Previous Years' Course Catalogues

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.

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.

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 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.

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.