R170: Religion, Ethics, and Public Life
R376: Problems in Social Ethics
R365:
Religion and the Self in Augustine,
Kierkegaard, and Freud
R571: Virtue and Freedom
R374/574 & R375/575: From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism I-II
R672/770: Religious Thought and Ethics
R672/770: Religion, Culture and Medical Ethics
Religion,
Ethics, and Public Life (R170)
Link to Syllabus (Spring, 2004)
This is an introductory undergraduate lecture course in religion and ethics, focusing on social responsibility and moral reasoning. Graduate students work in this course as Associate Instructors, leading discussion groups and evaluating student performance.
We begin by examining basic methods and tools in ethics, after which we study six topics: abortion; war and peace; death and dying in medicine; economic justice; discrimination; and environmental ethics. The chief goal of the course is to explore the complexity of these topics and to understand how religious thought, belief, and practice inform moral discussion in American public life today. Along the way, we ask whether individuals or groups have a responsibility to protect the interests of vulnerable, or “at-risk” populations: fetuses, political communities under attack, women in the economic and cultural marketplace, sick and dying patients, the poor, racial minorities, and nonhuman lives. These groups, and the issues that surround their needs, stand at the center of debates in public culture today – debates in newspaper articles, religious gatherings, political elections, professional meetings, evening talk shows, shop floor conversations, and family dinners. With each topic we examine different arguments and points of view. We close the semester by studying some religious themes that inform most of the readings, focusing on creation and covenant. Sources draw from Judaism, Christianity, and contemporary social thought.
Problems in Social Ethics (R376)
Link to R376 Syllabus
(Spring, 2005)
Topic: War and Peace in Western
Religion is course that explores fundamental
questions about killing and war, drawing on classical and contemporary sources
in western religion and ethics. Consider some questions:
When President Bush announced a war against terrorism in response to the attacks
of September 11, did he do the right thing? Were those who
planned and carried out the attacks outlaws who
should be captured and tried in a court of law, or warriors
who should be fought and killed? In the 1990s, President
Clinton sent ground troops to
This course helps us think about these questions in a
critical and comparative way. Drawing on Jewish, Christian,
Islamic, and secular sources, we study a wide range of perspectives, e.g., the
Bible, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Reinhold
Niebuhr, G.E.M.
Anscombe, the U.S.
Texts
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral
Argument with Historical Illustrations (2d or 3rd ed.)
Richard B. Miller, ed., War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological
Ethics
Richard B. Miller, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the
Just-War Tradition
John Kelsay, Islam and War: The Gulf War and
Beyond
Terry Nardin, The
Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives
A.J. Coates, The Ethics of War
James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare
Jean Bethke Elshtain,
Women and War
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God:
The Global Rise of Religious Violence
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of
Jesus
Reader (available at Collegiate Copies,
Religion
and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud (R365)
Link to R365 Syllabus (Spring 2007)
This course is about
religion, psychology, and the moral life. It focuses on the quality of
dispositions; our loves, fears, hatreds, and regrets; our sense of
responsibility to ourselves and others; our (anxious) awareness that we are
limited in body and time; and our attempt to craft a narrative of
self-understanding. In this way we will examine questions of self-knowledge,
religious experience, and the moral quality of the emotions.
We will ask, Is religion a source of psychic health, or an obstacle to it? What sorts of problems is religion meant to cure? What problems do religious beliefs create? How does religion bear on the self's loves, its past, its mortality, its doubts? We will also look at concrete actions, cultural practices, and religious institutions. Along the way we’ll ask whether it is possible to want to do evil, whether it is possible to love or grieve too much, what is meant by purity of heart, and whether we ought to love the dead. To focus our discussions, on occasion we’ll look at relationships with mothers and fathers, the emergence of mega-churches in the USA, eating ethnic fast food, and wearing “authentic NBA apparel.”
We will study these questions and cases through the works of Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard, and Sigmund Freud. These authors examined how the self can be a problem to itself. They were strong poets of self-analysis who turned to religion to provide either a cure for or an explanation of the self's internal woes. Equally important, they believed that the path to truth was taken through self-examination. What we find as they take us along that path will be a central topic of this course. These authors also saw their ideas as having broader implications for cultural and social criticism. Their brilliant efforts to study the self’s longings, pathologies, cultural influences, and religious practices will be the focus of our readings and discussions.Texts
Augustine, Confessions
Augustine, The City of God (selections)
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Penguin Edition)
Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing
Kierkegaard, The Present Age
Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud, The Ego and the Id
Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Peter Brown: Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought
Baptized
Ronald Green, Kant and Kierkegaard: The Hidden Debt
Ernst Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics
Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of a Moralist
Problems in Social Ethics: Virtue and Freedom (R571)
This graduate “piggyback” course focuses on two
fundamental ideas: the idea of developing moral character, or becoming a
virtuous person; and the idea that freedom is, in some way, fundamental to moral
action. What is the meaning of the good life?
How do we find out? On what must we rely to achieve
the good life once we have discovered its meaning? Must we
discover anything at all in order to act rightly? In
addressing these questions, we engage in close readings of five classical
authors in Western ethics: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and
Immanuel Kant.
The course takes the following general shape: After
examining three architects of the virtue tradition (Plato, Aristotle, and
Aquinas), we turn to two critiques of this legacy,
critiques developed from theological (Luther) and philosophical (Kant)
perspectives. Studying virtue and freedom opens up a wide
array of complex issues, e.g., the relation between self, society, and history;
the nature of moral responsibility; theories of human nature; the relation
between moral action and "happiness"; virtue and the problem of religious
self-righteousness; and the relation between religion and morality.
In addition to these primary sources, graduate students examine two recent
discussions of the virtues: Martha Nussbaum's discussion of the role of
vulnerability, contingency and tragedy in Greek ethics, and Alasdair
MacIntyre's effort to retrieve a theory of the
virtues in the wake of the alleged demise of Enlightenment morality.
Nussbaum's work is read in conjunction with Plato and Aristotle.
Five additional meetings are arranged to discuss
MacIntyre's work.
Texts
Plato, Republic
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness; Treatise on the Virtues;
and supplementary materials, photocopied
Martin Luther, Selections From His Writings
(John Dillenberger, ed.)
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of
Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics
(recommended, except for the chapter on Kant)
From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism I
& II (R374/574 & 375/575)
Link to R374/574 Syllabus
(Fall 2005)
Link to R375/575 Syllabus (Spring 2006)
n.b. This course is a two semester survey of the history of Christian Ethics and religious social criticism. Though the course is designed with continuity between sections I and II, students are not required to take both courses.
This graduate "piggyback" seminar is a textual and contextual survey of the history of Christian ethics. It is designed to give an overview of major thinkers in key periods of Christianity and to acquaint students with different genres of ethical literature. The core argument underlying the course is that there is no single tradition of “Christian ethics.” Rather, “Christian ethics” comprises several subtraditions that overlap, interpenetrate, and argue with each other, other religious traditions, and cultural trends. Materials draw from biblical sources and early Christian teachings, the patristic period, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, radical reformers, Enlightenment Christianity, Edwards, Kierkegaard, Barth, and Rahner. In addition to these primary sources, we read Wayne Meeks's The Moral World of the Early Christians and pertinent sections of Ernst Troeltsch's The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches.
Texts
Bible
Ernst Troeltsch, The
Social Teachings of the
Wayne Meeks, The Moral World of the Early
Christians
Cyril Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers
Augustine, The City of
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of
Songs, IV
Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness and Treatise on the Virtues
Paul Sigmund, ed., Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics
John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther:
Selections from His Writings
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
George Williams, ed., Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers
John Locke, Letter on Toleration
Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True
Virtue\
Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics, II/2, with an excerpt from III/4
Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations,
various articles
Religious
Thought and Ethics (R672/770; G620)
Topic: Religion, Justice, and Culture
Link to R672/770 Syllabus (Fall, 2006)
This graduate seminar addresses matters of religious commitment and cultural identity in recent debates about social justice and public philosophy. We examine these issues in light of liberal and communitarian theories of justice, and then turn to arguments from modern Judaism and Christianity that echo, challenge, or amend those theories. We close by examining feminist and multicultural contributions to recent debates about social justice.
Texts
John Rawls, A
Theory of Justice
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2d ed.
John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," from
Collected Papers
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of
Justice, 2d ed., & selected articles
Reinhold Niebuhr, The
Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of
Pluralism and Equality
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition"
Susan Moller Okin,
Justice, Gender, and the Family
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A
Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory
David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity
Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality,
Species Membership
Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics (R672/770; G620)
This graduate seminar surveys the social history of
and leading figures in modern bioethics. We examine writers
who have shaped both academic writing and public policy in the
Texts
David Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside: A History
of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making
Albert Jonsen, The Birth of Bioethics
(recommended, not required)
Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person
Richard McCormick, How Brave a
William May, The Patient’s Ordeal
James Childress, Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care
Elliot Dorff, Matters of Life and Death: A
Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics
Susan Wolf, Feminism and Bioethics
Norman Daniels, Just Health Care
Thomas H. Murray, The Worth of a Child
Arthur Kleinman, The
Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition
Anne Fadiman, The
Spirit
Richard B. Miller, Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine
James F. Childress and Tom Beauchamp, Principles in Biomedical Ethics, 4th
ed. (recommended, not required)
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