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 TO 847: Middle Egyptian 2
  An introduction to the classical stage of the Egyptian script and language spoken in Ancient Egypt during the Middle Kingdom which became the standard hieroglyphic language until the Graeco-Roman Period.(Cluster 1)
• STH TO 851: Akkadian 1
  Akkadian grammar, including exercises in translation and composition. (Credit for STH TO 851 is given only after successful completion of STH TO 852.) (Cluster 1)
• STH TO 852: Akkadian 2
  Akkadian grammar, including exercises in translation and composition. (Credit for STH TO 851 is given only after successful completion of STH TO 852.) (Cluster 1)
• STH TR 802: The Sociology of Religion
  This course will introduce students to the basic ideas and methods with which sociologists have analyzed the relationship between religion and society. It will explore what it means to think about religious language, symbols, communities, and practices a social phenomenon. We will also explore the social processes at work in congregations and denominations, new religious movements and conversion, religious communal identity and ethnic conflict. (Cluster 2)
• STH TR 813: Congregations and Communities
  The increasingly global and transnational work of ministry, social activism, and non-profit service often takes place within or alongside religious congregations. Such congregations function as communities, and are in turn embedded within larger communities such as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, political blocs, and countries. The purpose of this course is to help students theorize religious "community" in a sophisticated and nuanced way, as well as introduce concepts and methods for the engaged sociological study of congregations within their international contexts. From this vantage point we will then discuss current issues of racial/ethnic diversity and inclusion, globalization, and "millennial" spirituality. (Cluster 2)
• STH TR 814: Advanced Qualitative Research
  This course is for students involved or interested in independent qualitative research, including interviews, ethnographic projects, and/or content analysis. It will function much like a workshop, providing extensive guided practice with project conceptualization and design, finding funding, meeting university ethics requirements, gaining access to communities, recruiting participants, managing and storing data, creating coding schemes and using software, integrating mixed types of data to support an argument, balancing "home" and "field," being reflexive, and exercising respect and care for both oneself and one's interlocutors. Relative attention to these issues will depend on the needs and interests of the students. It can fruitfully be taken either separately or in addition to TR 800, Ethnographic Research. (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 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 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 845: Christian Social Ethics
  Comparative study of historical and contemporary Christian approaches to the nature, sources, methods, and concepts of ethics in diverse contexts. The course is in two parts: an historical overview of the development of Christian social ethics from biblical times to the twenty-first century; an in-depth exploration of approaches to specific contemporary social issues including war and peace, ecology, economic justice, and equality. Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 848: Global Pentacostalism
  The last 50 years have seen the explosion of Pentecostal-Charismatic type churches in the world, becoming not only the fastest growing segment of Christianity, but also the vanguard of the global Christian movement. This is a basic course on the theology, ethics, and history of the worldwide Pentecostal-Charismatic renewal movements. It offers a historical-descriptive approach of the movements in various countries, theological analyses of their doctrines and beliefs, a sociological investigation of their religious techniques, and an ethical study of their social actions and political spiritualities. Students will learn how Pentecostal-Charismatic movements are transforming themselves to be a major positive force for social justice in this- worldly realm. Drawing on readings from religious studies, theology, politics, sociology, and anthropology, this course seeks to transcend disciplinary boundaries to enable students to better understand Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, their recent histories, and their potentials for renewal of Christianity across denominational lines and across the Catholic- Protestant divide. Clusters 1 and 2)
• STH TS 877: The Principles and Practices of Restorative Justice
  A study of the fundamental principles and practices of restorative justice as applicable to church and society. The course explores the needs and roles of key stakeholders (victims, offenders, communities, justice systems), outlines the basic principles and values of restorative justice, introduces some of the primary models of practice, and identifies challenges to restorative justice and strategies to respond to them. The course is organized around the issue of crime and harm within a western legal context, but attention is given to applications in other contexts. Of particular interest is the contribution of traditional or indigenous approaches to justice as well as applications in post-conflict situations. (Clusters 2 and 3)
• STH TS 881: Environmental Justice
  This course explores the ways in which injustices are mediated through our physical environment, and how academics, artists, ordinary citizens, organizers, and religious leaders are addressing those injustices. Through articles, case studies, discussion, writing, and excursions to encounter the the work of the environmental justice movement in Boston, we will explore how communities engage (or avoid engaging) the connection between environmental and public health. We will explore how environmental justice activists navigate the complex webs of different stakeholders and analyze the ways that power and voice relate to environmental health. By the end of this course, you will have developed your own creative response to an instance of environmental injustice and have joined the other academics and activists at work in this vital field. (Cluster 2 or 3)

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