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)
26 June 2024
The Radical Theopoetics of John D. Caputo
This seminar will explore John D. Caputo’s Theopoetics, a "weak theology" of narratives, prayers and praise in response to the call of God in contrast to a "strong" theology of predicative claims about the existence and nature of God.
ICS 150907 / 250907 F24
Tuesdays, 6pm - 9pm EST
3 June 2024
Biblical Foundations: Narrative, Wisdom, and the Art of Interpretation
*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.
**NOTE: Approved for Area 1 of the CSTC.
Cultivating Learning Communities of Belonging
This is a course for instructional leaders and administrators considering school and classroom cultures. Course content will include attention to social and cultural contexts, racial justice, Indigenous perspectives, human sexuality, restorative practices, and how these topics impact and form school and classroom cultures.
This course seeks to help students find clarity in answers to the following questions:
- What is the relationship between the daily behaviour of educational leaders and the cultures of schools?
- How do we awaken our students’ knowledge, creativity, and critical reflective capacities in our schools and classrooms?
- How do racism and other forms of oppression underlie achievement gaps and alienation within our schools?
- How can classroom learning be linked to larger movements seeking to effect change in the community?
- How can school culture be a vehicle for social change?
- How do we cultivate learning communities of belonging in our schools?
ICSD 260008 F24*
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)
(MA-EL)
Syllabus
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 6 (Note that the first class for this course takes place on September 12). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Approved for Area 2 or 3 of the CSTC
Philosophy at the Limit: Richard Kearney
Dr. Ronald A. Kuipers
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm ET
(MA, PhD)
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.
Facing the Darkness: The (Human) Nature of Evil
*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.
Religion, Life, and Society: Reformational Philosophy
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
The Aesthetics of Compassion
The emotion of “pity” (eleos) or “compassion” is at the heart of Athenian tragedy, the great forbear of Western tragic drama. For Aristotle, creating feelings of pity and fear in an audience was thought to provoke a catharsis of those emotions that enabled a positive moderation of our passionate natures. But, as George Steiner has observed, the subject matter of tragedy places those emotions in a register beyond the ordinary. As fundamental human responses to extraordinary human suffering, they signal the “core of dynamic negativity” that underwrites authentic tragedy. Raising the problem of human pain and fragility in the face of circumstances potentially beyond human control, representations of human suffering have a metaphysical and, more particularly, theological dimension that has long provoked philosophical interest in the dynamics of tragic drama. In this course, we will examine the interface between philosophy and works of tragic drama as that interface pertains to the psychology and aesthetics of compassion. Looking to such writers as Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil, we will investigate the place of compassion in Western philosophy and theology and the roles that art and imagination have played in the stimulation of compassionate response.
Dr. Rebekah Smick
ICS 120104 / 220104 F24
ICH5751HF L0101*
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:00pm ET
(MWS, MA, PhD)
Syllabus
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.
4 April 2024
The Craft of Reflective Practice
We humans make sense of things by telling stories. In this course we will learn how to do critical reflective practice, primarily by telling stories about our everyday professional lives. We will zoom in on the story of an ordinary day at work, and then zoom out to the story of our career to date, zoom out further to the story of our work community, and zoom out even further to the overarching story of God’s world. In the process we will learn qualitative research skills, receive an introduction to phenomenology (the philosophical study of lived experience), develop our own approach to praxis (that is, the craft of morally-oriented, theoretically-informed, and theory-generating critically reflective practice), and, most significantly, come to terms with who we are in what we do.
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)
(MA-EL, MWS)
Syllabus
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 6 (Note that the first session for this course takes place on September 12). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Approved for Area 2 of the CSTC
3 April 2024
God of Solidarity: Liberation Theology as Social Movement
In the latter half of the 20th century, a wave of liberation movements swept across the globe as colonized and exploited people undertook seismic struggles for self-determination. These movements had a profound influence not only on global politics, but also on intellectual trends and the political left, for whom “the masses” took on new significance and previous orthodoxies seemed out of step with the times. Theology was no exception, and from the 1970s on Christian theology would not only reinterpret itself through the lens of liberation around the world, but would also become a primary organizing force in the struggle for liberation.
While liberation theology is often studied for its doctrinal content, it is irreducibly social, historical, and political, emerging from and accountable to people’s movements. As a result, liberation theology was also severely disciplined by ecclesial and political power brokers. In this class, we will consider liberation theology in historical perspective, specifically in its Latin American expressions, examining its relationship to a revolution in global Christianity and revolutions in various political contexts. We will also consider the papacy of Pope Francis, looking at the rehabilitation of several liberation theologians since 2013, with an eye toward the future and legacy of liberation theology in the 21st century.
ICSD 132904 / 232904 S24
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Intensive, June 17 - July 24
Mondays & Wednesdays, 7pm - 9pm ET
(MWS, MA, PHD)
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is June 17, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.
24 February 2024
State, Society, and Religion in Hegel’s Philosophy
This course explores the interrelation of political, social, and religious life in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Readings will be drawn from Hegel’s lectures on art and religion, as well as his works Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Phenomenology of Spirit. We will explore the political and social conditions of human experience through the lens of what Hegel calls “objective spirit,” focusing in particular on how our freedom as self-conscious beings is enabled and supported by the domains of ethical life, law, and civil society. We will also explore Hegel’s account of the human engagement in “absolute spirit,” here attending to the distinctive practices of art and religion, and to how these practices are interwoven with social and political life. We will also consider Hegel’s role in the historical construction of the modern West’s category of religion, and on what is involved in thinking about religion and religious difference (and Hegel’s philosophy itself) beyond Eurocentrism.
21 February 2024
Art, Religion, and Theology (ART)
- POSTPONED TO 2025 -
ART in Orvieto is an advanced summer studies program in art, religion, and theology located in Orvieto, Italy, a magnificent hill town 90 minutes north of Rome. The program offers an ecumenical exploration of Christian understandings of the arts. It provides a three weeks residency designed for artists, graduate students in relevant fields, and other adult learners interested in engaging the intersection of art, religion, and theology.
For some, the idea of an expressly Christian art is a literal impossibility in the contemporary art world context. According to such a view, the sheer notion of a “Christian art” defies the very nature of art as we understand it. It suggests that art is a form of propaganda rather than the free expression of an individual artist. Yet, explicitly Christian art dominates the walls of most Western art museums. Further, much of this art is thought to represent the height of Western art practice. What is this puzzling history able to tell us about the relationship of art to Christianity? How have Christians understood are to function religiously and what relation does it have to how art is conceived in the modern context?This course will examine the art traditions of the three main branches of Christianity in their historical contexts with a view to understanding the relationship of Christianity to art today. It will consider the art histories of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity, the theology pertinent to their understandings of the religious image, and what contemporary Christian philosophers and theologians have to say about the possibilities for Christian art in modern society. Taking full advantage of our setting in Orvieto, we will explore the art of the area as well as in Rome, Assisi, and Florence. The methodology used in the course will be a mix of lecture and class discussion on assigned readings.
The goal of this studio residency is to help practicing artists make substantial progress with a particular body of work. Participants will develop their artworks through various stages, from initial inspirations, ideas, and studies to more fully realized visual forms, while exploring relevant religious, theological, and art historical dimensions. Although we will emphasize the process of the creation of the works more than their final completion, there will be opportunities to display work produced during the residency.Works in a variety of media will be encouraged and supported. Practicing artists of all levels of experience are welcome and guidance will be tailored to meet individual needs, including help with regard to materials, techniques, and design issues; assistance with furthering technical skills; and direction in concept development, research, and interpretive methodologies. In addition to ongoing individual consultation, weekly sharing of one’s progress with the group will provide valuable opportunities for informed feedback and support.Our well-equipped studio will be within the beautiful large space of a former 13th-century convent, which will allow everyone a dedicated personal workspace as well as space for group work, discussions, and shared displays of artwork. Open access to the studio will ensure ample time to work individually or together with other participating artists. A list of basic supplies will be sent to participants upon registration.
- POSTPONED TO 2025 -
What's Christian About Christian Education?: Reformational Philosophy
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.
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.
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?