God Inc: Christology/Humanity/Incarnation

Christology is (at) the heart of Christian Theology as a whole. Jesus, as God in flesh and blood, faces us with the true relationship between God and creation. In that light, how can we make sense of the "two natures" of the "second person" of the Trinity today? In revealing (his) divinity, does Christ (also) reveal our humanity?

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

With/Out Reason: Art and Imagination in the Western Tradition

This seminar will explore the special relationship of the arts to the concept of the imagination in the history of Western thought. It will also consider the implications this relationship has had for art's role in the areas of theology and ethics, areas in which reason has been thought to fail in providing adequate knowledge.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

Religion, Critical Theory, and Habermas

While maintaining a stance of "methodical atheism," Habermas' work also exhibits a positive appreciation for many dimensions of the Judeo-Christian religious heritage, especially its moral and ethical dimensions. Habermas' critical appreciation of religious tradition is in continuity with his "Frankfurt School" forebears, who took religion to be integral to modern social and cultural evolution. Religion must be studied, they felt, because it can both display forms of pathological socialization and yet be a resource for a critique of, and eventual emancipation from, such a repressive reality. After exploring key writings of the first generation of critical theorists on the social relevance of religion, the seminar will culminate in an in-depth study of Jurgen Habermas' contribution to this discussion.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

The Self and Its Others

This course explores the notion that subjectivity is not merely given but produced through an encounter with society, language, and other selves, and explores the ethical and political consequences of this possibility. We will examine the construction of ethnic, religious, racial, and gendered difference, the forces that have constituted them as "other" instead of "same," and the consequences this has for the construction of the self and its obligations and responsibilities. We will set up the theoretical issues by reading Kant, Sophocles, Hegel, and Levinas, but will focus especially on readings from Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Luce Irigaray, and Gayatri Spivak.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

IDS: Art, Religion, Education, and Justice: The Christian Philosophy of Nicholas Wolterstorff

This course examines four central themes in the Christian philosophy of Nicholas Wolterstorff. It examines the interconnections to be found among these themes and their respective contributions to the project of Christian Philosophy as conceived and practiced by one of the most wide-ranging and successful English speaking philosophers to come out of the world of Reformed Christianity.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

The Rational Individual and the Social Contract: Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Marx

(Formerly: Classic Themes in Political Philosophy: the Social Contract)

The notion that society is based on a fundamental pact or a contract among citizens is a very old idea in political philosophy. That society is founded in agreement is an idea especially powerfully developed in early modern philosophy, which has had a significant impact on existing laws and political institutions. In this course we will look at the way this idea is developed and challenged in a number of classical authors: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

Spiritual Exercises as Christian Philosophy from Augustine to Bonaventure

CANCELLED

This seminar examines the notion of spiritual exercise as it evolved in Hellenic and Hellenistic philosophy to understand the emergence of 'Christian philosophy' as a cultural project within the Augustinian tradition that begins in Augustine's own work and finds its medieval high point in Bonaventure. It explores the effect on our understanding of philosophy, theology and their history of identifying as properly theoretical cognitive operations that do not have logical validity as their end and horizon.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

Christianity and Ecological Crisis

"The attitudes to save the environment should be imbued with a vision of the sacred." --David Suzuki at the Global Forum of the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 4 June, 1992

Critics often blame Christian culture, and sometimes rightly, for either ignoring or contributing to the global ecological crisis. This course will examine some Christian responses to the ecological crisis that contest that characterization. These include claims that the responsibility for the global ecological crisis is complex and multifaceted as well as arguments that Christianity can resist and undo the attitudes that helped create the crisis. We shall explore agrarian essays, ecological theology, and international initiatives on ecological activities. We may also visit a farm whose inhabitants integrate their faith and their lifestyle. In this discussion-intensive seminar, participants will consider what role Christian faith can and should play in a strong environmental ethic.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

Curriculum: Organising the World for Learning

[This is a distance education course.]

Curriculum is the selection and organisation of experience for pedagogical purposes. The criteria that determine what is selected and how it is organised articulate fundamental values about the nature of the world and our calling in it. This course will encourage critical evaluation of the criteria that are commonly employed and of how the curriculum can be shaped to better reflect a Christian worldview. Curriculum is conceived not as a static collection of materials, but as a dynamic plan that directs the learning process and governs the organically developing relationship between teachers and learners. Teachers are curriculum workers, charged with reflective responsibility as they conduct themselves in their profession. Whether adopting and adapting an externally prescribed curriculum or designing a curriculum from its inception, Christian teachers have a responsibility to ensure that the curriculum reflects a biblical worldview, in structure as well as in content, and that learners are invited to respond from their hearts in obedience to the call of God in Christ, Scripture and creation.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)