61 - 70 of 261 results for: RELIGST

The emergence of Protestant Christianity in 16th-century Europe. Analysis of writings by evangelical reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Sattler, Hubmeier, Müntzer) and study of reform movements (Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Spiritualist) in their medieval context and as expressions of new and influential visions of Christian belief, life, social order.

A survey of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy¿that will explore their authorship, form and meaning.

From 1870 to the late twentieth century, Jewish thought and philosophy attempted to understand Judaism in response to the developments and crises of Jewish life in the modern world. In this course we shall explore the responses of figures such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Soloveitchik, Emil Fackenheim, and Emmanuel Levinas. Central topics will concern ethics and politics, faith and revelation, redemption and messianism, and the religious responses to catastrophe and atrocity. We shall discuss Judaism in European culture before and after World War I and in North America in the postwar period and after the Six Day War. A central theme will be the ways in which attempts to understand Jewish experience are related to history.

What role do Jewish and Christian traditions play in shaping understandings of gender differences? Is gender always imagined as dual, male and female? This course explores the variety of ways in which Jewish and Christian traditions - often in conversation with and against each other - have shaped gender identities and sexual politics. We will explore the central role that issues around marriage and reproduction played in this conversation. Perhaps surprisingly, early Jews and Christian also espoused deep interest in writing about 'eunuchs' and 'androgynes,' as they thought about Jewish and Christian ways of being a man or a woman. We will examine the variety of these early conversations, and the contemporary Jewish and Christian discussions of feminist, queer, trans- and intersex based on them.

How did Jesus of Nazareth, who never claimed to be Christ or divine, become the son of God after his death? Sources include the history of first-century Judaism and Christianity.

Contemporary historical-critical methods in investigating how one might study Jewish and Christian texts of the 1st century CE. Social contexts including economic realities and elite ideological views. What can be known historically about 1st-century Judaism and Jesus' part it in it. How Jewish apocalyptic messianism shaped the birth of Christianity and its trajectory through the 1st century.

An exploration of Christian gospels of the first and second century. Emphasis on the variety of images and interpretations of Jesus and the good news, the broader Hellenistic and Jewish contexts of the gospels, the processes of developing and transmitting gospels, and the creation of the canon. Readings include the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and other canonical and non-canonical gospels.

The transformation of an apocalyptic sect into an imperial religion from 200 to 600 C.E. Shifts in structures of authority, worship, and belief mapped against shifts in politics, economics and religion in the larger Roman empire. Cultural visions of this history including Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Dan Brown's conspiracy theory in The Da Vinci Code, and Elaine Pagels' The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

Religions throughout history have marked certain spaces as out-of-the-ordinary, as places where the gods reveal themselves, where special events have taken place, where one can see and experience things not possible in ordinary space. Individuals and groups who enter and create these sacred spaces create the opportunity to transcend the everyday world. Some of these spaces are natural--mountains, rivers, deserts. Others are constructed--temples, churches, tombs. This course will explore such sacred spaces: how they come to be, what distinguishes them from ordinary space, what happens in them. Part of the course will be theoretical, looking at different approaches to sacred spaces developed by recent scholars of religion; part of it will be focused on specific sacred spaces, especially in Israel and America, and the course will conclude with a chance for students to explore the variety of sacred spaces found in our own community.