Courses

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

• STH TO 851: Akkadian 1
  Akkadian grammar, including exercises in translation and composition. (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 TO 925: The Liberated Community
  This on-line Seminar will explore the distinctiveness of the community shaped by the Exodus experience, focusing on the praxis of the liberated community and its struggle for remaining faithful to the liberating God. We will analyze also the paradigmatic character of the Exodus event for the prophetic tradition, the New Testament, and contemporary ministry. Biblical creation accounts will be explored as forms of legitimation of the liberated community.
• STH TR 800: 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 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 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 820: Introduction to Black Church Studies
  This course will examine trajectories of intellectual thought that have been missing, silenced, or marginalized in standard narratives of black church studies. Using critical race theory, we will explore counter-narratives that challenge prevailing ways of thinking about black church origins, theological and philosophical foundations, liberating discourses, and its representation in the public sphere. At the conclusion of the course, students will be equipped to reflect on the history, necessity, and trajectory of black church studies through the counter-narratives.
• STH TR 850: Social Science Approaches to Religion and Spirituality
  The social sciences offer a robust set of paradigms, methods, and insights useful for understanding religious and spiritual lives. Whether our goal is to deepen appreciation, articulate critique, or pursue transformation of religious institutions; to become better religious leaders; or to further our spiritual growth and healing, social science approaches can help us identify and interpret the broader contexts of religion and spirituality and better reflect on our relevant experiences. They also provide methods for studying religion and spirituality that are increasingly employed in multidisciplinary fields such as practical theology, social ethics, and pastoral psychology. This course provides an overview of social science approaches and methods with a special focus on sociology. Students will learn how to digest, interpret, and employ social science research in the service of their professional goals, and will begin to develop methodological skills for use in their own scholarship.
• 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 Art of Conflict Transformation
  This course is an introduction to the theology, theory, and practice of conflict transformation, preparing students to become leaders equipped with fundamental tools and skills for engaging conflict and transforming conflict toward a just peace. It introduces students to conflict transformation practices such as mediation, interfaith dialogue, peacemaking circles, nonviolent direct action, compassion practices, truth and reconciliation commissions, community conferencing, etc. Designed for practitioners, students will be invited to participate in role play scenarios, dialogues, art projects, and other interactive in- and out-of-class engagements.
• 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 812: Introduction to Mediation Theory and Practice
  This course will provide hands-on skill development, combining role plays, exercises, and presentations. The course meets the statutory requirements for mediator confidentiality related to the Massachusetts General Laws and can be the first step toward certification.
• STH TS 815: LT OF MEM EX/RD
  GOD AND MONEY
• 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 817: African American Moral and Social Thought
  This course will concentrate on the theo-ethical perspectives of selected Black Christian (Afro-Christian) and humanist thinkers. The course seeks to expand the horizons of religion and Black Studies as it is currently understood and learn about the history and achievements of Black thinkers, clergy, and activists. We explore resources that span the areas of Black feminism and womanism, colonial studies, and critical race theory, among others, and challenges us to think outside of dominant viewpoints and orthodoxies.
• STH TS 818: Sexual Ethics
  Since the 1960s, ethical reasoning about sex in America has been narrated in terms of a sexual "revolution" or "liberation." Yet historiographies of increasing sexual freedom conceal the continued conceptual instability and normative confusion around sex as an element of human living. We will study the historical shifts and current debates around sexual identity, sexual violence, monogamy, polyamory, sex work, and pornography; consider the complex negotiation of sex with state, religion, commerce, racialization, technology, and medicine; and explore the place of sex in the stages of a human life. You will be encouraged to use the course material to clarify and refine your own ethical reasoning about sex. (Cluster 2)
• STH TS 824: Christian Ethics
  This course introduces students to the sources and methods of Christian ethics. We will consider the ways in which Christian moral thinking is shaped by the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; survey some prominent approaches to Christian ethical discernment (divine command, natural law, Christian realism, virtue ethics, as well as feminist and womanist ethics); examine the deformation of Christian subject by empire, racism, and economic exploitation; and finally, probe the promise of Christian moral vision in reimagining human response to mass incarceration, finance-dominated capitalism, disabilities, racial capitalism, migration, and environmental justice. (Cluster 1 &2)