printer friendly pageRELIGST 133: Inventing Christianity in Late Antiquity
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.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 146: Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection
Explores the boundaries of rational knowledge about Christian faith through a careful reading of the transcendental project of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. Rahner¿s thought, informed by various sources (e.g., the mystics, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel and Ignatius Loyola), results in an interpretation of Christian faith that strives for intellectual honesty in the face of challenges from science, atheism and post-modern culture. Yet it leaves room for a fundamental human openness to the source and goal of self-transcendence, what Rahner calls Holy Mystery. Weekly short position papers will be required to stir both reflection and discussion.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 148: From Jesus to Paul
Jesus considered himself God's definitive prophet, but he did not think he was God, and had no intention of founding a new religion. How did this Jewish prophet become the gentile God and the founder of Christianity? The role of Paul.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 148A: St. Paul and the Politics of Religion
The major letters written by Paul, the Apostle, and his biography, Acts of the Apostles. Historical context in first century Jewish cultural politics. Origins of Christianity, and the split into Judaism and Christianity. The relationship between Jews and non-Jews. The juxtaposition of law and faith. Origins of cultural universalism. Paul as Jewish radical versus Paul, the first Christian thinker and theologian. Recent philosophical readings of Paul (Taubes, Badiou, and Agamben).
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 150: The Lotus Sutra: Story of a Buddhist Book
The Lotus school of Mahayana, and its Indian sources, Chinese formulation, and Japanese developments.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
RELIGST 161: Modern Religious Thought: From Galileo to Freud
The three centuries following the Protestant Reformation led to a gradual clarification of the notions of the religious and secular and gave rise to a new genre of religious thought, ideally freed from theology, church or synagogue-a secular philosophy of religion, or in some cases a religiously-imbued philosophy. We will examine some of the foundations of religious thought in modernity, including Galileo, Spinoza, Diderot, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 168: Philosophy of Religion
Course traces efforts within the Western tradition from Boethius through Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard to Camus to establish a rational foundation for theist belief and its consistency or coherence with everyday experience. We will deal extensively with the criticisms that that effort has cast up and then turn to investigate issues that extraordinary or mystical experience raises. We will incorporate a look at Buddhist traditions as well as those in the west to gain insight into these questions. And finally, we will look at the ethics of belief, at our responsibility toward our commitments, and some of the varying positions available to us.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 173: What is Enlightenment? Religion in the Age of Reason
Many contemporary attitudes towards religion were forged in 17th- and 18th-century Europe in the midst of heated debates over the meaning and value of Christianity in a world 'come of age': Liberal calls for justice, toleration, and pluralism in matters religious; secular suspicions about religious superstition, fanaticism, and ideology; skepticism regarding the solubility of ultimate questions of meaning and metaphysics. Seminal readings on religion from Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Mendelssohn and Kant.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 176: Religious Diversity: Theoretical and Practical Issues
What does it mean for a religion to be true? If one religion is true, what about the truth of other religious possibilities? How, and why, should religious traditions be compared? Readings address tolerance and pluralism, relativism, comparative theory, and new religious virtues.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 185: Prophetic Voices of Social Critique
Judges, Samuel, Amos, and Isaiah depict and question power, strong leaders who inevitably fail, the societal inequities and corruption inevitable in prosperity, and the interplay between prophet as representative of God and the human king. How these texts succeed in their scrutiny of human power and societal arrangements through attention to narrative artistry and poetic force, and condemnation of injustice. Includes service-learning component in conjunction with the Haas Center.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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