Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• STH TR 830: Values and Practices in Developing Healthy Communities
  Important theoretical and practical issues related to cross-cultural, governmental and nongovernmental and faith-based service work related to the practice of *Decent Care and its application in developing healthy communities will be surveyed. Structured according a developmental approach to health and health systems, students will be encouraged to think critically about and experience the application of values and assumptions undergirding health systems and structures of such service work as currently envisioned and practiced. Case studies, guest speakers, and multimedia offerings will enrich the context of informed disciplinary and cross disciplinary approaches. *Decent Care is a concept developed in the World Health Organization by the instructor. Decent Care bases the planning, delivery and evaluation of care on values that place individuals, in their social and cultural contexts, at the center of the caring process. The aims of decent care are to develop health systems around the primacy of persons in their own health care, and to build a bridge between the principles of human rights and the practice of medicine. By listening to and honoring the voices of the people care processes and models can be developed that respond to the needs of a community enabling human flourishing.
• STH TR 840: American Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestants in the United States
  Conservative Protestantism is a vital religious movement in North American life whose adherents make up roughly 25-35% of the American population. This course will introduce students to various streams of conservative Protestant movements- -Pentecostalism, Fundamentalism, and Neo-Evangelicalism--and their characteristic religious patterns. Taking an interdisciplinary approach with sociology as the lead discipline, students will explore the major theories that attempt to explain the vitality of these groups, examine their impact on various dimensions of social and political life, and assess the implications of the exportation of these distinctively American brands of religion abroad. The assumption that the study of Evangelicalism and its complexities in the U.S. context warrants deep and thoughtful study guides this course. (Cluster 2)
• STH TR 850: Sociology of Congregational Life
  The overarching goal of this class is to provide students with a working knowledge of group and organizational dynamics, using congregational life as a lens. Examining congregations, religious leaders, and laity through theories of group and organizational dynamics. This is a course about how congregations and congregational life is shaped - how the laity, pastoral staff, surrounding community, and organizational processes all shape congregations in specific ways. We will examine the ways in which societal factors impact congregations and congregational life. By the end of the semester, I expect students will have a working knowledge of group and organizational dynamics, as well as research methods to examine congregational conflicts from an individual, group, and societal level. (Cluster 2)
• STH TR 900: Ethnographic Research
  This seminar aims to train students in the understanding and application of ethnographic research methods. The research methods covered in this course are qualitative in nature, focusing on projects which require practitioners to go into the field and to analyze social spaces constructed, inhabited, and maintained by particular sets of social actors. The data in focus is less readily accessible via surveys, demographic analysis, and experimental designs. Course participants will, first of all, gain a broad understanding of the traditions related to ethnography, fieldwork, and qualitative research in the field of sociology. Secondly, participants will engage key debates in sociology related to the theories and methods of ethnographic work, ultimately developing research designs that most effectively fit personal projects in progress. Thirdly, participants will expand their techniques of data collection via guided field assignments and class interactions. Fourthly, participants will develop practices of research presentation that communicate findings in a compelling and insightful manner, with the aim of making findings accessible to a broader academic audience. Throughout the course, special attention will be given to the observation of how social boundaries are constructed and maintained in particular social settings.
• STH TR 909: Sociology of Black Religions
  This course will survey major classic and contemporary themes in social scientific studies of black religion in the 20th century in the United States. Students will interrogate, among other things, popular conceptions of black religion, the black church, and black religious experience.
• STH TR 940: Advanced Seminar in Religion and Social Change
  This seminar examines the relationship between religious ideas and practices and the world of micro and macro social change. It gives attention to both the conservative and radical potential within religion, as well as to the structures that either limit or facilitate the exercise of religious power. It covers both major theoretical perspectives and relevant research literature, with focused attention on a variety of historical and contemporary cases.
• STH TR 964: Seminar in Social Theory and Religious Identity
  This seminar will explore a variety of theoretical perspectives on the social formation of modern persons, asking how those insights inform an understanding of individual and collective religious identity. Students will also participate in field research focused on the intersection of religious and social identities.
• STH TS 500: Encountering ET: Spirit, Science, and Space
  The discoveries of Copernicus/Galileo and Darwin (19th century) significantly altered scientific and religious worldviews. People experienced a sense of displacement from their previously perceived status in the universe. In the 21st century, as space explorations expand, Contact with extraterrestrial life-- including intelligent life--becomes ever more possible (some people already claim to have had visual or physical contact with UFOs and their alien occupants). Using perspectives from science, science fiction, religion, and United Nations space treaties, and narratives about peoples' claims of encounters with extraterrestrial beings, this course will discuss current and projected understandings of the human place in the cosmos; reflect on how discovery of extraterrestrial life might impact the human sense of place in the universe; and consider how the impacts of ET encounters (actual or theoretical) might be positively incorporated into human consciousness and contexts.
• STH TS 800: International Conflict and the Ministry of Reconciliation
  This course proposes a theology of reconciliation for religious peace-building in the realms of ethnic division and nationalism, race, economic injustice and environmental degradation. Churches and communities of faith are not simply local and parochial bodies but are parts of wider communities of faith and practice. The course explores such corporate practice toward a public theology for the public square for Christians to live faithfully in a world of difference.
• STH TS 803: Literature and Ethics
  Good ethical conception and practice often demand that we see things from others' points of view. Great novels, plays, poems, and films are good at helping us to reach empathic perceptions of particular people and situations by involving our intellect and emotion. Novels, tragic dramas, and others have the capacity to make readers identify with fictional characters in ways that show possibilities and potential vulnerabilities for themselves. This kind of empathic identification is important for good ethical practice in diverse and pluralistic communities. Narrative works of art are important for developing the human self- understanding critical for embodying certain religious and theological ideals. This course will explore the connections between literature (novels, plays, and short stories) and ethics: the relationship between creative imagination and moral imagination; the nature of moral attention and moral vision; the role of context-specific judging in ethical decisions. The course will help students to deepen and broaden their ethical understanding in ways that involve and give priority to context-specific moral evaluation, compassion, similar possibilities and vulnerabilities, eudaimonistic judgment, rather than abstract general principles for ethical judgment. (Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 804: The Religious Thinking of Howard Thurman
  This seminar examines the religious and moral dimensions in the thought of Howard Thurman (1899-1981) a leading figure in twentieth century American religious and cultural life. The dream of community, or "the search for common ground," was the defining motif of Thurman's life and thought. His vision of the kinship of all peoples, born out of the particularity of his own personal struggles, propelled him into the Protestant mainstream as a distinctive interpreter of the church's role in a democratic society. He influenced a younger generation of ethical leaders in the modern Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Pauli Murray, Marian Wright Edelman, Whitney Young, Jesse Jackson, and Vernon Jordan. (Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 805: The Spirit and the Art of Conflict Transformation: Creating a Culture of JustPeace
  This course is a response to the experience of destructive conflict in the church and in the world, as well as the experience of religion as a source of conflict. More importantly, it is a response to the call to every Christian to be ministers of reconciliation and peacebuilders. The course will introduce students to the theology, theory and practice of faith-based conflict transformation, preparing students to become religious leaders equipped with fundamental tools and skills for engaging conflict and transforming conflict in a way that advances God's goal of shalom, a culture of justpeace. . (Clusters 2 and 3)
• STH TS 806: Introduction to Mediation Theory and Practice
  This course will present theory and practice on mediation through interaction with the instructors, course readings and practical experience. The course utilizes a lecture/discussion format interwoven with role play experience to help students form a strong foundation in the practice of mediation. Students will learn theory as well as practical skills and, in the process, they will learn how to engage themselves in an appropriate way in the mediation process. In addition to classroom experience, students will complete an 8 hour practicum in the Barnstable Courts under the supervision of Cape Mediation staff (see details below). (Clusters 2 and 3)
• STH TS 807: Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Healing Collective Wounds
  The first half of this course will compare transitional justice processes in the Balkans and Rwanda. The second half of the course will compare reconciliation processes between Indigenous communities, mainline churches, and governments in Australia, Canada and the US, to address one hundred years of child removal, institutionalization and cultural genocide of Indigenous communities. The historical role of the Church as advocate, bystander or perpetrator, will be explored, and more recent forms of public apology, reparations and attempted healing between communities. Students will have an opportunity throughout the course to apply frameworks of transitional justice and reconciliation to their own contexts. (Clusters 2 and 3)
• STH TS 808: Spirit and Ethics
  This course equips students with necessary skills to address this crucial question from Christian theology and ethics: How does (does not) the Spirit empower religious-ethical life that engenders social transformation of societies? Students will engage with the work of leading social ethicists, theologians, political theorists, continental philosophers, and scholars of religion who are conceptualizing, rethinking, or even resisting the notion of God's Spirit as an agent in history. We will undertake close readings and critical reflections on the creative thoughts of intellectuals influencing and shaping the discourse on Spirit in the twenty-first century. The course will enable participants to radically re-imagine pneumatology and to deploy it as a resource for liberatory praxis and creative moral deliberations necessary for critical engagements with late capitalism, democracy, pluralism, public policies, and structures of domination and oppression in their own communities. (Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 811: Economics and Ethics
  This course is structured to provide students with the basic awareness and understanding of economic ideas, issues, and practices as they intersect with faith and ethics in all spheres of life. Economics and Ethics will enable students to better comprehend the existing economic order of being in their societies and to help them craft theologically-informed modes of resistance to social injustice and obstacles to human flourishing. It will teach students the basic concepts of economics in ways that would equip them to not only grasp the economic foundations of Christian thinking about moral decisions, but also prepare them to minister to professionals, business executives, and corporate leaders in a globalizing world. The course will also help students to respond to one of the major challenges in the marketplace: how can we develop frameworks and models to enable business executives live ethically and faithfully in the complex and pluralistic corporate world?     (Clusters 2 and 3)    
• STH TS 815: God and Money
  This course offers philosophical, theological, ethical, and religious study of the nature and role of money in contemporary societies. It is not about stewardship of personal money, but about the peculiar dialectics of the monetary structures and forces that frame existence and actively confront persons, peoples, classes, gender, races, and economies in today's world. It explores various transdisciplinary discourses of money not only to highlight the important role of money in constructing meaning and relationships, but also to uncover the central role of monetary systems in fostering economic inequality and social injustice. This course will shine a bright theological-ethical light on the motion of money in both national and global spheres so as to highlight the serious ethical issues that pertain to the production, circulation, control, and use of money in the structures and organizations of economic life. The class will reflect on how to nudge the structures and organization of monetary life toward creating and maintaining an embracing, inclusive economic community that brings unity-in-difference into perpetual play and also fosters more ethical relationality without stifling its creativity and galvanizing force. (Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 816: Paul and Continental Philosophers
  Non-Christians and atheists have interpreted Paul's work in ways that have deepened our understanding of politics and social ethics of Christianity and even the legacy of Christian thought on radical philosophy and revolutionary thought. We will, among others, critically engage with the works of French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jean Luc-Nancy, Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben, and Slovenian radical scholar Slavoj ?i? ek, who are some of today's leading interpreters of Paul and his influence on political theology/philosophy, community, messianism, subjectivity, and social transformation. We will also study the works of scholars within the Christian tradition who are picking on some of their radical insights and bringing them into theology, social ethics, and biblical studies. All these new forms of scholarship making provocative proposals about society and political philosophy prompt a re-turn to classical readings of Christian texts in order to strengthen and broaden our knowledge of Christian thought as it applies to transformative praxis. Students will be encouraged to approach their study in this course with some particular social-political problem in mind so as to discern more readily the implications of the new interpretations of Paul's theological thought for dealing with contemporary moral issues. (Cluster 1 & 2)
• STH TS 818: Christian Thinking about Moral Decisions
  The purpose this course is to analyze critically the following prominent types of Christian thought concerning moral decisions: Christian realism; Christian responsibility/ relationalism/contextualism; Christian moral virtue; Christian pacifism; Christian feminism; Catholic moral tradition; African American Christian tradition; Christian womanism; and the ubiquitous challenge of utilitarianism. (Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 822: The Ethical Leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  This seminar examines the life, thought, and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a resource for the conceptualization and development of ethical leadership. The seminar will examine his perspective on the public role of religion against the background of contemporary leadership theories and practices, classical Christian views, late nineteenth-century dissenting traditions, the early twentieth-century American Social Gospel Movement, the modern Civil Rights Movement, Black Theology and Black Nationalism, Womanist Studies and Critical Race Theory. (Clusters 1 and 3)

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