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"Although we often think of religious freedom as a fixed philosophical doctrine of Enlightenment liberalism, it is a concept continually being (re)made from the ground up in increasingly important ways that today affect national politics and the judiciary. Nowadays, religious freedom has cultivated oppositional meanings: it holds together both a freedom from and to supersede government regulation; where actions in the name of religious freedom seek both to separate from government and to radically engage it as a theological force. We begin by taking this tension as a provocation to look locally and draw widely from a variety of ethnographic, historical, philosophical, literary, and other present-day texts and media, which will deepen how we understand the significant scope of what is at play and at stake in contemporary America and its politics. Through our readings and discussions, we will better grasp how religious freedom and its legal interpretations have grown from the bottom up, moving through local policies, social geographies and institutions, such as churches and prisons, as much as through any singular adherence to transcendent philosophical doctrine. While this class is an overarching exploration of how American Christianity has developed, it will pay particular attention to the Alabama and Louisiana prison systems and their distinctive religious histories. And we will focus on how the varied conceptual forms of religious freedom relate to the social geographies, religious discourses, literary texts, and media produced in and through ideas of the American South."