God/Sex/Word/Flesh: Gender, Theology, and the Body

How is our agenda for theology related to our gender? Is 'God' a male word? Is the 'Word mad flesh' a male God? Does the experience of women change how God is (made) known? Is sexuality embraced by the resurrection? Attentive to the work of feminist theologians and biblical scholars, we will attempt to develop an 'embodied' theology open to the biblical vision that God will be 'all in all'.

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"To the Unknown God": Paul and Some Philosophers

This course explores the current fascination with the writings of Paul among non-Christian thinkers engaged in the study of political theology. How has this turn to Paul changed secular thinking on political matters? How has the work of these philosophers affected the Christian understanding of scripture?

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Beauty: Theology, Ethics, or Aesthetics?

Is beauty simply "in the eye of the beholder" or is it something more? Is it a way to God, a moral precept, or the specific locus for a unique kind of pleasure? This course examines a variety of subjective and objective views of beauty in the history of Western philosophy and theology from antiquity to the present (e.g. in the thought of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Weil, Barth, and Balthasar). It will also consider the implications of these views of beauty for the production of the visual arts, music, and literary culture in Western religion and society.

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Religion, Life & Society: Reformational Philosophy

An exploration of central issues in philosophy, as addressed by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and the "Amsterdam School" of neo-Calvinian thought. The course tests the relevance of this tradition for recent developments in Western philosophy. Special attention is given to critiques of foundationalism, metaphysics, and modernity within reformational philosophy and in other schools of thought.

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Philosophers on Education

Many major philosophical figures addressed educational issues and had a significant impact on the theory and practice of education, both in their own immediate contexts and in the longer term. In 2010, we will engage with key works by Plato and Augustine (who was significantly influenced by neo-Platonic philosophy). Particular attention will be given to anthropological and epistemological convictions and the implications of these for an understanding of learning and the conception of an educated person. Participants will be able to focus on the connections between the authors' educational thought and their broader philosophical concerns or on the influence and implications of their writings for the current practice of education. They will be encouraged to discern insights and distortions in the light of a biblically informed view of the person as they develop further their own perspective on education.

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Body, Language, Power: the Question of the Human in 20th Century French Philosophy

(Formerly: Power, Desire, and Anti-Humanism: Foucault and Deleuze)

The goal of the course is to study significant accounts of the nature of human beings in 20th-century French continental philosophy. It will begin by investigating the existential-phenomenological conceptions of human nature developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Persons, on such accounts, should be understood as being in the world, as embodied, as essentially defined by relations to others and relations of language, and as characterized by existential problems of anxiety and authenticity. We will then take up the development and transformation of this story in Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, who oppose to the humanist model of the well-formed and autonomous individual the model of persons as dispersed into networks of language and power.

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Aristotle, Aquinas and the Scholastic Approach to the History of Philosophy

This seminar examines the scholastic approach to the history of philosophy exemplified by Etienne Gilson against the background of its foundation in the thought of Aristotle as it was appropriated by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It examines the role that philosophy or theology's history plays in the conceptual constructions of scholastic thinkers, and what they think is truly first and deepest in the history they so study.

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Biblical Foundations

This course will explore the Bible as the ongoing story of and for God and creation, paying special attention to the way in which God's story is intertwined with that of humanity and the world. In asking whether and in what way the Bible is also our story, we will attempt to identify which hermeneutical methods might help us discern its significance for present day life, including the academic enterprise.

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Christian Theologies of Art

The course will explore significant ways that Christians have theologized the arts, artistry and art culture. The course will compare the varieties of theologies that have emerged from within the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. The study will involve looking at paintings, icons, altarpieces, and socially and culturally engaged works of art as well as pertinent theological writings.

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Biblical Foundations

[This is a distance education course]

This course will explore the Bible as the ongoing story of and for God and creation, paying special attention to the way in which God's story is intertwined with that of humanity and the world. In asking whether and in what way the Bible is also our story, we will attempt to identify which hermeneutical methods might help us discern its significance for present day life, including the academic enterprise.

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Ways of Learning

[This is a distance education course]

Participants in the course will investigate and evaluate significant perspectives on the learning process in order to understand the assumptions of various theories and to interpret these from a biblically-informed standpoint. They will review current research into child development and learning (e.g. brain research, cognitive processes, multiple intelligences, learning styles) in seeking to develop a coherent understanding of the relationships between various learning theories, on the basis of a Christian view of the person and of knowledge. An action research project will enable participants to test an approach to learning in the context of their own classrooms.

Theories of Language and Interpretation: Gadamer, Kristeva, and Searle

The "linguistic turn" and the "interpretive turn" in twentieth-century philosophy play a role in many cultural controversies and academic debates. This seminar examines representative texts from three schools of thought: German philosophical hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer), French poststructural feminism (Julia Kristeva), and Anglo-American analytical philosophy of language (John Searle).

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