Fall 2013

Exclusively required for the Transition Year students, this course provides a comprehensive survey of the academic expectations involved in a Ph.D. Students will be required to find relevant Ph.D. dissertations and offer a critique of the quality; in addition faculty will make presentations on time management, note taking, and doctoral level arguments.

This course will trace the growth and development of Christianity from its earliest beginnings in the first century to the great councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, stopping en route to examine selected texts from the New Testament, early Christian and Roman documents, the writings of the Fathers and the earliest creeds, ranging from the Gospels and St. Paul to Ignatius, Justin, Origen, Basil, Augustine, and Nicea. The course will focus on emergent Christian thought, the nature of God and Christ, the Bible, Church and sacraments, sin and grace, the relation of church and state, and the Christian way of life, toward the goal of gaining keener insight into issues of religion and faith today.

This intermediate level course is designed to enable students to read the New Testament in Greek, concentrating on grammar and vocabulary building. Students will be introduced to the wide variety of Greek styles present in the New Testament writings. Prerequisite: LG-562 Introduction to New Testament Greek, Part II or permission of the instructor.

All religion is a social phenomenon. Although faith has a private dimension, human beings experience religion in groups or through forms created by social organizations. Every religion creates and is maintained by institutionalized rituals or concrete organizational forms. Professed beliefs are passed down by religious traditions, and ideally, these beliefs have consequences for one’s social behavior. Religious life has spawned times of war and times of peace; changed human beings and human history. Each of these social dimensions of religion can be investigated with the research methods of the social scientist. Much can be learned about religion from a sociological perspective, from reading classical sociological theories of religious organization and practice including those of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx.

An introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, this course will apply historical-critical methods of study to develop a framework for understanding the origins of the texts and the relationship of the texts to one another. Attention will be given to contemporary theories of biblical interpretation. Survey I will cover the materials in the Torah and Prophets (Genesis-Kings).

This course explores the complexity of Christian and Muslim theological interpretation of each other, and of themselves in light of the other, in various times and contexts. Students will examine the themes, genres, and strategies of Christian-Muslim theological engagement from the 7th century CE to the present, with particular attention to the 21st-century dialogue of Christian and Muslim scholars known as the Building Bridges seminars. Thus, this course will facilitate what Francis Clooney means by comparative theology: an endeavor which “combines tradition-rooted theological concerns with actual study of another tradition.” And, following John Renard, it will define theological concerns broadly: including, of course, understandings of God, revelation, and the divine-human economy; but also the “panoply of texts and images and the various modes of interpreting them; ways of reasoning and analysis of human ‘religious’ experience; modes of expression, whether verbal or visual, of that experience; and the host of institutional and cultural developments that have formed the settings and contexts for all such interpretation, processing, and expression.”

Students will be expected to attend all sessions and to take their turn at leading class discussion. Up to ten hours of online work may be required in addition to the week of intensive classroom time. This may take such forms as watching a webcast or taking part in a webinar, an online discussion, or a conference call.

The Jewish people are called to consecrate both time and space, the two pillars of a this-worldly spirituality. After an introduction to Jewish identity and vocation, the focus will shift to the Sabbath and other holy days in the Jewish calendar. The metaphysical dimension of these holy times will be examined along with the behavioral norms and rituals associated with the festivals. Next, the sacred dimension of space/place/land will be addressed, with specific reference to the “Holy Land,” Jerusalem/Al-Quds, and Hebron/Al-Khalil. The political disputes over holy places and cities in Israel/Palestine will be considered from aspiritual perspective linking the Jewish experience with Christian and Muslim sensibilities.