Coming to Our Senses: Art, Faith and Embodiment

Many centuries of mind-body dualism have conditioned Christians to evaluate art primarily by its capacity to transcend our finite embodied existence in search of ‘the spiritual.’ By contrast, this course will focus on the way art, whether religious or secular, articulates lived human experience as a way to gain more intimate contact with the world, each other and, ultimately, also with God. In order to do so we will discuss the crucial role of the body in our pre-reflective understanding of the world; the importance of the sense of touch for sensing nuanced textures and timbres; and the notion of beauty understood as unfolding in time rather than as a timeless, captured moment. The course will conclude by assessing the implications of this approach for a fresh understanding of art, with particular attention to the recent return of religious references in contemporary art. The aim of the course is to enable participants to develop new Christian criteria by which to approach and evaluate works of art of our time.

ICS 151208/251208 S16
Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
On-Campus Summer Intensive
CANCELLED

(MWS, MA, PhD)

CSTC Approved (Worldview)

Syllabus

Political Theology and the Secular State

‘God is back’, on the streets of a liberal democracy near you. But the return of public religion – its ‘de-privatisation’ – is generating deep anxieties among secularists who have long assumed that liberal democracy presupposes a ‘secular state’ and a religion-free public realm. Christians, too, are scrambling to make sense of the new but shifting spaces opening up for their own faith-based political engagement. Drawing on salient insights of contemporary political theology, the course will confront the challenges to, and opportunities for, the secular state presented by the resurgence of public religion in liberal democracies. It explores various concepts of ‘secularism’, ‘secularization’, ‘the secular’ and the ‘post-secular’, probes the nature and legitimacy of religious public reasoning, and reflects on the shape of constructive and critical religious citizenship in contemporary liberal states.

ICS 151309/251309 S16
Dr. Jonathan Chaplin
On-Campus Summer Intensive
CANCELLED

(MWS, MA, PhD)

CSTC Approved (Philosophy)

Syllabus