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Spring 2007 Course Listings and Summer 2007 |
| 201: Christ College Symposium.
Cr. 0. Christ College sophomores, juniors, and seniors are required to register for the course and expected to attend each gathering except in the case of a course conflict. Presentations and discussions of topics of special interest to members of the Christ College community. Only Christ College students may register, but all students are welcome to attend.
This course will introduce students to central developments in the history of the Christian tradition and to the nature and purpose of Christian theology. It will also encourage students to practice developing a "working theology" by examining primary texts in the Christian intellectual and spiritual tradition. This work will be reflected in three short papers and one longer research paper. Readings include selections from the Bible, St. Irenaeus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as selected writings by other classical and contemporary theologians. The course aims at improving the student's (1) knowledge of Christian theological and practical traditions; (2) ability to read theological texts closely and to think critically about them; and (3) integration and expression, oral and written, of critical reflection on the readings.
This course introduces students to fundamental issues in the theory and practice of interpreting our lives as individuals and as a community. The course will draw its theoretical emphases from major figures in the human sciences that might include Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, R.G. Collingwood, and Michel Foucault. The course will not, however, simply consider and examine social and cultural theory in the abstract but rather show how it can be applied to historical and contemporary phenomena. This will be approached primarily by reading historical and other texts that incorporate these theorists into tangible settings, and by practicing the craft of cultural and social interpretation ourselves. The primary assignments, along with weekly discussion, include sets of papers in one of the following two patterns: two individual papers of approximately 2-4 pages, 1 longer paper of approximately 10 pages, and one collaborative research project; OR three 5 page papers and one collaborative research project. An additional plenary hour will be spent each week viewing films, listening to lectures, or participating in research projects and presentations.
One of this course's primary objectives is to help you better understand the character, scope, and limitations of the scientific endeavor, particularly in your own discipline. Readings, class discussions, and writing assignments will help you move beyond simplistic notions of the so-called "scientific method" which often bear little resemblance to the way science actually works in the real world. The course will contain presentations of various philosophical schools of thought along with specific historical examples. By examining a series of case histories of scientific work, we will better be able to understand how scientific choices are made, and what factors influence such choices. We will try to better understand how competing ideas, models, and theories are formulated and rise to acceptance in the scientific community. We will also examine the factors that lead to their demise. These studies will illustrate that science is a very human endeavor and is strongly influenced both by human abilities and limitations. A fundamental assumption is that science is basically an honest endeavor seeking to discover the truth about the natural world. Yet in view of our role as human observers and participants and the competition for research funding and results, how do we maintain our objectivity and integrity? And how does the scientific community deal with cases of carelessness, mistakes, and outright misconduct? These and other ethical issues will be considered in our discussions. It is natural to explore the connections between the scientific endeavor and our own personal lives. What are our motives and desires for learning more about the natural world? How does science influence and interact with our various faith commitments? What moral issues arise due to our involvement in and benefit from scientific developments? We will discuss these issues in an attempt to develop as whole persons whose lives have increasing coherence and unity. Readings for this course will include The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, Philosophy of Science by Del Ratzsch, The Scientific Attitude by Frederick Grinnell, and One World by John Polkinghorne. Students will take two in-class exams and a final exam. They will also be expected to submit frequent one-page written responses to assigned readings. Students will write a 10-15 page paper analyzing an episode in the history of science of their own choosing, and will also write a 5-8 page personal essay reflecting on their motivations for pursuing a scientific career and possible tensions and conflicts between their professional and personal lives.
Primarily through the study of tragedy and comedy, we will analyze the nature and function of ancient Greek and Roman theater in its historical and social context. Through all of this, our goal will be to reconstruct the evolution of ancient play-making and stage entertainment, from the elevated tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, to the bawdy comedies of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence, to Roman mime, pantomime, and gladiatorial contests. Among the topics considered: the tragic and comic venues and occasions (Greek festivals and Roman games); tragedy's relationship with Athenian democracy; the nature of Greek theaters, the Roman stage and what they considered to be “entertaining”; ancient theatrical production techniques; religion and drama; women and tragedy, especially the presentation of women on the Greek tragic stage, in the light of the social, political, and economic status of the actual women of classical Athens; tragic and comic heroism; and myth and drama.
In this course we will examine Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women’s roles in European religious life during the late medieval and early modern periods, an era marked by dramatic religious change. We will explore the largely Catholic Europe of the Middle Ages as well as the astonishing period of religious creativity marked by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the Reformation era, people’s seemingly private religious beliefs were held to be of public significance and thus constantly were subjected to governmental supervision. As “weaker vessels” women were believed to be particularly susceptible to religious heresies. Consequently, clerics and governmental officials often perceived women as potential threats to both political and religious harmony. Some women struggled to maintain illegal religions, such as Judaism in Spain or Catholicism in England. Others took on central roles in the establishment of entirely new religious communities such as the Quakers. Readings for this course will focus on women from across Europe as mystics, nuns, heretics, prophets, and/or preachers, and as victims and perpetrators of religiously motivated persecution and violence. Likewise, we will address the relationship between sexual politics and religious reform in witchcraft accusations and the effect of reformed morality on women’s work as prostitutes. Potential readings: Assignments include one 6-8 page paper, five one-page discussion papers, and one research paper (12-15 pages) and presentation (10-15 minutes).
The Bible is perhaps the most important and influential book in history, and the history of the Bible is, according to one scholar, “perhaps the biggest subject in the world.” The ancient Jewish and Christian communities produced and determined the books of the Bible as the textual foundation on which their religious beliefs, teachings, and practices have been built. Biblical manuscripts represent the most numerous surviving artifacts from the Middle Ages. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Bible became the first major book to be printed in Europe and it has remained in print ever since. Today the Bible is the world’s best-selling and most widely disseminated written text. This seminar will explore the Bible as a sacred book throughout Western Christian history. We will divide this history into four periods and the course into corresponding units, namely: (1) Antiquity; (2) the Middle Ages; (3) the Reformation era; and (4) Modernity. In each of these historical periods we will investigate Bibles as material objects – as ancient papyrus scrolls and parchment codices, as richly illuminated medieval manuscripts and glossed scholastic texts, as incunabular icons of divine revelation, as Victorian heirlooms, as sacred pulpit totems, and as contemporary culturally-relevant magazines. Questions central to the seminar include: How were Bibles and their texts produced, by whom, and for what particular purposes? How did (and do) the various forms and formats of Bibles and their texts influence dissemination, use (liturgical, devotional, monastic, familial), display, reading, interpretation, theological formulation, education, preaching, proselytizing, and spiritual and moral formation? Course requirements include reading and participation in class discussion, one class presentation, a midterm exam, and a research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. Required Texts: Recommended: 300EX: Environment, Faith, and Ethics. Cr. 3. Mr. Skillen.
In this seminar, we will examine the relationship between Christian faith and environmental stewardship, taking as our starting point the recurring charge that Christianity has fostered a callous disregard for the nonhuman world. We will put Christian faith in dialogue with environmental concerns, seeking to recover and emphasize elements of Christian theology, faith, and practice that clarify the nature of human responsibility for the non human world. The seminar will be divided into three parts: framing environmental problems as religious rather than merely technical problems; articulating a framework for environmental ethics that emphasizes vision and character more than rules for decision making; and tracing the basic contours of at least one approach to Christian environmental ethics and action. Readings will be drawn from history, theology, ethics, and related fields, and will include the work of Thomas Dunlap, Wendell Berry, Richard Niebuhr, Paul Santmire, and Steven Bouma-Prediger. Assignments will include two short papers (4-6 pages) and one more substantial paper (12-15 pages). Grades will be influenced substantially by student participation. This is not a seminar in environmental problem solving. There is an important place for such an approach—in ethics as well in the sciences—but this seminar presupposes that our deepest environmental crises are in fact crises of culture, worldview, and human nature. These underlying crises will not be solved through technological and political solutions alone. Indeed, the seminar presupposes that the fundamental causes of environmental degradation, sin and death, cannot be solved in any final sense, but they can be understood with greater clarity through Christian reflection and therefore confronted with a renewed sense of purpose and hope.
In the gospels (Matt. 16:13-20; Matt. 18:15-20; John 20:19-23) Jesus bestowed an awesome authority on his disciples, the so-called “power of the keys,” which enabled them to forgive or retain sin. Down through the centuries Christians have understood and exercised this authority in a variety of ways. These varied understandings and practices, in turn, have had a profound influence on the piety and the politics of the church. The task of this seminar is to examine the power of the keys historically in order to understand how this authority has shaped church and society in the West. The course will proceed chronologically, beginning with the Biblical text, and then turn to examine sources from the early, medieval, early modern, and modern periods of Church History. These sources will include writings by the evangelists Matthew and John; the patristic theologians Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine; the medieval theologians Columbanus, Thomas Aquinas, and Jean Gerson; the early modern theologians Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Menno Simons; and the modern theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Class sessions will consist of close reading and discussion of these sources, along with reflection on recent scholarship. Course evaluation will be based on in-class presentations and a final research paper. Enrollment is limited to 15 students. Prerequisites: THEO 200 or CC 215.
This course will examine three of the “Four Classic Chinese Novels,” namely, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 1330-ca. 1400), Journey to the West (1590s), and The Story of the Stone (1791), all required readings for any basic training in Chinese civilization. The greatest achievements of narrative in premodern China, all three texts also enjoy enormous popularity in contemporary China as a result of their transmission through oral retellings and popular media reproductions. Three Kingdoms and Journey each recounts a significant event in Chinese history: the division and unification of the Three Kingdoms in the 3rd century, and the journey of Xuanzang, the famous monk from the Tang dynasty (618-907), to India to get Buddhist scriptures. Both events still have an impact on Chinese society. Being neither historical nor political, The Story of the Stone has won the acclaim of being “a summation of the three-thousand-year span of Chinese literary civilization” (Andrew Plaks, et al.). We will discuss the texts’ literary values as well as themes such as national unification, heroism, justice, love, the individual and the community, the identity of the intellectual, among others. Whenever appropriate, the course strives to be comparative with Western literature. For example, among the assigned readings will be an article that compares The Journey to the West with The Fairie Queen. We will also compare The Story of the Stone with the European Bildungsroman, particularly Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship. No previous knowledge of China or Chinese language is required. Class requirements include active participation in weekly discussions, one presentation, two shorter papers between 5-7 pages, and a final paper between 8-10 pages. Graduate students will be required to do additional work.
This course examines the history of visualizing American national identity from the late eighteenth century to the present. Accompanied by a small exhibition of images and objects, which will figure in student writing and research, the principal theme will be the role of visual mass media in the formation and practice of American nationalism, collective memory, and public culture. Focusing on prints, paintings, monuments, and mass-produced images from posters to films as public formulations of what America is and to whom it belongs, the aim of the course is to consider how images and ways of seeing have allowed Americans to imagine their national identity—for better and for worse. Beginning with the important work of Benedict Anderson, consideration will focus on the cultural construction of nationhood as an imagined community. A series of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and ritual practices will plot a historical arc to the present, bringing discussion to Tony Horwitz’s fascinating study of Civil War re-enactments today, showing how the project of national (re)imagination is always unfinished. Andrew Delbanco’s overview of American history and religion provides an opportunity to consider the national narratives and the place of religion within them. Several readings about various images and national identity will ground the theoretical reflections in the history of visual practices, examining the deeply contested nature of the American imagination as it has taken shape in cultural and social conflicts around race, ethnicity, gender, and American involvement in the world beyond its boundaries. National mission, civil religion, public ritual, nationalism, propaganda, education, entertainment, cultural institutions, and social conflict are among many of the themes that will occupy our attention. The course ends with a careful reading of Daniel Boorstin’s critique of American self-indulgence. Students will write two brief critical papers and one longer research paper. The final paper will also be presented in class. Major texts:
How can we understand other human beings who are very different from us? Do matters of history, language, race, class, gender, and religion separate us so definitively as to render mutual understanding impossible? This seminar will explore the peril, possibility, and promise of understanding others. Specifically we will focus on intellectual others, especially the ‘other’ that is the text. When we read a text from a very different time, place, or point of view than our own, do we inevitably misunderstand it? What makes one interpretation better or worse than another? Why bother reading texts that seem strange, foreign, or wrong? Our approach to addressing these (and other) questions will necessarily be interdisciplinary, but it will draw most heavily upon philosophy, theology, and literary theory. Course requirements include regular attendance, thoughtful preparation and participation, occasional seminar leadership, a formal oral presentation, and a major seminar paper of approximately 20 pages. Texts to be used in the course will likely include the following:
Museums reveal what cultures value most. In their architecture, collections, and public programs museums demonstrate how people organize knowledge, think about the past, and see themselves in relation to others. This seminar will examine the history of museums in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the present, tracing the development of a wide variety of institutions—Art Museums, Science and Technology Museums, History Museums, and Natural History Museums. Topics will include the nature of collecting as a human activity, history and memory, museums and nationalism, culture as entertainment, and the politics of taste. We will pay close attention to difficult challenges facing museums today, such as Native Americans’ demand for the return of human remains and artifacts, the politics of the representation of racial, ethnic, and religious difference, and the proper response to tragedies such as the dropping of the atomic bombs, the Holocaust, or 9/11. Students will complete a take-home midterm and a term project analyzing one museum of their choice, requiring both a 15 –20 page paper and a final PowerPoint presentation. They will attend several weekday (class period) local field trips and two Saturday field trips to Chicago. Major readings will include: Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums (1979), Susan Vogel et al., Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (1988), Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1993), and Katherine M. Lewis, The Changing Face of Public History: The Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of American Museums (2005).
Born in 1813 Denmark, and raised by an intensely religious, successful merchant of humble origins whose second wife gave birth after five months of marriage, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen in 1830 to study theology. But it would be ten years before he took his final exams, during which time he became alienated from his melancholy father and the Christianity in which he was raised. Meanwhile he devoted himself to reading literature and philosophy, and presumably, sowing wild oats. In 1838 Kierkegaard’s journals report a prodigal’s return, in both the earthly and heavenly sense. Two years later his formal education came to an end, at which point he also broke off a year-long engagement to Regina Olsen. So far as we know, he never told anyone, including Regina, exactly why he became convinced he could not go ahead with their marriage. What we do know is that this event triggered a vast and complex literary career. In bookstores, Kierkegaard is classified under “philosophy/religion.” This is both accurate and misleading. He financed his own publications, never held an academic post, and felt no obligation to make his writing fit a particular disciplinary genre. For most authors this would spell complete disaster, except that here we have a clear case of genius. Stages on Life’s Way, for example, opens with a dinner party at which several bachelors give puzzling, and tipsy, speeches about love, and ends with an equally puzzling, though sober, commentary on an anonymous diary found locked in a box at the bottom of a pond. Fear and Trembling opens with four odd retellings of the sacrifice of Isaac and ends by contrasting Abraham with a guilt-stricken merman. Sickness Unto Death is nothing short of a diagnostic manual of the human spirit, the preface of which declares, “In one sense this little book is such that a college student could write it, in another sense, perhaps such that not every professor could write it.” In addition to not fitting a particular genre, Kierkegaard’s work has inspired and influenced readers from a variety of academic disciplines, such as theologians Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, novelists Albert Camus and Walker Percy, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and psychologist Rollo May. His work has also been used as an interpretive grid for analyzing other phenomena, such as: “a Kierkegaardian reading of” Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamozov, the film American Beauty, or the artistic and political career of Václav Havel, post-communist president of the Czech Republic. But what finally is this unusual literature about? In his first publication Kierkegaard criticized his contemporary Hans Christian Andersen for not having a “worldview.” And this is precisely what he sought to include in his own work: a view of life, a vision of our ethical, spiritual, psychological, and social circumstance, of what it means to be an authentic human individual. This allowed him to address classic themes of love and despair, religious faith and doubt, ethical commitment, aesthetic detachment, and social critique. And he does so in a literary form so earnest, yet so riddled with irony, you will want to read it twice. Course expectations include one 15-20 page or two 8-10 page essays. Reading assignments will be roughly 15-30 pages for every 50-minute session.
This course will examine a cluster of questions that are concerned
with how human beings should live and with the relationship between
life and livelihood. Are some lives more worthy of regard and hence
more significant than others? Does the significance of the work
(paid employment) that I do come from what it is, from the quality
of its products, from the manner in which I do it, or from the number
of people who benefit from it? Are human beings really free to shape
their lives? Is ambition a good thing or a bad thing? The questions
will be explored in conversation with a wide variety of readings,
most of them from the realm of imaginative literature, e.g. short
stories,lyric poems, memoirs, diary entries, eulogies, philosophical
essays, plays, and biographical sketches. Students will be asked
not only to study the texts assigned but to discover additional
texts that might contribute to a revised, published anthology of
readings on the subject of the course. Students will be led to prepare
assignments that will help prepare them for what they might do after
graduation from Christ College, e.g.
Christ College Senior Colloquium provides a capstone, integrative experience for Christ College Associates and Scholars. Through class conversations, readings, and written work, students will be led to give shape to the substance of their lives through autobiographical narrative, and they will be led to reflect upon the character and meaning of their future work. The practical dimensions of these reflections will include attention to the transition from college. Registration is restricted to students who will graduate in May or August or December 2007.
Hangzhou, China International Study Center (Cross-listed with ENGL 390, EAST 390, HIST 390, and POLS
490.) Join Professor Renu Juneja on a journey to understand modern China from a variety of perspectives. While the primary texts for the course will be fiction (short stories, novella) and films, the course will also use a basic history text, and will engage cultural and political issues through short readings, invited guest speakers, and discussion. Students may be interested in knowing that Professor Juneja is not an expert on China, so the class will be a mutual journey of discovery. Professor Juneja does, however, have considerable expertise in cross-cultural studies and in interpreting texts. Expectations for student work include several short critical responses to the texts, a longer essay (5-7 pages), and a final exam. |
