Courses

• GRS PY 961: Scholary Methods in Physics
  Introduction to scholarly methods in physics teaching and research. Reading and reporting scientific literature; ethical obligations in physics teaching and research; priority disputes; online publications and copyright issues; effective reading and writing in physics; discussions about careers in physics. Required of first-semester doctoral students.
• GRS RN 601: Varieties of Early Christianity
  Surveys the many different and often competing forms of Christianity that arose and flourished in the second to the seventh Century, from the "apostolic period" to the Arab conquest in the Middle East.
• GRS RN 602: Early Christian Women
  An examination of the lives, concerns, and roles of women during the first four Christian centuries. Engages texts that present women as disciples, missionaries, ascetics, and church leaders, with attention to ancient gender constructions.
• GRS RN 603: Inventing Christianity
  Addresses issues raised in identifying and interpreting religious traditions, using Christianity as a test case. Examines a selection of recent constructions of Christianity undertaken from contrasting perspectives, internal and external, `neutral' and partisan, pro and contra. Clayton.
• GRS RN 604: Christian Thought II
  Second course in two-semester sequence on major developments in Christian intellectual history. Source readings in RN 604 are from Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Lessing, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Maritain, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bernard Lonergan. Students may enroll for either semester or both.
• GRS RN 605: Bible Medvl Wld
  
• GRS RN 607: Medieval Christian Spirituality
  Explores Christian beliefs and practices in medieval Europe within and outside formal church structures. Topics include accommodation of pagan culture, constructing identity, clerical and lay piety, heterodox practice and institutional response, and encounter with non-Christian traditions.
• GRS RN 608: The Open Heaven: Apocalyptic Literature in Early Judaism and Christianity
  Examines literary and historical roots of “apocalypticism” in early Judaism and Christianity. Attention to literary genre, symbolism, metaphor, heaven, hell, angelology, demonology, attitudes toward the end of the world. Examines relationship of apocalypticism to shamanism, mysticism, magic, magic, gnosticism, liturgy.
• GRS RN 612: Buddhism in America
  The transplantation and transformation of Buddhism in the United States. Time period ranges from the 18th century to the present, but the emphasis is on contemporary developments, including the new Asian immigration, Jewish Buddhism, feminization, and engaged Buddhism.
• GRS RN 613: Hinduism in America
  The transplantation and transformation of the ideas, institutions, and practices of Hinduism and Sikhism in America. Consideration of gurus and students, Indian-American immigrants, and European-American converts. Emphasis on primary texts, including autobiographies, novels, catechisms, sermons, and anti-cult polemics
• GRS RN 615: Spiritual Autobiography
  Focus for Fall 2007: American Spiritual Autobiographies. Explores the literary genre of spiritual autobiography as a window onto the varieties of American religious experience and the vagaries of the modern self. Attention to text and context, classic exemplars and contemporary American authors, and multiple religious traditions.
• GRS RN 619: Midrash: Classical Rabbinic Biblical Interpretation
  Explores rabbinic biblical interpretation in its literary, cultural, and historical context (second to seventh centuries CE). Examines how the rabbis read the Bible, and what these interpretations tell us about Jews and Judaism in the ancient world.
• GRS RN 620: Readings in Classical Hebrew
  Surveys, in original Hebrew, selections from ancient Jewish religious texts, from Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Rabbinic literature. Reviews grammar and syntax as needed. Attention to development of Hebrew language in historical context. Theme of readings for Spring 2010: Judaism and Justice, Human and Divine.
• GRS RN 621: Seminar: Wisdom and Tradition in Ancient Israel and Judaism
  Wisdom as a major intellectual tradition in ancient Israel; the sage in Israelite and other Near Eastern cultures; formal criticism of literary types; relation to prophetic and apocalyptic traditions; canonical and apocryphal writings.
• GRS RN 622: History of Judaism
  Major trends in postbiblical Judaism; academy and synagogue; Mishna and Talmud; Babylonian diaspora; medieval poetry, philosophy, and mysticism; codes of law; organization of the Jewish community "in exile"; land of Israel; Judaism and Islamic and Christian civilization.
• GRS RN 623: Classical Jewish Thought
  Basic human and religious issues as they have been understood within the classical Jewish framework of God, the people of Israel, and Torah: good and evil, creation, the relationship of human beings to God and to one another.
• GRS RN 624: Introduction to Rabbinic Literature
  Chronological exploration of rabbinic Judaism's major documents, using a modern scholarly anthology. The Mishnah; legal and legendary selections from the midrashim and both the Jerusalem and Palestinian Talmuds. Themes: monotheism, sin and atonement, heaven and hell, conceptions of gender, the impact of rabbinic texts on medieval and modern Judaism.
• GRS RN 625: Seminar: Early Jewish Mysticism
  Analysis of the development of Jewish mysticism from the biblical to the early medieval era. Emphasis on the forms of mysticism--and the texts in which they are embedded-- from the rabbinic era. No knowledge of Hebrew is required.
• GRS RN 626: Jewish Mystical Movements and Modernization, 1492–2000
  Mysticism, spiritual, and social influences. Early modern, modern periods. Focus on “conservative” and “revolutionary” tendencies. 1492 and Iberian, German, Polish Jewry; leadership of “third generation” of survivors; Christian and Islamic influences; Kulturkampf precipitated by popularization of Kabbala, antinomianism, Hasidism, magic, science.
• GRS RN 628: Modern Judaism
  Exploration of complex encounters between Judaism and modernity from the Renaissance and Reformation to expulsion from Spain and creation of Jewish centers in the New World; emancipation and its consequences; assimilation, conversion, Reform Judaism, Zionism, the American Jewish community, modern anti-Semitism.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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