Our job today is to find and think about materials that help us to consider the contexts from which the various works for your course come. 

Some questions include:

• How did these works, stories, narratives, come to be on your syllabus for this class, on the shelves of the library, or digitized online? 
• How have scholars used these works over time and responded to them?

We'll talk about strategies for learning more about the people responsible for creating and publishing these texts, and the political and economic conditions surrounding the creation of these texts.  We'll do this with an eye towards exploring how these contexts shape and deepen our understanding of the study of religion.