HDS 3392: Interreligious Theology in a Post-Post-Modern Era
Semester:
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Description
Theology is grounded in belief in God, or some Transcendent Reality that engages normatively our minds, hearts, bodies, lives. It is the practice of faith seeking understanding, attentive to the canonical scriptures and traditions, yet also to ritual, ethical and experiential learning. Today theology must be purified by contemporary critical questions, as honest theologians expose biases and systemic injustice, learn to be more suspicious of elite power structures and exclusions and, in our interreligious world, hesitant about overdependence on the ideas, words, and methods of the Christian West. Theology is also committed to learning from the past, even after legitimate critiques. This new course aims at a critical but still faithful theology that seeks to be post-post-modern: defending belief in God (the immanent transcendent, divine power/s); refusing to reduce spiritual realities to ordinary experience and values; honoring truth, beauty, and goodness as inklings of the divine; being grounded in some home tradition, however large or personalized; confessional, of a tradition, yet deeply interreligious; and reading religious classics slowly and deeply. This course experiments with the retrieval of theology by taking seriously three classics of three normative traditions: the prose part of Sankara’s Thousand Teachings (8th century CE, orthodox Hindu), part of Augustine’s Instructing Beginners in Faith (4th century CE, North African Christian), and Confucius’s Great Learning (6th century BCE, Chinese) — considering each in terms of its portrayal of the human, the transcendent (absolute, God), the nature of learning, and, indeed, Truth. Each text is taken seriously, and each is comprehended in light of the other two. The course also importantly includes readings that challenge the very idea of learning from such texts, plus readings that argue that such reading is still crucial, despite the many ways in which we must be sadder but wiser theologians in the 21st century . Jointly offered in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as Religion 1040PPM.
Jointly Offered with:
Faculty of Arts & Sciences as RELIGION 1040PPM