how religious practices change in relation to losses and reflect on losses of religion both personally (e.g., because one’s hitherto familiar value system breaks down) and collectively (e.g., the forced conversions and suppression of religious traditions by colonialism). We will track how loss and rituals surrounding loss can change how history, time, space, and meaning are experienced. We will ask what if anything comes after or alongside loss, especially given the perdurance of loss that is brought about by centuries of systemic violence. Given the circumstances of our moment, we will also take time to reflect on the (hopefully only temporary) loss of face-to-face communal learning in a shared classroom and what new rituals of virtual learning mean for building communities and relating to others and the world.
Rather than trying to settle on definitive answers, this course will cultivate a process of open-ended collective inquiry in which students will be encouraged to think autonomously and to challenge facile solutions. Students should come away from the course with an expanded sense of how we grapple with issues related to loss, damaged life, community, complicated and violent pasts, the precarity of the present, vanishing futures and how religion and religious formations are entangled with these issues well beyond religious communities. Ideally, students should experience this course as enlarging the set of critical tools at their disposal for creative and rigorous thinking.
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