The Divine (at) Risk? Open Theism, Classical Theism and Beyond

Did God take a risk in creating the world? How are divine and human freedom related? Can we confess God's sovereignty in the face of evil? This course will explore the different ways in which the God of history is viewed by advocates and critics of "Open Theism." Our examination will stimulate our own reflections on how we might best understand and, indeed, image God's love, knowledge and power.

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Feminist Social Thought

This course will focus on the work of prominent feminist philosophers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Seyla Benhabib, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. We will explore their analyses of gender, oppression, and justice, as well as identify the links between their work and broader philosophical issues and questions.

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Grace as an Aesthetic Concept

During the Renaissance, a notion of grace served as the central critical concept for understanding art, and the achievement of grace in art was taken to be the highest artistic ideal. The course will examine the concept of grace within its theological, philosophical, and art theoretical contexts in an effort to understand more completely how art was thought to function in the early modern period. It will also consider the place of grace in the development of the aesthetics tradition.

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Imagining the Word with Ricoeur: Narrative, Action, and the Sacred in Ricoeur's Hermeneutic Phenomenology

This course will explore an important piece of Paul Ricoeur's contribution to the philosophy of language, paying special attention to his three-volume work, Time and Narrative. After gaining appreciation for the "healthy circle" that Ricoeur discovers between time and narrative, we will explore his understanding of the meaning of religious uses of narrative in particular, using the anthology Figuring the Sacred as our guide.

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IDS - Way, Truth, Life: (Re)visions of Truth from the PreSocratics to Hegel

This seminar reexamines Western conceptions of truth from the preSocratics to Hegel in light of contemporary debate over the nature and meaning of truth. How and out of what contexts has truth been conceived in the Western tradition? Which contexts have been privileged and which forgotten? How might one's understanding of the Western truth tradition be reconceived to address postmodern concerns? Seminar style, weekly reflections, major paper.

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