Course Catalogue 2024-2025

Historical Theology is an interdisciplinary project, which employs the tools and skills of historical research to examine what Anselm of Canterbury called "faith seeking understanding." Yet history, like theology, is neither monolithic in structure nor univocal in expression. This seminar will introduce students to issues and questions that dominate historiographical debate, and by extension theological discourse. We will proceed in three ways. First we will discuss the basic tools of the trade, ranging from bibliographical research to the "grunt work" of collecting the data, to the various genres of historical writing. Then, we will examine some the key philosophical and methodological questions around the construction and writing of history, with a clear eye on how this relates to nature of historical theology. Finally, practice and theory will come together as we examine a topic of common interest (such as a broad doctrinal category, or a general aspect of ecclesial life). This examination will give each student the freedom to employ a specific historical methodology on this topic, but framed in relation to each student's own confessional and ecclesial contexts. It is during this last part of the course that students will begin to formulate their major piece of writing.

This seminar offers an advanced introduction to comparative theological method. The course examines the processes by which theologians study theologies across religious boundaries and bring this learning into dialogue with home traditions through careful comparison, dialogical reflection, and nuanced theological understandings of religious belonging. Students will consider critiques and refinements of the practice of comparison, survey current methods of theological comparison, and frame a comparative research project according to their own theological interests. Because the class wrl! analyze examples from a variety of religious traditions, prior knowledge of multiple traditions is desirable but not required.

This seminar will focus on the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant that have been and continue to be seminal texts for the contemporary discipline of moral theology/theological ethics. The goal will be to understand their conceptions of human happiness, the nature of morality, the means (actions, virtues, sin, law, grace, friendship) by which one pursues happiness or lives morally. We will also attend to their understanding of the individual and political society. While we will focus on primary sources, students will also be introduced to key interpretations of Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant by contemporary moral theologians.

An examination of the idea of self in Hinduism and Islam through representative contemporary thinkers Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal respectively. How is self understood? What is its relation to the ideas of person and personal identity? What are the philosophical and theological presuppositions of the idea of self? Answers are supplemented by classical and other contemporary writings of the religious tradition in question, thereby accessing the worldview associated with that tradition.

This seminar examines the ancient and medieval discipline of rhetoric and its practitioners’ claim that it represented a properly philosophical discourse. It does so in terms of a selection of texts drawn from the works of Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Abelard and Heloise. In the process, it explores the relationship between affectivity and discursive validity with a view to the effect such a focus has on our understanding of Greek and Latin philosophy, patristic and medieval theology and their intertwined history.

Throughout Christian history Paul’s letters have been crucial texts for those attempting to answer the question ‘What is the gospel’? This class explores the Pauline interpretation of sixteenth century Protestant Reformers, whose work forms one of the most influential episodes in that history of reception. It considers the impact upon them of earlier interpreters, and the content of their own Pauline interpretation. It also considers their influence upon subsequent eras as those who contributed to the development of new traditions of Pauline interpretation. In order for students to undertake this exploration in a methodologically sophisticated manner, the course also examines reception theory and its potential contribution to New Testament interpretation. Students will assess what use we should make today of resources drawn from previous interpretations, especially those of the Reformers, in our own attempts to interpret Pauline theology. Many recent interpreters understand their positions as standing in direct opposition to trajectories of interpretation established by the Reformers. Does this render Reformation interpretations redundant or are contemporary interpreters neglecting an important resource?

This course will make the case that religion must be understood as shaping how we experience the world and not simply as a distinct kind of experience (e.g., religious experience v. artistic experience v. ethical experience). In doing so, the course will bring together work in religious studies, phenomenology of religion, phenomenological philosophy, secularism studies, and Continental philosophy of religion to show that religion is both constituted within historical and material conditions and is partly constitutive of those conditions. In that way, what it offers is not simply a materialist account of religion, but an account of material spirituality in which religion can be located and contextualized. Please note that the course will not assume prior familiarity with phenomenology.

Most people, when the subject of mediaeval liturgy is mentioned, think of the old service books which have the words spoken (sacramentaries, lectionaries, missals, breviaries) and descriptions of the action (ordos). There is another class of book entirely, the liturgical commentaries, which goes through the public services, explaining the elements they contain. They were also interested in the ministers of the liturgy, their orders and dress, in the structure of church and altar, in the calendar (temporal and sanctoral), and of course in the vexed question of how a priest computed the date of Easter (no diocesan journals in those days).

Stewart Clegg has suggested that,'the forgetting' of power may yet be the 'fate of our time' His caution signals how the more difficult it becomes to locate the source and nature of power amidst the complexity of social and political life, the harder it is to discern power, presence, employ it effectively, or resist it when necessary. This course addresses a 'forgetting' of power in Christian theology. Although various approaches to contemporary political theology imply differing conceptions of the workings of power, seldom is the concept itself the focus of direct analysis. Without a fully developed concept of power, effortsto advance a coherent political theology, or to resolve problems in ecclesiology more generally, leave many questions unaddressed and numerous tensions obscured. In addition to analyzing both the limitations and untapped resources regarding the concept ofpower within the Christian tradition, the course will also engage wider debates over the nature of power by making the concept of 'powerlessnes' a significant topic for discussion. For as contemporary scholars investigate the nature of power as both an oppressive and productive force, the Christian tradition, wrestling with the significance of being without power, and its reflections on whether this is always an inherently negative situation, promises to offer a unique contribution to debates over the nature of power.

Challenges of religious pluralism to Christianity appearing from outside Christianity, and responses to it. How do other world religious traditions think about Christianity or religions for that matter? What are the theoretical problems of religious pluralism and the response to them from within Christianity?

This course explores the role of emotion in biblical texts both within passages and within the reader. We integrate several elements: theories of emotion and the fuzzier category of affect, the cultural specificity of emotions, the expression of emotion beyond vocabulary, specific emotions (especially those that are often identified with religiosity), and the interplay between feeling and meaning. The overall aim of the course is to facilitate richer readings of biblical texts through attention to their affective valences.

Interfaith dialogue has many avenues, of which reading each other's sacred texts is one of the most conducive to building understanding. The scriptures of Islam, Judaism and Christianity are particularly suited to this venture, because of the shared narratives, which demonstrate both commonalities and profound differences. This course focuses on narratives shared between the Bible and the Quran and how major Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars have approached the relationship between the texts across the ages. The course examines scholars such as Tabari (d. 923), Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), W. St. Clair Tisdall (d.1929), Angelika Neuwirth and others. Students will learn the difference between author- and reader-oriented approaches, influence theory and intertextuality, and how different presuppositions can impact how the texts and their relationship are read. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in scripture-based interfaith dialogue and to experience first-hand how some of the established and developing approaches are practiced.