Previous Years' Course Catalogues

This course provides a critical study of resources and challenges for advanced work in theology and ethics. The contribution, critique, and challenge of contextual, constructive, liberative, feminist, postcolonial, womanist theologies to each other and to Western theological methodology will be examined. This approach to the study of theological method will give specific attention to how the recovery and use of non-traditional sources of God-talk and moral life (prayers, songs, story, etc.) are creating new theological paradigms. How traditiona1 sources of theology (scripture, tradition, reason and experience) are interpreted, through the lens of different cultures and contexts of oppression and social relations of domination and subordination, will also be explored. It investigates how methods matter for the formation and adjudication of Christian theology, practices and moral agency in specific global and local contexts. Emphasis on self-reflexive, dialogical and collaborative skills in research and scholarship.

This course explores lgnatian spirituality as a resource for the construction of religious narratives that contribute to intentional, social transformation in a secular context. Students develop a transdisciplinary approach to ecological, social, cultural and ecclesial reconciliation. Students develop an understanding of the evolution of a religious and cultural recognition of the autonomous rights of indigenous peoples. Elements of recognition theory and transitional justice are introduced through a discussion of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Lectures and assigned readings draw on authors such as Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, Cynthia Crysdale, Robert Doran, Pope Francis, Renee Girard, Roger Haight, Bernard Lonergan, James L. Marsh, J. R. Miller, Ronald Niezen, Karl Rahner, Thomas Reynolds, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor.

This course explores lgnatian spirituality as a resource for the construction of religious narratives that contribute to intentional, social transformation in a secular context. Students develop a transdisciplinary approach to ecological, social, cultural and ecclesial reconciliation. Students develop an understanding of the evolution of a religious and cultural recognition of the autonomous rights of indigenous peoples. Elements of recognition theory and transitional justice are introduced through a discussion of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Lectures and assigned readings draw on authors such as Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, Cynthia Crysdale, Robert Doran, Pope Francis, Renee Girard, Roger Haight, Bernard Lonergan, James L. Marsh, J. R. Miller, Ronald Niezen, Karl Rahner, Thomas Reynolds, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor.

This course explores Ignatian spirituality as a resource for the construction of religious narratives that contribute to intentional, social transformation in a secular context. Students develop a transdisciplinary approach to ecological, social, cultural and ecclesial reconciliation. Students develop an understanding of the evolution of a religious and cultural recognition of the autonomous rights of indigenous peoples. Elements of recognition theory and transitional justice are introduced through a discussion of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Lectures and assigned readings draw on authors such as Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, Cynthia Crysdale, Robert Doran, Pope Francis, Renee Girard, Roger Haight, Bernard Lonergan, James L. Marsh, J. R. Miller, Ronald Niezen, Karl Rahner, Thomas Reynolds, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor.

This course explores lgnatian spirituality as a resource for the construction of religious narratives that contribute to intentional, social transformation in a secular context. Students develop a transdisciplinary approach to ecological, social, cultural and ecclesial reconciliation. Students develop an understanding of the evolution of a religious and cultural recognition of the autonomous rights of indigenous peoples. Elements of recognition theory and transitional justice are introduced through a discussion of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Lectures and assigned readings draw on authors such as Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, Cynthia Crysdale, Robert Doran, Pope Francis, Renee Girard, Roger Haight, Bernard Lonergan, James L. Marsh, J. R. Miller, Ronald Niezen, Karl Rahner, Thomas Reynolds, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor.

The body and the embodied self were crucial components of identity, social engagement, and lived experience in the ancient Mediterranean, the context of early Christian texts. Early Christian texts themselves abound with material that speaks to these concerns, in a variety of different ways. Specifically, this course will examine concepts of the social body, the body as a location where identity, honour and shame are constructed and negotiated, the body as something which must be controlled or even disdained, and the body as a location of negotiating power (among other topics).

An exploration of the intersection of hermeneutics with the critical theory of some of Europe?s most influential theorists in such areas as post-heidegerrian phenomenology, Frankfurt School, ideological criticism, Lancanian theory, Poststructuralism and Postcolonial criticism.

What is at stake in Canadian discourses of multiculturalism and postcolonialism for religious communities becoming intercultural? What is at stake and for whom? What is the purpose of Christian moral engagement and who is it for? These queries will foreground attention to theo-ethics of the politics of social location; the power of social difference; an ethics of ambiguity and perseverance; identities and epistemology in global, local and transnational frames; living at interstices of complex difference, dislocation and connection; and the negotiation of shared meanings through discourses of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, and place.  In-class honing of collegial skills for intellectual life based on comprehension of and critical engagement with texts and being willing to be self-reflexive and to communicate one's own stance in relation to others.

Terrorism, war, genocide, sexual abuse, murder: how can the human mind make sense of these horrors without reducing them to the 'obscenity of understanding', of trying to imagine the unimaginable? How can we possibly try to imagine the mind of perpetrators of violence, sexual abuse and terror? Yet these phenomena are becoming more pervasive and immediate and the destruction of human bodies and minds is worsening. How is it possible to sustain hope and faith in human goodness when our capacity for evil grows more sinister and ingenious? We will explore these and other questions comparatively and cross-culturally, examining the perspectives of religious, philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers who represent Western and non-Western cultural and religious traditions.

Terrorism, war, genocide, sexual abuse, murder: how can the human mind make sense of these horrors without reducing them to the 'obscenity of understanding', of trying to imagine the unimaginable? How can we possibly try to imagine the mind of perpetrators of violence, sexual abuse and terror? Yet these phenomena are becoming more pervasive and immediate and the destruction of human bodies and minds is worsening. How is it possible to sustain hope and faith in human goodness when our capacity for evil grows more sinister and ingenious? We will explore these and other questions comparatively and cross-culturally, examining the perspectives of religious, philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers who represent Western and non-Western cultural and religious traditions.

Adolf von Harnack imagined the origin of Christianity as a "timeless kernel" which, over the centuries, grew into a mighty tree. But Gilles Deleuze would argue that Christianity resembles a rhizome more than it does a tree. A rhizome possesses no pure beginnings and it resists all tree-like structures, favoring instead a nomadic system of growth. This course will explore the growth of early Christianity from a rhizomatic perspective, based on the theoretical tools of Deleuze and Felix Guattari, with whom he co-authored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Topics for discussion will include Christ groups as 'desiring-machines,' the 'body of Christ without organs,' apparatuses of capture, destratifying early Christianity, resisting forms of Capitalist social production through nomadism, the New Testament as several regimes of signs, becoming-woman, and how to start your own molecular revolution. If Christianity's claim that that it is derived from a "timeless kernel" impedes interfaith dialogue and global cooperation, then perhaps a Deleuzian rhizomatic theoretic will facilitate interfaith dialogue and new forms of planetary thinking.

Readings in feminist theology, ethics, and critical theory to provide advanced resources for linking spiritual life and struggles to transform vast structures of injustice and violation with responsiveness to women's diverse lives, needs, and communities. Attention to challenges and methods central for feminist and Christian faith-and-justice ethics as applied to specific movements for transformation and to the development of collegial skills in discussions and scholarship.  Collaborative seminar format, presentations and responses, major paper.