| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Religion (X) |
In the event of the absence of God, can one still have belief? In the face of nothingness, how is one to live? Can beauty still be encountered in the aftermath of war and genocide? This course discusses various responses to these questions in philosophy, theology, literature, and film, focusing on the ideas emerging out of WWII and the Holocaust. Thinkers considered include Dostoyevsky, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Marcel, Arendt, and filmmakers, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
The 19th-century formulated many of the questions and frameworks that continue to dominate theology and religious reflection in the West. We consider the developing interplay between modern Christian theology (primarily continental) and the principal philosophical and social critiques of religion in the 19th-century. Topics include human nature, religion, the divine-human relationship, religious knowledge, the social, and historicity. Readings from Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Harnack, and Troeltsch.
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A seminar on Ramanuja's (10th - 11th c.) Vedartha Samgraha, dedicated to a theistic reading of the Upanisads and Vedanta, defending devotion, synthesizing an integral view of God, world, and self, while criticizing alternative Vedanta readings of the Upanisads.
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Surveys important authors in the formative development of liberal religious thought in America into the early 20th century, such as Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, James, Royce, Matthews, DuBois, Wieman, Dewey.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will consider newly discovered works, as well as engage critical re-readings of well-known sources, around such topics as the politics of martyrdom, performance and ritual, gender, and intra-Christian controversies.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
An examination of evil in western thought, with focus on conceptions of human freedom and divine will, the distinction between natural and moral evil, and responses to the challenge of theodicy. The final project asks students to apply tools of analysis developed in the course to a situation or topic of their choosing. Readings include philosophical, theological and literary texts.
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The first half of the course introduces students to archaeological data from the Graeco-Roman world (inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, coins). The second half consists of seminars in Greece and Turkey during May and on-site meetings with archaeologists.
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The late Reginald Shepherd writes that the poem is "a form of thinking, a thinking out and a thinking through." For many contemporary poets, this thinking requires new and/or hybrid forms, forms often reminiscent of ancient and medieval religious texts. Readings for the course will likely include work by Rae Armantrout, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Dawn Lundy Martin, Jennifer Moxley, Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, John Taggart, and C. D. Wright.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will survey Augustine of Hippo's theological career through the lens of his encounters with three heretical communities of Roman North Africa: Manichaeism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. Particular attention will be paid to following themes: evil, freedom, the will, and selfhood.
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The seminar will explore Talal Asad's contention that bodily practices give rise to practical reason. Particular attention will be given to the importance of these conceptions of bodily practice and practical reason for the understanding of religion. In addition to Asad, we will read texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, as well as material from the medieval Christian monastic and mystical traditions.
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This course is an advanced introduction to the history of Madhyamaka Buddhism in India. Its focus will be on understanding the Madhyamaka text-tradition's impact on the philosophy and intellectual history of Buddhism in Southern Asia, through an analysis of specifically intra-Buddhist debates. A secondary objective will be to inquire into the possibility (and desirability) of working towards an intellectual history of religion in Southern Asia.
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Focuses on the Buddhist theory of momentariness. After discussing its intellectual history in India, we will read, in translation, a Buddhist "proof" of the theory, and discuss a number of non-Buddhist criticisms of it.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
A consideration of the place of Buddhist practices and values in Asian literary cultures and the place of literary culture in Buddhist life. The literary cultures considered will include examples from India, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan.
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This seminar will study Buddhist sources for what they suggest about how the human body exists, perceives, engages with others, learns, and participates in moral and artistic development. Readings will be drawn from Buddhist writings on the body and the senses, ritual, discipline, ethics, and artistic practice, along with personal memoirs from South Asia, Tibet, and East Asia. The seminar will also study continental philosophy of the body, including Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, as resources for vocabulary and conceptualization.
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A systematic exploration of the place of moral reflection in Buddhist thought and practice. The scope of the course is wide, with examples drawn from the whole Buddhist world, but the emphasis will be given to the particularity of different Buddhist visions of human flourishing. Attention will also be given to the challenges and promises of describing Buddhist ethics in a comparative perspective.
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This course is an opinionated introduction to the roughly 800 year history of the Buddhist epistemological tradition in India. 2007-2008 academic year focuses on this text-traditions approach to inferential reasoning and religious language, and explore its impact on the intellectual history of religion in Southern Asia. A secondary objective is to develop a trans-disciplinary methodological approach to this material that is equally responsible to its historical, philosophical, and religious contexts.
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This is an advanced seminar for multidisciplinary Buddhist Studies. For 2008-09 the topic was Buddhist Tantra in its Indian and Tibetan Contexts. Topics in the past have included Buddhist Monasticism, and Readings in Contemporary Buddhist Studies: The State of the Field.
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Some Christian ethicists have recently turned back to liturgy and sacraments in their explanations of moral education. This is indeed a return: the oldest Christian accounts emphasize the connection between ritual and character. At the same time, some Christian liturgists have tried to sharpen liturgy's ethical consequences--both by disrupting ritual complacencies and by blurring boundaries between ritual and world. This seminar brings together these preoccupations by juxtaposing older theological accounts of sacraments with recent studies of ritual efficacy.
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Whatever else it might be, European "modernity" is a transformation in Christian projects for ethics. Controversies over Reformation can conceal how far both Protestant and Roman Catholic writers begin to make modern assumptions about moral learning or to exercise modern forms of control over moral subjects. The course will try to trace some of the transformation and the increasingly radical reactions to it through a series of primary texts from Luther to Nietzsche.
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What accounts for the prominence of sexual issues in contemporary Christian debates? Is this something new in church history? Is it peculiar to Christian thinking or does it arise from other cultural forces? Is it helpful for Christian ethics to talk so much about sex? This course will take up these questions first in some historical constructions of sexual topics, then in the rapid changes of the last hundred years.
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This course will introduce students to the ancient and medieval expansion of Christianity eastward from Syria to China by tracing the history of the so-called "Nestorian" Church, or "Church of the East." Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of this church community in the wake of the Christological controversies of the 5th century and its intellectual heritage in Antioch. Subsequent units will focus on particular areas where the Church of the East established itself, including Syria, Persia, India, Central Asia along the Silk Road, and finally Tibet, China, and Mongolia. Considerable attention will be paid to the interactions between Christianity and other religions in these areas, including Judaism, Islam, Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
Under what conditions did philosophy of religion emerge in Western thought? How is it separate from theology? Participants conduct research and present in the second half of the term.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will analyze the major classics of Twentieth Century Roman Catholic Theology. The seminar will seek to introduce major religious thinkers primarily through an analysis of the arguments of a major work that has become a classic. It will discuss the unique contribution of the work, the reasons for its significance and the extent of its impact. Among those considered will be Maurice Blondel, Alfred Loisy, Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, and Gustavo Gutierrez. Others to be considered.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
Presentation and discussion of the research of doctoral candidates in American religious history.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page
Presentation and discussion of the research of doctoral candidates in American religious history.
Score: 9.24515 Details | Listing | Web page