What is happening to attention in the age of digital distraction? What are the consequences of viewing attention as a monetized and commodified resource? And how are habits of attention entangled with spiritual life and practice? This course explores these questions by considering attention as one part of a broader way of inhabiting the world. Major topics covered include the phenomenology of attention, the impact of digital technologies on attention, socio-political implications of living in an attention economy, and the cultivation of contemplative forms of attention. A key component of this course is an opportunity for students to consider their own habits of attention. Alongside weekly readings, students will engage spiritual practices that aim to cultivate contemplative forms attention (broadly construed) and resist negative forms of fragmentation and distraction of digital life—silence, stillness, digital fasting, time in nature, slow reading, ethical listening, engaging the arts, hospitality, and more.
Attention in the Age of Distraction
Reconsidering Kant's Aesthetics
Until recently, it was customary to regard Kant as the thinker who definitively separated aesthetic knowledge from the domains of reason and morality by identifying its core epistemological activity as a kind of judgment that he qualified as a matter of taste. The postmodern rejection of the “modernist” practice of aesthetic theory, however, has done much to undermine Kant’s position in both the arts and in philosophy. This course aims to re-examine Kant’s aesthetic theory as set out in his Critique of Judgment of 1790 from the vantage point of the art theoretical literature that preceded it vis a vis the integral place of the aesthetic in both premodern ethics and theology. In an effort to better understand Kant’s contribution to the history of thought about art and its purposes, it will seek to contextualize such “Kantian” themes as judgment, taste, genius, beauty, sublimity and purposiveness. It will also consider to what degree our understanding of Kant has been shaped by later modernist assumptions about the character of his contribution.
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.
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 8 (Note that the first session for this course takes place on September 10). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Approved for Area 2 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?
Smith, D. I. (2018). On Christian teaching: Practicing faith in the classroom. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 8 (Note that the first class for this course takes place on September 10). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.
*Approved for Area 2 or 3 of the CSTC
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 made Flesh” a male God? Does the experience of women change how God is (made) known? Is sexuality—are sexualities—embraced by the resurrection? Attentive to the work of feminist theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers, we will attempt to develop an “embodied” theology open to the biblical vision that God will be “all in all.”
Dr. Nik Ansell
220804 F26
ICT5220HS L0101 / L9101*
Online Synchronous
Tuesday, 10am - 1pm
(MA, PhD)
Syllabus
*Attention TST students: you have to contact the ICS Registrar to complete your registration.
Biblical Foundations: Narrative, Wisdom, and the Art of Interpretation
How can we read and experience the Scriptures as the Word of Life in the midst of an Academy that believes the biblical witness will restrict human freedom and thwart our maturity? How may we pursue biblical wisdom as we “re-think the world” when our Christian traditions seem convinced that biblical truth may be disconnected from—or simply applied to—the most pressing and perplexing issues of our time?
*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.
Religion, Life and Society: Reformational Philosophy
An exploration of central issues in philosophy, as addressed by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and the “Amsterdam School” of neoCalvinian 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.
Purchasing links: Amazon CA
* Also available through 21five website, or
* Chapters/Indigo website.
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 11. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.