Spring 2005 Course Atlas

 

RLAR 703M: Theories of Myth in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Patton, Wednesday, 7:00-10:00
(same as CPLT 751 and ILA 790)

Content: Historian of religion Ivan Strenski has characterized the concept of "myth" as "an idiosyncratic oddity of cultural history." This course will take up Strenski's critique, and consider the treatment of myth in a number of intellectual contexts--literary, philosophical, and historical. We will examine, among others, the writings of philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Leszek Kolakowski, and Paul Ricoeur; literary critics Northrop Frye, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Marcel Detienne, and historians of religion Charles Long, Ivan Strenski, Bruce Lincoln, Sam Gill, Wendy Doniger, and Robert Ellwood. Each section of the course will also involve essays from collections of essay on myth published in the last decade, which attempt to break new ground in each of these areas. Special attention will be paid to the following themes: 1) myth as an ontological category; 2) myth as a function of religious experience; 3) the role of myth in the study of literature; 4) the relationships between mythical and historical narratives; and 5) myth as a political category of analysis. Previous work in the modern study of religion, the anthropology of religion, the philosophy of religion, or comparative literature is most helpful.

Texts:

• Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
• Shlomo Biderman, ed. Myths and Fictions: Their Place in Philosophy and Religion
• Schillbrack, Ed. Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives
• Leszek Kolakwoski, The Presence of Myth
• Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred : religion, narrative, and imagination
• William K. Doty, Mythographies
• Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in the Twentieth Century
• Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Myth
• Sam Gill, Mother Earth
• Walter Benjamin, Selections from the Arcades
• Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth
• Ernst Cassirer, Myth and Language
• Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider

Particulars: Requirements include regular attendance, vigorous participation in class discussion, regular presentations and writing throughout class; one final research paper on a topic of the student's choosing.

RLAR 797R: The Buddhist Psychology of Tolerance and Forgiveness (2 credits)
H.E. Rizong Rinpoche / Geshe Lobsang Negi, Tuesday, 4:00-6:00 (6 weeks)
(Same as REL 472R)

Content: This course will look into the nature of anger, hatred and violence from the Buddhist perspective and offer time-tested meditative techniques for transforming these destructive emotions into patience, tolerance and love. The course will draw from the sixth chapter, on Patience, of the Bodhicharyavatara, or Guide to the Ways of the Universal Hero, a masterpiece composed in the 8th century by Acharya Shantideva. Shantideva offers profound meditative techniques that are as relevant today as they were when he composed the text. Throughout the centuries, both in India and in Tibet, Buddhist contemplatives and scholars have relied on this timeless classic as a personal guide for dealing with emotions and transforming personal and social lives.

Texts:

• Required text: Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective by the Dalai Lama.
• Recommended text: Working with Anger by Thubten Chodron.

Particulars: Contact Geshe Lobsang Negi for permission to enroll.

RLE 720: Ethics of Thomas Aquinas
Reynolds, Wednesday, 9:00-12:00
(same as RLHT 721S)

RLE 733: Love and Justice
Jackson, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30
(same as PHIL 789)

Content: This course examines several philosophical, theological, and literary accounts of love and justice, with emphasis on how they interrelate. Is love ideally indiscriminate and/or self-sacrificial and therefore antithetical to justice? Is justice a single virtue equally binding on all human beings, regardless of sex, race, creed, or ethnicity? Does God possess either moral attribute? Does the practice of charity or the upholding of justice require the denial of dilemmas or belief in an afterlife? How are we to conceive (and act on) such related values as rationality, human equality, and civil liberty? How, more specifically, do love and justice bear on such issues as women's liberation and gay and lesbian rights?

Texts may include:

• Saint Augustine, City of God, trans. by Henry Bettenson
• The Bible, New Revised Standard Version
• Jackson, T.P., Love Disconsoled
• Kittay, E.F., Love's Labor
• Nussbaum, M.C., Sex and Social Justice
• Plato, The Republic, trans. by Allan Bloom
• Plato, The Symposium, trans. by Christopher Gill
• Rawls, J., Political Liberalism
• Other readings as course handouts.

Particulars: This course is designed for graduate students and presupposes some knowledge of ethical theory; it is, however, open to advanced undergraduates and Candler students, numbers permitting and with the permission of the professor. Requirements include substantial reading per week, class participation and a class presentation, and two 12-15-page papers. The papers may be synthetic, critical, or original, but they should display critical knowledge acquired in the course and not simply be research projects.

RLHB 720N: Leviticus
Hayes, Thursday, 1:00-4:00

Content: A study on the Hebrew text of Leviticus. Textbooks are Jacob Milgrom's three volume commentary on Leviticus in the Anchor Bible, in addition to the MT.

RLHT 710G: Classical Christology
Bondi, Wednesday, 1:30-4:30

RLHT 721S: Ethics of Thomas Aquinas
Reynolds, Wednesday, 9:00-12:00
(same as RLE 720)

Content: This seminar focuses on the (mainly philosophical) foundations of Thomas's ethics, as set out in the prima secundae pars of his Summa theologiae. Topics include human action, teleology, free will, the causes of voluntary action, happiness, the passions, love and hate, habits, virtues and vices, moral value, sin, law, and grace. We shall also sample articles from the secunda secundae pars of the Summa (which is essentially a treatise on the virtues and vices) to see how Thomas divides morality according to the schema of seven principal virtues (the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues), and under that heading we shall consider topics such as supernatural enlightenment, the seven cardinal sins, the just war, and the virtue of studiousness.

Texts: Since the seminar emphasizes close reading of primary sources (with attention especially to analysis of arguments), our chief text is Thomas's Summa theologiae, which students may study either in Latin or in English translation. (An English translation is available on-line.) For secondary support, we shall rely mainly on Stephen J. Pope (ed.), Ethics of Aquinas (Washington D.C., 2002), an excellent anthology. I shall assign several other secondary readings passim.

Particulars: Most sessions will include an informal talk by the professor, but the chief procedure will be group exposition and discussion. Students will present summaries as a basis for some discussions. Assessed work includes two short expositions, a final research paper, and an annotated bibliography of secondary literature related (but not restricted) to the topic of the research paper.

RLL 703: Advanced Hebrew Grammar
Newsom, Tuesday, 2:30-5:30

Content: This course will examine the development of late biblical and early post-biblical Hebrew. Selected readings in Hebrew will come from Ezekiel, the Priestly corpus, Chronicles, Qohelet, Ben Sira, Qumran, Masada, and Muraba'at. Particular attention will be paid to attempts by scholars to establish criteria for analyzing historical linguistic change.

Texts may include:

• Avi Hurvitz, A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel
• Robert Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew
• Arno Kropat, Die Syntax des autors Chronik
• Elisha Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Takamitsu Muraoka, ed. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira; Diggers at the Well; Sirach, Scrolls, and Sages

Particulars: Texts will be prepared weekly for reading and analysis in class. In addition, readings on grammar and linguistics will be discussed. Attention will also be given to the nature of the texts discussed and their place in the religion and culture of early Judaism.

RLNT 721G: Paul's Letter to the Romans
Johnson, Wednesday, 9:00-12:00

Content: This course involves a close, sequential reading of the Greek text of Paul's Letter to the Romans, and an engagement with all the issues for interpretation such a reading raises, from textual criticism to theology.

Texts:

• Nestle-Aland, 27th edition of the Greek New Testament.
• K.P. Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, Revised and Expanded Edition (Peabody, MA: Henrickson, 1991).
• A.K. Greib, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God's Righteousness (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002).
• L.T. Johnson, Reading Romans: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Macon: Smyth and Helwys, 2001).
• S.K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Particulars: This is a seminar restricted to students in the Graduate School. The only exception is a ThM student with preparation in language and critical NT study equivalent to a first-year student in the GDR. Seminar participants will prepare to read in Greek and translate for each session. They will, in addition to the texts above, be required to report at each session on the work of a standard critical commentary, and provide for the class a recent critical article on assigned section of Romans. A final written project is negotiated with the instructor.

RLNT 745: Greco-Roman Backgrounds of the New Testament
Wilson, Tuesday, 2:30-5:30

Content: A broad and introductory survey of Greco-Roman civilization, especially the early imperial period, concentrating on religious, philosophical, and social trends. Attention will be given throughout to what is distinctively "Greco-" and what is distinctively "Roman" about the traditions that shaped this era. Both primary and secondary sources will be utilized, with due attention to the material culture of the period, as well as its literature, which will be analyzed according to the major genres (poetry, drama, biography, historiography, epistolography, etc.).

Main text:

• Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger, eds., Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean (3 vols.)

Other texts may include:

• Mary Beard, et al., eds., Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook (2 vols.)
• Walter Burkert, Greek Religion
• Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family
• Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire
• Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
• Jane Rowlandson, ed., Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook
• Jo-Ann Shelton, ed., As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History
• John Wacher, The Roman World (2 vols.)

Particulars: Students will be responsible for weekly presentations and a major project on an ancient figure or corpus. Working knowledge of Greek and Latin highly recommended.

RLPC 710K: William James Seminar
Snarey, Monday, 2:30-5:30
(same as PSYC 770)

Content: The James Seminar will consider William James (1842-1910) among the classic psychologists of religion. The first half of the seminar is based on James's classics, The Principles of Psychology (1890, 1892), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). Building on this foundation, the remainder of the seminar enlarges upon James's ideas by placing them in conversation with the writings of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and several other classic psychologists of religion who will be selected by those enrolled in the course.

Texts:

• William James: Writings 1878-1899. New York: Library of America.
• William James: Writings 1902-1910. New York: Library of America.
• Freud, S. (1927). The Future of an Illusion. Norton.
• Jung, C. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Yale University Press.
• Wulff, D. (1997). Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (2nd Ed.)Wiley.
• Other possibilities: Wilhelm M. Wundt (1832-1882), Frederick W. H. Myers (1843-1901), G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), Theodore Flournoy (1854-1920), Josiah Royce (1855-1916), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), John Dewey (1859-1952), James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934), George A. Coe (1862-1951), Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930), Edwin D. Starbuck (1866-1947), James Henry Leuba (1868-1946), William E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), Rudolf Otto (1869-1941), Evelyn Underhill (1875-1944), James B. Pratt (1875-1944), Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), Anton T. Boisen (1876-1965), Karen Horney (1885-1952), Gordon Allport (1897-1967), Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Erich Fromm (1900-1980), Howard Thurman (1900-1981), Carl Rogers (1902-1987), Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994), Joan M. Erikson (1902-1997), Carl Rogers (1902-1987), Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997), Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987).

Particulars: The class sessions will be conducted as a graduate seminar. Members of the seminar will select the psychologists of religion considered during the second half of the course. The final requirement for the course is a 20- to 25-page term paper, which compares, contrasts, and critiques/evaluates the ideas of William James and those of the classic psychologist of religion the student previously presented to the class.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing in the Division of Religion, the Department of Psychology, or the Division of Educational Studies.

RLPC 750G: The Development of Modern Homiletics
Long, Wednesday, 2:30-5:30

Content: The seminar will trace the development of theory and theology in contemporary Christian homiletical thought, beginning with the period of "sacred rhetoric" in the late 19th century and moving to the pluralistic and multi-faceted situation of today. The seminar will proceed, essentially chronologically, through the critical reading of key pieces of homiletical literature, with an emphasis upon the textbooks and monographs that have significantly influenced homiletical practice. At each point along the way, this literature will be placed in both theological and cultural context.

Texts: Readings will be from books that represent the major homiletical works of the last 100 years.

Particulars: Students will be required to read approximately 150-200 pages per week, to make weekly reports on their reading to the seminar, and to prepare a major final paper (of approx. 20 pages).

RLPC 776: Issues in Theology and Education: Politics of Knowing
Brelsford, Thursday, 9:00-12:00

Content: This seminar is designed to engage participants in a constructive dialogue with discourses in theology and education on issues central to the dynamics of knowing. Participants will develop a methodology for identifying and critically assessing epistemic-pedagogical and politico-religious assumptions at work in their own projects and research interests, and in theories and practices bearing on theological and educational praxis. During the semester each seminar participant will read in depth works of a theologian relevant to their own research projects and to the focus of this course.

Texts may include (selections from):

• Augustine, The Teacher
• Belenky, M., et al (1996 [1988]) Women's Ways of Knowing
• Code, L. (1995) Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on gendered locations
• Freire, P. (2000 [1970]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Gardner, H. (1999) Intelligence Reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century
• Giroux, H. (1988) Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical pedagogy in the modern age
• Greene, M. (1988) The Dialectic of Freedom
• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An essay in exteriority
• Noddings, N. (1991) Women and Evil
• Ricouer, P. (1986) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
• Scheffler, I. (1965) Conditions of Knowledge: An introduction to epistemology and education
• Whitehouse, H. (2000) Arguments and Icons: Divergent modes of religiosity

Particulars: Writing will include a two-page paper each week exploring insights, critical perspectives, and questions raised by reading in relation to students' own final project; and a final research paper pursing themes from the course in relation to the student's own interests and goals. Seminar structure and shared leadership responsibilities will be negotiated.

RLPC 790R: Religion and Therapy
Chikako Ozawa-de Silva and Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, Tuesday, 9:00-12:00
(Same as ANT 585-01P)

Content: Each religion, therapy, and even biomedicine, has its own way of understanding the human condition and its own mode of dealing with suffering and healing. For a long time, religion has been associated with the non-scientific, and secular therapies have been seen as having nothing to do with religion. However, partially due to increasing interest in spirituality, religious practices, and the power of the mind in the medical field, religion and therapy have been coming together more closely, as shown in the increasing level of dialogue between psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Recent studies claiming that the efficacy of psychotherapies and even medical treatment depend significantly on the level of conviction or "faith" on the part of the therapist/doctor and client/patient raise further questions concerning the boundaries between religion and therapy. While biomedical views find it difficult to find a place for the mind in self-healing, this trend is interesting when viewed in conjunction with Buddhist thought, which has long held that the mind can play a powerful role in bolstering physical and psychological well-being.

Along such lines, this class will explore issues such as what makes for a healthy "self" or person, the role of religious practice and belief in healing, and the relationship of body and mind, by bringing together approaches from contemporary anthropology, neuroscience, biomedicine, psychology, and Buddhist thought.

Texts:

• Jeremy Safran, ed., Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. An unfolding dialogue.
• Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind. Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy.
• Daniel Goleman, ed., Destructive Emotions. A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
• Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher.

Particulars: Requirements include class presentations, three written assignments, and a final paper (12-15 pages).

RLR 700H: Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Study of Religious Practices
Bounds and Flueckiger, Wednesday, 10:00-1:00

Content: This course serves as an introduction to the study of religion through an examination of religious practices. We will look comparatively at a variety of approaches and lenses, within religious and theological studies, reading both work describing theory and method and works studying religious practices. Throughout we will keep trying to be attentive to how religions are lived and practiced and how best we can understand these practices. As their major project, students will study one religious practice, drawing upon one or more of the theoretical and methodological frameworks presented.

Texts may include:

• C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
• P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice or The Logic of Practice
• L. Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds
• Laurel Kendall, The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman
• Laurel Kendall, "Initiating Performance," in The Performance of Healing, ed. by Laderman and Roseman (and accompanying video)
• Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith
• D. Bass and M. Volf, Practicing Theology
• B. Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come

Particulars: The course will be in seminar format. Students will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, be co-presenters of the weekly topics, and prepare a research project.

RLR 725F: Narrative and Women's Selfhoods
Hall, Friday, 10:00-1:00
(Same as PHIL 789, WS 585)

Content: We will begin with philosophical discussion of narrative as it has been used to describe the nature of human experience and, specifically, self-understanding. We will then consider discussions of female subjectivities within feminist theory, addressing the meaning of claims about the unitary or multiple nature of the self and addressing interpretations of the risks and dangers to selfhood. Finally, we will take these questions about narrativity and selfhood to selected representations of women's lives in fiction and autobiography.

Possible Texts:

• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (chapter 15)
• Kearney, portions of On Stories
• Susan Brison, Aftermath
• Selected essays by Judith Butler, Jane Flax, bell hooks
• Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

Particulars: One essay, two reflection papers, and a class presentation.

RLR 725N: Nietzche Writing Religion
Jordan, Monday, 9:30-12:30
(same as CPLT 751 and ILA 790)

Content: The books of Nietzsche's trilogy - Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra - enact desires for cultural therapy. Therapy for Europe requires the displacement of Christianity. Nietzsche attacks Christianity by mocking its pretensions to heal, but he displaces it by rewriting the canonical Gospels to show what life-giving Good News would really sound like. This re-writing is Zarathustra. Our main task will be to read this new gospel as part of a trilogy that also features appearances by Dionysus and the triple goddess of Sais. We will glance back to Nietzsche's first effort to write out gods (in the Birth of Tragedy) and sideways to his summary diatribe against Christianity (the Anti-Christ) and his hymns (Dionysus-Dithyrambs). We will also enlist the aid of a few of Nietzsche's more cunning readers.

Texts: Beyond the texts by Nietzsche mentioned above, we will read some commentators, including at least Kofman and Klossowski.

Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts attentively and to discuss them constructively. They will also be asked to make two exegetical or critical presentations to the whole seminar. The main written work will be a final essay. There will be no examinations - except for those imposed by the texts themselves.

RLR 725P: Literature and Psychoanalysis: Texts, Methods, Ethics of Interpretation
Felman, Monday, 4:00-7:00
(Same as FREN 780 and CPLT 751)

Content: How has psychoanalysis revolutionized our conception of knowledge and of man? What are the psychoanalytic concepts that inform modern culture? How does psychoanalysis give us tools for understanding and interpreting literary works? The course will explore these questions through selected readings in psychoanalytic writings. Emphasis on Freud's and Lacan's understanding of the self as well as of society and culture, through an illumination of the relation of desire to repression, of life to death, of fiction to reality, of religion to disillusion. Among the notions discussed are theories of sexuality, narcissism, identification, dreams, repetition, death drive, mourning, trauma, memory and history.

Texts: Authors closely studied include Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Malanie Klein, and others.

Particulars: Two short papers in the course of the semester; oral presentations and ongoing active participation.

RLSR 775: Contemporary American Religion
Eiesland, Thursday, 9:00-12:00
(same as SOC 769)

Content: This course is designed to fill out and stretch scholarly notions of how and what we study when we investigate contemporary American religion. In the 20th century, new patterns of immigration undercut white, Euro-American majorities and greater scholarly attention to the vital diversity of African American, Jewish, and Catholic religious expression—among other trends— have challenged the dominance of certain secularization theories and of accounts that privilege the waning of the Protestant mainstream. These changes have given rise to a wide range of theoretical and research agendas along a spectrum from studies of popular religiosity to quantitative analyses of women's ordination.

On the one hand, there is a plethora of accounts of religious expressions that are spontaneous, fluid, eclectic, and grassroots, often involving transgression of borders between cultures, religious traditions, races, and gender categories, as well as between institutions and the street, home, and faith communities. On the other hand, numerous studies of new conservatisms have also appeared, identifying an increased policing of borders, a tightening of boundaries, and the production of more rigid orthodoxies. How does this generation of religion scholars provide plausible and serviceable accounts of the milieu in which we live? What variables matter for what empirical and theoretical reasons?

Illustrative Texts:

• Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World
• R. Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora
• Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion
• Fredrick Harris, Something Within
• Bruce B. Lawrence, New faiths, old fears: Muslims and other Asian immigrants in American religious life (Columbia University Press, 2002).
• Deborah Dash Moore, To The Golden Cities

Particulars: Full seminar preparation and participation. Students will present seminar discussion papers at least once during the course. Students will make a second presentation either on an overview and evaluation of current research in an area of interest in contemporary American religion, e.g., new age religiosity, Hasidism in the U.S., African-American Islam. Students will be expected to develop the second presentation into a major term paper (20-25 pages).

RLSR 780R: Ritual Theory and Practice: Critical Interventions
Seeman, Thursday, 3:00-6:00

Content: Ritual theory is central to the study of religion as well as the social sciences. This seminar investigates the accomplishments (and deficits) of classical attempts to understand the nature of ritual, from Freud's early synthesis of psychoanalysis and evolutionary anthropology, through the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and the symbolic-interpretive approaches of American cultural anthropologists like Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, as well as more recent phenomenological approaches. In addition to exploring the genealogy of ritual theory, we will raise questions about the relationship between ritual and lived experience, ritual healing, and the ethics of ritual practice, through full-length ethnographic studies in which the true multi-dimensional context of ritual practice is allowed to emerge. We will consider the various methodologies through which ritual can be studied, and explore the relationship between studies in anthropology of ritual and related fields, such as religion.

Texts:

• Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
• Theodore Reik, Rituals in Four Societies
• Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
• Marcel Mauss, The Gift (W.W. Norton and Co., 1967)
• Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
• Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
• Thomas Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing
• Edith Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing
• Unni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living
• Talal Asad, Geneaologies of Religion
• Madidoma Patrice, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

RLTS 700: Readings in Theology
Farley, Friday, 9:30-12:30

Content: This course is designed with theology students in mind to contribute to their preparation for qualifying exams, but it is open to anyone interested in reading classical theological texts. Each of the various members of the area of Theological Studies will lead at least one seminar session. Students registering for this course are invited to make suggestions for particular texts they would like to study in this context. There will be attention not only to the distinctive themes of the various texts but also attention to the variety of methods represented within the texts and among the TS faculty. The papers assigned through the seminar will encourage close reading of texts as well as the integration of the themes of these texts with students' own theological projects.

Texts may include:

• Plato, Phaedrus
• Augustine, City of God and/or On the Trinity
• Aquinas, Summa Theologica
• Jonathon Edwards, The Religious Affections
• Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers
• Karl Barth, Letter to the Romans
• James Cone, God of the Oppressed

RLTS 740T: Feminist Theologies: God, Gender, and Selfhood
McDougall, Tuesday, 6:30-9:30
(same as WS 585)

Content: This course examines feminist critiques and contemporary proposals for the Christian doctrines of God, gender, and theological anthropology. We will first read examples of classical texts from the second wave of Christian feminist theology, e.g. Daly, Keller, Chopp, and McFague. We will turn then to consider a range of contemporary feminist critiques and reconstructions of these central Christian doctrines, reconstructions that range from post-Christian theism to feminist trinitarian proposals. Throughout the semester we will give particular attention to the following issues: feminist methodology and its multivalent sources, e.g., different hermeneutics of suspicion, competing feminist theories, and diverse Christian traditions, rival God-concepts and their theological implications, and the intersection of theological anthropology with gender theories.

Texts may include:

• Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender
• Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God
• Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father
• Daphne Hampson, After Christianity
• Serene Jones, Cartographies of Grace: Feminist Theory and Christian Theology
• Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self
• Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology
• Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity
• Selected essays of feminist theorists, e.g. Benhabib, Bordo, Butler, Irigaray, Marion Young,

Particulars: The course will be in seminar format. Students will be expected to be co-presenters of the weekly topics. They will write a short paper on one of the second-wave feminist theologians and a final research paper on some aspect of the material covered by the course. Students will be evaluated on seminar attendance, participation and on their written work. Prerequisites: Graduate standing in the Graduate Division of Religion, the Department of Women Studies, or by special permission of the instructor.

RLTS 753G: Phenomenology of Black Religion
Smith, Tuesday, 2:00-5:00

Content: This graduate seminar introduces phenomenology of religion as a discipline by way of examining the distinguishing features of black American religion(s) and culture(s), specifically: 1) ritual-transformative dynamics in black religions, for example ecstatic worship and spirit possession, folk magic, healing, and conjuration; 2) ritual-aesthetic dynamics in black religions, for example in music, literature, visual arts, and performance arts; 3) ritual-political dynamics in black religions, for example the use of scriptural and spiritual figures and symbols to pattern social change and freedom movements.

Texts:

• Katie Canon, Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community
• Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
• Anthony Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (New Vectors in the Study of Religion and Theology)
• Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South
• Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, African American Religious Thought (Anthology)
• Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans

Particulars: Class members will have the opportunity to a) provide presentations on course materials, textual and nontextual; b) develop and present a midterm ethnographic or media project focused on some aspect of black religion and culture; and c) research and present a summary term paper.

RLTS 755: Hermeneutics: Biblical Theology
Lowe, Wednesday, 6:30-9:30

 

 

Other courses of interest:

 

ILA 790: Witchcraft, Prophecy, and Heroes in Ancient Greece and Recent Africa
Bay and Blakely, Thursday, 9:00-12:00

Content: This practical experiment in comparative study focuses on three modalities of religious experience in ancient Greece and recent Africa; prophecy/spirit mediumship, heroism, and witchcraft/magic. Beginning with a consideration of empirical data, we will move to issues of evidence and method, interpretive traditions, and intellectual potential. Our data include literary and ethnographic texts, visual and archeological evidence, archival materials, and news reports. This course tests the possibilities of scholarship that is simultaneously cross-cultural and interdisciplinary and hence it explores
intersections of cultures, both human and academic.

Particulars: While a background in Greek or African studies is useful, we also welcome students curious about the viability of comparative and interdisciplinary projects.