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In the United States, the nation that in its infancy so famously erected a “wall between Church and State,” religion remains a persistent, and insistently public concern today, occupying our literary imagination, filling dockets and riding the national airwaves. Far from dropping out of a rapidly secularizing public sphere, specific forms of religious life have become deeply embedded in America, while the nation has also impressed its own particular institutional character upon religious expression. This course takes an anthropological lens to the particularity of American forms of religious life, asking what claims they make on the liberal subject, and through what enduring institutional forms and channels.