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University of Toronto

Department for the Study of Religion

Course Trailers

UNDERGRADUATE: 

Introduction to Christianity (2020, 2021, 2022): An introduction to the Christian religious tradition through a consideration of a wide range of themes.  These will include key elements, major historical periods, and cover significant concepts, such as mysticism, art, and creation.

Religion and Nature (2019, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022): This course examines the relationship between nature, religion and its representation from antiquity to the present. Antique, patristic, medieval, modern, Romantic and contemporary readings taken from they history of philosophy, theology and poetics are employed. 

Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021): This course examines the history of religion and spirituality in the Latin West through a focus on the desire, resistance and nostalgia for transcendence. Themes such as biblical hermeneutics, sacramental understanding, ritual and community and love and desire are examined though readings taken from theology, philosophy, and literature, ranging from Plato to contemporary magical realism. 

 

Justifying Religious Belief (2018): An introduction to the history of the philosophy of religion. Readings include: Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza, Lessing, Kant, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach and Charles Taylor.

 

The Poetics of Mysticism (2018, 2023): Examines the relationship between poetics and mystical poetry. Readings include: Plato, Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Francis, Jacopone da Todi, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Hadewijch, Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Angelus Silesius, Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Blake, von Balthasar
 

Becoming Modern (2017): As a concept, modernity is used to demarcate a boundary between ourselves and all that came before the present. This course will examine the advent of modernity as a fundamental change in the way the Western mind structures and conceptualizes reality. Taking up key texts from philosophical, literary, theological, and scientific sources, it will carry out an ongoing appraisal of what it means to become modern with the guidance of recent theoretical considerations of modernity.

 

GRADUATE: 

Romantic Religion: Idealism, Realism and Aesthetic Synthesis (2019): The Metaphysics and Poetics of Nature (2019): This course examines the contrcutrion of the concept of nature through religious categories beginning with Plato and the Hebew Bibl, moving through early and meaveival Chrisntainty. It examines how shifting attitudes in theology altered the way unanswered understand and interact with nature. Throughout, role of poetics in re-establishing a language capable of renewing the human-nature relationship is examined. 

The Poetics of Mysticism (2018): Examines the relationship between poetics and mystical poetry. Readings include: Plato, Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Francis, Jacopone da Todi, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Hadewijch, Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Angelus Silesius, Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Blake, von Balthasar

Re-Enchanting Nature: Spirituality and New Nature Literature (2017): Consideration of spirituality and nature in the ‘New Nature Literature’ movement. Contemporary literature is viewed in dialogue with antique, medieval, Romantic, and postmodern materials. 

Arizona State University

Barrett Honors College

 

The Re-Enchantment of Nature (2017): This senior-level course examined key contemporary themes in environmental humanities as they relate to spirituality and its poetic expression. The possibly of a re-enchanted relationship to nature as a solution to the present environmental crisis was examined. 

 

God and Muses (2016): An Introduction to the Study of Religion & Religious Literature (2016): Major theorists in religious studies paired with religious poetry and music (e.g. David Tracy, Charles Taylor, von Balthasar, Jacopone da Todi, Dante, Herbert, Wordsworth, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Jack Clemo).

 

The Human Event I (2015, 2016): A great books course covering materials from the antique period to 1600. Materials include: Upanishads, Genesis, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Zhuangzi, Gospel of John, Pseudo-Dionysius, Dante, Aquinas, Attar, Marie de France, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hafez, Raphael, Pico, Grünewald, Luther, Zwingli, Shakespeare, Holbein.

 

The Human Event II (2016, 2017): A sequel great books course covering materials from 1600 to present. Materials include: Descartes, Donne, Hogarth, Kant, Kleist, Blake, Coleridge, Schlegel, Cozens, Emerson, Arnold, Dickenson, Weber, Vilakazi, T.S. Eliot, Monet, Woolf, Larkin, Borges, Charles Taylor, Gianni Vattimo, Rothko.

 

The English Imagination, Religion and Ecology (2017): Examines religious and cultural changes in the English intellectual landscape through fine art, material artefacts and museums, and readings from poetry, fiction, and religious prose. Taught on-site in London.

 

University of Cambridge

Faculty of Divinity

 

Philosophy of Religion & Ethics (2011, 2012, 2013): Foundational course in philosophical theology and ethics. Readings include: Plato, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Butler, Kant, Mill, Kierkegaard.

 

God, Freedom, and the Soul (2011, 2012, 2013): Historical and critical philosophy consideration of major topics such as religious language, freedom and personality, immortality of the soul. Readings include: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. 

Teaching
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