Previous Years' Course Catalogues

Inquiry into the role and meaning of religion in a post/metaphysical, post/secular time within the frameworks of critical theory, psychoanalysis and ethics. Authors include Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Habermas and their theological/religious interlocutors, i.e. Charles Davis, Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, Hent de Vries. Major paper.

Inquiry into the role and meaning of religion in a post/metaphysical, post/secular time within the frameworks of critical theory, psychoanalysis and ethics. Authors include Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Habermas and their theological/religious interlocutors, i.e. Charles Davis, Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, Hent de Vries. Major paper.

This course will challenge the prevailing view that the thought of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno are so deeply pessimistic as to be devoid of hope. Freud’s psychoanalytic theories are widely (mis)interpreted in the register of a crude pansexulaism and biological determinism. Adorno’s critique of society and the individual is often (mis)interpreted as so ruthlessly pervasive that it forecloses on any possibility for emancipatory transformation. This is a distorted view of both thinkers, that misses the hopeful, utopian currents that motivate and shape psychoanalysis and critical theory. The course will explore the emancipatory currents in Freud and Adorno, and their implications for potentialities of individual, social and ecological transformation.

Inquiry into the role and meaning of religion in a post/metaphysical, post/secular time within the frameworks of critical theory, psychoanalysis and ethics. Authors include Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Habermas and their theological/religious interlocutors, i.e. Charles Davis, Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, Hent de Vries. 

This course engages students with key Old Testament interpretive methods across a broad spectrum that may include historical-critical, literary, reader-oriented, theological, inter-disciplinary, and global approaches. Working with biblical texts together with readings from practitioners enables students to assess the assumptions, methods, development, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in each interpretive method.

Acts of prayer, collective effervescence, ritual action, ecstatic experiences have all left a mark in early Judaism and Christianity. However, despite the importance of religious experience to these historical movements, scholarship has been reluctant to explore these phenomena in their own right. The course explores various methodologies, and the theories underlying them, as they are relevant to religious experience. Topics include ritual, emotion, metaphor, and identity. Together we will consider the relationship between the methods and our research questions. Although the examples in the course readings will be drawn primarily from Biblical and contemporary material, students are welcome to explore sources from other historical periods.

Acts of prayer, collective effervescence, ritual action, ecstatic experiences have all left a mark in early Judaism and Christianity. However, despite the importance of religious experience to these historical movements, scholarship has been reluctant to explore these phenomena in their own right. The course explores various methodologies, and the theories underlying them, as they are relevant to religious experience. Topics include ritual, emotion, metaphor, and identity. Together we will consider the relationship between the methods and our research questions. Although the examples in the course readings will be drawn primarily from Biblical and contemporary material, students are welcome to explore sources from other historical periods.

Acts of prayer, collective effervescence, ritual action, ecstatic experiences have all left a mark in early Judaism and Christianity. However, despite the importance of religious experience to these historical movements, scholarship has been reluctant to explore these phenomena in their own right. The course explores various methodologies, and the theories underlying them, as they are relevant to religious experience. Topics include ritual, emotion, metaphor, and identity. Together we will consider the relationship between the methods and our research questions. Although the examples in the course readings will be drawn primarily from Biblical and contemporary material, students are welcome to explore sources from other historical periods.

Acts of prayer, collective effervescence, ritual action, ecstatic experiences have all left a mark in early Judaism and Christianity. However, despite the importance of religious experience to these historical movements, scholarship has been reluctant to explore these phenomena in their own right. The course explores various methodologies, and the theories underlying them, as they are relevant to religious experience. Topics include ritual, emotion, metaphor, and identity. Together we will consider the relationship between the methods and our research questions. Although the examples in the course readings will be drawn primarily from Biblical and contemporary material, students are welcome to explore sources from other historical periods.

Focusing on recent interpretations of the moral theology of St. Thomas, the course will examine competing understandings of Aquinas' ethics, both for understanding Aquinas' account of morality in its historical context, and for drawing resources in order to address key issues in contemporary moral theology.

Focusing on recent interpretations of the moral theology of St. Thomas, the course will examine competing understandings of Aquinas' ethics, both for understanding Aquinas' account of morality in its historical context, and for drawing resources in order to address key issues in contemporary moral theology.

A study of selected Jewish literature from the Second-Temple period. To provide thematic unity to our reading, we will pay particular attention to issues of Jewish self-definiton and identity within the Greco-Roman world, and to the range of Jewish attitudes toward "the Nations" and their place in Jewish frames of reference.