This course will offer you an opportunity to reflect about what it means to teach or educate “Christianly.” It will situate a Reformational understanding of Christian education within two distinct types of “context”: first, the “spirits of the age” that are at work influencing our shared modern, Canadian society; and second, the local context of the school you work at. The ‘spiritual’ context will help us see Christian education as an alternative, not simply to “secular” education, but to other patterns of spiritual formation, like consumerist education or workaholic education. The ‘local’ context will then allow us to discuss how Christian education can be ‘put to work’ in your day-to-day activities as a teacher or administrator. The goal is to give you time, space, and resources to develop a clearer understanding of how faith impacts education in general, and how your faith shapes what you do as an educator more specifically.
29 November 2024
What's Christian About Christian Education?: Reformational Philosophy
Called to Teach: Formation and Learning
Called to Teach is designed to inspire and support K-12 educators in their personal and professional journey of teaching and learning. Through this course, participants will explore their vocation as educators, reflecting on their teaching practice in the context of faith and spiritual disciplines. This inner journey invites educators to seek refreshment and renewal in their work while considering the formation and learning of their students.
The course aims to address these key questions:
- What is my calling as an educator?
- How can I intentionally live out my calling in teaching and leadership?
Lead From Where You Are: Making a Difference in the Face of Tough Problems, Big Questions, and Organizational Politics
Leadership is not about personality, authority, position, influence, or power as such. Leadership is an art, a craft, a practice, to which everyone is called sometime or other, in widely different situations. Leadership can be practiced with varying degrees of authority, from any position, at varying scales of influence, and with varying access to different sources of power. Leadership is the work of motivating a group of people to act in certain ways as they shape what they share.
In this course we will explore how to contribute leadership when we have a particular, recognized position of authority in a group, and also regardless of our position in a group. We will learn how to contribute leadership when our group has clear, commonly agreed-upon procedures and goals, and when there are not (or not yet) clear, commonly agreed-upon procedures and goals (so that we must practice imaginative discernment). We will learn how to contribute leadership both to make beneficial change happen and to ensure needed maintenance.
9 October 2024
Material Spirituality: Rethinking Religion
*Attention TST students: you have to contact the ICS Registrar to complete your registration.
Rhetoric as Philosophy from Isocrates to the Age of Abelard and Heloise
This seminar examines the ancient and medieval discipline of rhetoric and its practitioners’ claim that it represents a properly philosophical discourse. It does so in terms of a selection of texts drawn from the works of Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Abelard and Heloise. In the process, it explores the relationship between affectivity and discursive validity as an implication of the cultural intent of philosophy, i.e., whether historical philosophies are best thought of as a speculative sciences, arts of right living, or whether they call out to be thought of in other terms altogether.
(MA, PhD)
God in Flesh and Blood: Revolutions in Christology
Although theologians often approach “Christology” by asking how Jesus of Nazareth might be best understood in terms of certain systematic concerns or doctrinal positions—a perspective that gives rise to questions such as: How are the divine and human natures of Christ related?, What are the merits of, or alternatives to, substitutionary atonement?, and How might a virginal conception thwart the transmission of original sin?—those who are more oriented to the discipline of “biblical theology” are more likely to prioritize how the New Testament portrayal of Jesus is related to the narrative movement—or movements—of the Hebrew Bible. This leads either to a different set of questions or (just as importantly) to a different angle on the kinds of questions asked above. This course, on potential revolutions in Christological thinking, will draw on contemporary NT scholarship in order to explore this latter approach.
Students can also buy the book directly from the publisher, HarperCollins.
OPTION A: **James Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (Louisville, NJ: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).They can also buy the eBook for $10 from Google Books.Chapters/Indigo sells both the print book and eBook ($15.99, Kobo).Barnes and Noble also sells both the print and eBook versions.OPTION B: **Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. Expanded Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).Thriftbooks is another option.Abebooks is another option.Barnes and Noble also sells the print version.
Meaning/Being/Knowing: The Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Implications of a Christian Ontology
“Meaning is the being of all that has been created and the nature even of our selfhood.” With these enigmatic words, which form part of the introduction to his magisterial New Critique of Theoretical Thought, the neo-Calvinist philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd signals his intention to de-centre the central concern of Ontology by relativizing (which is to say thoroughly relating) the philosophical notion of Being to Meaning, even to the point of (re-)defining creation’s being as meaning—all in the conviction that this will enable us to engage in (rather than circumvent or supersede) the work of Ontology (and thus Epistemology) in a truly systematic, integrally Christian, way. Although it might seem as though Dooyeweerd is merely substituting one metaphysical idea for another, his reference to the nature of our selfhood here indicates that, for all its theoretical import for Philosophical Anthropology, this highly suggestive proposal also has profound implications for how we might both appreciate and pull upon our deepest (religious) self-knowledge, which takes shape before the face of God as we face the world. To do the work of Ontology well—to gain genuine insight into the “nature of things” and to identify the contours and coherence of the world’s general structures without undermining investigation or denaturing experience—will require that we also draw upon a pre-theoretical form of Knowing, and a spiritual grounding and hope, that will always precede and exceed our understanding.
Implicit in Dooyeweerd’s vision of and for Ontology, we might say, is the provocative claim that creation does not “have” meaning but “is” meaning (a paraphrase that, tellingly, uses the language of Being to relativize Being). But what does Dooyeweerd mean by “meaning”? And what difference might this systematically relational, spiritually open, with-reference-to-self-and-beyond re-centering make (a) to the detailed, nitty-gritty work that needs to be done in any given academic field, and (b) to the theoretical integration that requires both intra- and inter-disciplinary reflection? After an opening discussion about the phenomenon of “post-truth,” to which we shall return at the end of the course, we shall explore the inter-play between Meaning, Being, and Knowing via a close reading of Hendrik Hart’s Understanding Our World: An Integral Ontology, paying careful attention to the ways in which his interpretation of Dooyeweerd’s ideas—not least the discussion of “meaning” that occurs at the midpoint of his Appendix (see 8.1.4) and in a pivotal section within his central chapter (see 4.4 and 405–406n37)—might deepen our insight into how what is known in faith and articulated via our web of beliefs can help us identify and evaluate the core concepts and the conceptual-ontological connections that play such an integral, influential role in the scholarly disciplines with which we are engaged. In paying attention to develop ments in Hart’s Ontology and Epistemology since the publication of this work, we shall also ask whether the broadly Dooyeweerdian position he initially adopts is as post-metaphysical as it may first appear.
In this iteration of the course, we shall pay special attention to the central concerns of political theory and aesthetics, including their respective interests in the way we posit societal principles and protect, reveal, expand, and find ourselves via the symbols that make up the fabric of our life, history, and society. In further probing the relationship between the aesthetic and political dimensions of created meaning, and between the mystery of our selfhood and the structural contours of reality, we shall also be asking what the development of an Ontology in the Reformational tradition might offer to the scholarly search for disciplinary integrity and interdisciplinary integration—this being a neo-Calvinism in which the unity and diversity we rightly seek are typically seen as covenantally, rather than ontotheologically, grounded.
Given this relational emphasis, we may well wonder what might happen if “Being” were to make way for—or make a way for—“Loving.” Perhaps, following Dooyeweerd’s (post-metaphysical?) turn to “Meaning,” we may find that a Christian scholarly approach to knowing and understanding our world and ourselves “after Being” may have something new to say to the peril and promise of life “post-truth”!
2 July 2024
Deeper Learning: From Wonder to Inquiry to Practice
How to Govern a School
Dr. Gideon Strauss
ICS 260002 W25
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)