Global Arc

An exploration of women's roles and experiences, and constructions of gender in diverse settings within North American religion. The seminar will examine women, gender, and religious leadership in varied religious contexts, such as Puritanism, evangelicalism, Catholicism, Judaism, African American Protestantism, native traditions, and American Islam. Emphasis on the dilemmas faced by women in religious institutions as well as the creative approaches to shaping religious and social opportunities in light of shifting ideas about religion, gender, and authority. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar will examine philosophical accounts of what it means to live well, focusing mainly on works written in the last half century that are relevant to issues in religious ethics: whether morality requires a religious foundation, the ethical significance of divine commandments, and the concepts of virtue, goodness, evil, horror, holiness, sainthood, faith, and the sacred. Among the philosophers to be discussed are Richard Rorty, John Finnis, Alasdair MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, and Robert Merrihew Adams. One three-hour seminar.

Analysis of philosophical and theological accounts of love and justice, with emphasis on how they interrelate. Is love indiscriminate and therefore antithetical to justice, or can love take the shape of justice? What are the implications for moral, political, and legal theory? The seminar also considers recent efforts to revive a tradition of political theology in which love's relation to justice is a prominent theme. One three-hour seminar.

In this course we explore the institutional, devotional, cultural, and social history of Catholics in America focusing on such themes as church/state relations, religion and politics, gender, race, and sexuality, Catholicism in popular culture, relations between laity and hierarchy, and social reform.

Religion permeated everything in colonial Latin America. In fact, it is not really accurate to talk about religion as something separate from other aspects of human life for this time and place. This class explores the ways "religion" was lived and understood by people in colonial Latin America through three categories: 1) experience, with an emphasis on internal experience, both physical and emotional; 2) expression, both verbal and non-verbal, with an emphasis on ambivalent forms of expression that simultaneously validated and challenged accepted religious truths; and 3) authority, with an emphasis on its limits.

Belief in the existence of God and non-belief are counterparts of one another and have a shared history in the United States. At the same time, those histories are distinct and have distinct features. This course is an historical exploration of non-belief in God in a country in which religion and religious faith has comprised its very core and shaped its character. What has it meant to be an "a-theist" in a country so dominated by various forms of theism? If America is, as G. K. Chesterton has said, "a nation with the soul of a church," where have been the spaces - intellectually, culturally, socially, aesthetically - for the "unchurched?"

A study of a selected topic such as mysticism, scriptures of the world religions, or of particular religious movements, leaders, and thinkers.

In this seminar we examine how the modern constructed categories of "race" and "religion" have interacted in American history and culture. We explore how religious beliefs and practices have shaped ideas about race and how American racialization has shaped religious experience. We consider the impact of religion and race on notions of what it means to be American and how these have changed over time. Topics include race and biblical interpretation; religion and racial slavery; religion, race, and science; popular culture representations; race, religion, and politics; and religious resistance to racial hierarchy.

The sermon is one of the most unique contributions to the American literary and oral tradition. This course examines sermonic texts and recordings from the late 18th century to the present. We will explore written and recorded homilies, placing both sermons and sermonizers in historical context. In this way we want to discover not only the theological perspectives contained in the sermons but also the cultural, social, economic, and political situations in the U.S. that helped shape them. Rather than a concern for the "practice" of preaching, our course focuses on sermons as literature and historical narratives.

The relative novelty of American scriptures allows us entry into the most essential questions of scriptures' meaning, function and use: What is a scripture? How does a text become one? We will discuss selections from The Book of Mormon, Science and Health, Message to the Blackman in America, and Dianetics, along with several other new-world scriptures and, by way of comparison, the American histories of some old-world scriptures. Emphasis will be on reading and reflecting on these texts as primary sources, investigating their internal logic, discursive influences, and rhetorical effects to think about how communities have formed around them.