Winter/Spring 2013

Studies show that a majority of congregations have less than half their members involved in the ongoing life of the community.  So while they struggle to grow, in essence, half of their current human resources are under-utilized.   This course will explore patterns in society, congregational expectations, and leadership norms that contribute to this reality.  It will draw on recent research and literature to strategize ways to overcome this low-commitment dynamics.  The course will use engaging exercises, self-reflection and an experiential effort to change involvement dynamics in an actual organization throughout the course.

Learning to live together is the challenge of our age. This course looks at Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of community and universality in light of our global situation. It considers what universalist ethics look like when not based on religious assumptions, and examines what such ethics have to offer religious moral discourse. The course will also consider a moral argument towards a way of being in the world that both maintains and moves beyond our own particularities. Questions of environmental responsibilities and economic justice as they relate to these perspectives will also be explored.

This course will explore the interactions of the Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the Middle Ages. Using primary sources and contemporary scholarship, we will trace the relationships among these different communities. In the Christian West, we will study how Jews survived as part of medieval society despite persecution and violence, and how Christians and Muslims confronted each other during the Crusades. We will also explore the way the three communities lived together in Iberia—first where Islam was the dominant power, and then after the Reconquista, when Christians ruled over communities of Jews and Muslims in Spain. We will seek to understand how theological ideas shaped but did not necessarily control individual interactions among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The focus of this introductory course, which assumes no prior knowledge of the Greek language, is on the basic grammar and vocabulary of New Testament Greek. Students will begin reading selected passages of the New Testament. Prerequisite: LG-561 or permission of the instructor.

This course investigates the role of religion - Islam in Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, and Islam and Christianity in Egypt and Syria - during the “Arab Spring,” the political rebellions of 2011 and 2012.  Principal topics include:  the cultural, political, and socio-economic histories that informed the outbreak of the “Spring” in its various embodiments; the immediate factors contributing to the rebellions; the role of the US and European and Arab states; the effect of the “Spring” on Arab Christian/Muslim relations; the overall outcome of the “Spring,” and the degree to which it has led to truly significant change.

This course will study in depth the worldviews of the Hebrew Bible [Old Testament], the New Testament and the Qur’ān. This will be done through an examination of common and divergent themes in the three Scriptures. More specifically, we shall study the three major themes of Revelation, Creation and Salvation. Within this framework, we shall pay special attention to such major themes as mercy, love and justice, atonement, sin and forgiveness, and the theology of creation, redemption and eschatology.

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.”

This continuation of the yearlong six-credit course in leadership and applied spirituality rooted in women’s experience and from a feminist perspective meets monthly through May.