Global Arc

Intellectual and cultural aspects of American religion from the 17th century through the early republic, with the Revolution as a focal point. Special attention to early Protestant traditions (Anglican, Puritan, Quaker, and Methodist, among others), African American religious traditions, the Great Awakening, the Enlightenment, and the transformation of religion through the Revolution. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The relationship between religion and society in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. Attention will be paid to Transcendentalism, the Civil War, the social gospel, Fundamentalism, New Thought, Pentecostalism, civil rights, immigration, and recent religious movements.Two 90-minute classes.

In this seminar, we will discuss ideas about conversion, authorship, translation, and histories in the context of Indigenous people's engagement with Christianity in colonial Mexico. In particular, we will be looking at the ways that Native Americans shaped Mexican Catholicism and the ways we can think of Indigenous people as authors and creators of their religious traditions rather than merely adopters or receivers of the Christian faith as taught by Spanish colonists.

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.