COR 230: Religion and Society

CORE Second Year Courses
COR 230: Religion and Society

As the Core Development team continues to work on the second and third year of the curriculum, we’ve been posting updates reflecting the directions we’re moving in and the concepts were working with for the next phase of our general education curriculum. This one concerns another of the second year courses, one that is slated for the spring semester. We don’t have a final, formal name for it, but essentially it’s a course on how religion and religious institutions have shaped the Western tradition. The goal is an interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven course that integrates the cultural, social, economic, political, and personal influences of religion and religious practice in the historical context of the development of the Western world.

Rationale
At the core of many world cultures is a set of religious beliefs, covering a wide variety of approaches to trying to understand the ineffable and transcendent. As a coherent cultural and social phenomenon, what we call the West is no exception. To understand the Western tradition, as the mandate for the second year of the Core demands, it is necessary to understand the religious and spiritual impulses that have shaped the West.

Even in relatively secular contemporary Western societies, the legacies of religious observance and belief are profound. From the language—“In God We Trust,” “endowed by their creator…”—to the law—such as the French legal battles over religious symbols in schools or the German government’s branding of Scientology as a cult—to popular culture—Left Behind and Medjugore—the influence of religion continues to be a powerful force in Western society. To understand the West, we have to know not only what is going on in terms of religious history, practice, and significance, but also why various belief systems continue to shape the West.

To re-emphasize, this is not a religious history course, nor is it a philosophy of religion course. It is a synthetic look at how religion and religious institutions have shaped core values and behaviors in the West. Its basic premise is that one cannot understand a society without understanding its belief systems—their history, their content, and their practice. It is designed as well to mesh with a third year course in world belief systems, and to reach backward to the COR 120: Concepts of Community materials as well.

Goals
With this course we want to teach people about how religious practice and belief have affected the development of what we call the Western tradition. We hope students will come away from this course with a strong understanding of the many ways religion has helped shaped the modern world in the West, and with a firm foundation for moving on to the third year for a deeper look at the global experience, including religion around the world.

COR 230 would be offered in conjunction with COR 240: Capitalism and Democracy. Much as the aesthetics and science courses in the first semester of the second year would work together, these two courses would also integrate to form a strong intellectual fit.


Outline
The second year Core course for this topic is tentatively called COR 230: Religion and Society. What we’re looking at right now is something close to the following, though obviously there is a lot of stuff here, probably too much. Some compaction is inevitable.

• A survey of the state of religion across the West today
• An investigation into the main issues of religion in the contemporary West
• Exploration of the roots and evolution of religious belief and practice in the West, including
o Foundations of Judaism
o Foundations of Christianity
o Mythic Influences and Legacies
o Greek and Roman influences
o Christianity and Empire
o Islamic Encounters
• Politics and Religion
o Theories of states and legitimacy
o Patriarchy
o Legitimacy and Faith
o Constructing “others”
• Economics and Religion
o Trade and Faith
o Usury and Lending
o Faith-based Economic Restrictions
• Culture and Religion
o Art and Faith
o Religion and Writing
o Discrimination and Prejudice
o Us and Them
o Social Habits and Belief
• Gender and Religion
o Gender Roles
o Power Relationships
o More Patriarchy
• Religious Conflict
o Jews and Christians
o Christians and Christians
o Christians and Muslims
o Monotheists and Polytheists
o Atheists, Deists, and Agnostics
• Secularism
o Renaissance Humanism
o North/South Splits
o Church and State
o Religion in the Modern World

Within these broad topics, the course will look at the balance between the sacred and the secular in the modern West, and how that balance came about. It will also address the role of religious belief in determining a whole host of cultural, social, political, and economic relationships, often in ways that are not immediately obvious.

The course is not being designed as a theology course, or a religious history course, but rather as an interdisciplinary exploration of the role of religion across a broad spectrum of areas that make up the modern West. It will not endorse or condemn any particular faith or belief system, though it will require students to become familiar with the basic tenets of several.

Texts
The selection of texts for this course will be challenging and exciting. The volume of work on religion and the West is staggering, though much of it is highly polemical or extremely technical. What we’ll be looking at is texts that:

• Give students an accurate and thorough grounding in Western religious practice
• Give students examples of good disciplinary practice
• Promote thoughtful discussion and analysis
• Represent a step up from the first-year readings

In general, student would have to read in the Christian and Jewish scriptures, as any understanding of the role of religion in the West is impossible without access to the basic sources. Other religious texts, from various sects or denominations within Christianity and Judaism, as well as excerpts from the Koran would likely be necessary.

The following is a VERY rough and tentative start to a list of possible texts that might work with this class.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr,, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
Remi Braque, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization
Richard Wightman Fox, Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church
Carl Lindbergh, The European Reformations
Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Religion, Toqueville on Democracy, and the American Future
James Reichley & A. James Reichley, Faith in Politics
Gary B. Ferngren, Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction
Paul Mendes-Flohr, Jehuda Reinharz (eds.). The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History
Richard Fletcher. Moorish Spain
Roxanne Mountford. The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces

Note – these texts are only examples of the right tone for part of this coursework – they introduce ideas about the interrelationship between religion and the evolution of the Western world. They cover various eras and issues that comprise the discussion of how belief and spirituality have shaped the Western tradition.

While these works draw on several social science disciplines, we need more and different disciplines represented as well.

Suggestions
As always, we welcome suggestions and comments!

Bob Mayer
Core Development Team

COR 220: Aesthetics: Art and Literature in the West

Over the next weeks we will be working hard on course design for the 2^nd year courses. Our plan is to have course proposals ready for the Curriculum Committee by the end of the semester.

Right now, we want to set out a few ideas about one of these courses and to solicit ideas for texts and classroom activities. COR 220 is a course about aesthetics, art and literature in the Western tradition. So, we want to draw attention to what is unique about the Western approach to art and literature, and to connect the development of these traditions to other social, historical and intellectual developments in the West.

This course is still very much in design – and we are still probably in the “trying to do too much” phase – but right now our goal is to design a course that encompasses exposure to literature and the arts, consideration of critical methods and approaches, and artistic/literary creation as well. This trio of exposure, critical reflection, and creation – we feel – is a strong feature of the way the Division introduces literature and art in COR 110. We want to develop this here as well.

Taking that approach gives us some ideas about the kinds of readings and coursework we need to develop:

Exposure: Probably the most important thing is to have students reading challenging works of fiction, drama and poetry while they are being exposed to other arts such as painting, music, and architecture. Although this is not going to be a course in Art History, it would be nice if selections could provide some sense of the development of art and literature in the West and feature some widely known titles.

Reflection: this course will be the central vehicle for showing students different critical methods. In some ways, this element of the course will be what holds the diversity of arts and literature together. We want students to see the similarities between thinking about literary and artistic expression. We want to make them think carefully about holistic, qualitative and aesthetic expression. We plan to create cohorts between sections of this class and the other COR class (COR 210: Scientific Revolutions) in order to bring out the tension between quantitative vs. qualitative and expressive vs. predictive thinking. Aesthetics provides many readings on the “What is Art?” question, but we would also like to find pieces where writers and artists discuss their own activities.

Creation: The exposure and reflection really come together when students are asked to develop some artistic or literary work of their own. We would like to make this a more focused and sustained exposure to literary or artistic work, but our ability to provide this is going to be limited by practical considerations. In any case, getting students to write poetry or fiction, to participate in drama or other art forms, is going to be an important part of this class.

These are big goals, and obviously this single second-year class cannot be an entire bachelor’s degree. The central idea is to get students to a place where they appreciate the complexity and importance of art and literature, and where they see these are avenues where humans contemplate the most important ideas. We will be returning to arts and literature throughout the Core and particularly to world literature and art traditions from other cultures in the third year, but this is the class where students learn how to appreciate this content when they encounter it in other contexts later on.

Locating reading for this class is difficult because it is not a traditional course in Aesthetics, Literary Criticism or Art History. As before, at least some of the readings must be common to all sections. So, it would be a huge help to hear your ideas for good readings.

COR 120 Work in Progress

Just to keep folks up to date where we're going with COR 120....

The last entry in this blog noted the texts we've selected for next semester. Betsy has arranged for these to be arriving (we hope!) around our October 15th division meeting date.

In COR 120, we'll all be able to configure each module more personally; while there will be an assignment at the end of each module that all of us will share in common, we're trying to build in an additional "track" focusing on more personal visions of community for students and instructors to personalize within each module. In addition, while each module with have a bloc of readings keyed to that module's major questions, getting from A to B within that module will be more completely in the hands of the individual faculty members this time around. And we're building in more opportunities, by limiting the quantity of assigned readings and creating more space in the class schedule, for faculty to introduce materials or examples of their own, in tune with their own interests.

Note that you'll have to do this via materials that you can provide, or the students can obtain, without additional expenditures or logistical commitments by the bookstore or the division--we're talking library, online and personal collections, for instance. Given the nature of the material we are focusing on, this should not pose any real difficulty.

As we roll this out next month, you'll have ample time to investigate the texts, design some assignments, and figure out how you want to customize your approach to community. While we'll be focusing everyone on some "cornerstone" issues in community, you'll be tasked with adding additional depth to the class by bringing in other issues and concerns involving the definition, structure, and interaction of communities.

We'll have more soon!

COR 120 Work in Progress

Work in Progress: Concepts of Community (COR 120)

The CDT felt it would be good to give everyone in the division a heads up as to where we stand with the next Core sequence concepts course.

The team, Jen Vincent, David Kite, Bob Mayer, working very closely with Cinse Bonino for instructional development and assignment planning, has mapped out the general questions, specific texts, and overall flow we want for spring. While the details (ah, the details!) remain as always devilish, you can expect essentially three modules dealing with the origin/definition, structure/functioning, and interrelationships of American communities, four major texts with elements from a fifth, a Global Module, and a major research-oriented paper.

The team is refining the language for the three questions, but the gist of it is:

What is a community?
How do communities function?
Why and how do communities interact?

The final list of texts is as follows:

Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
Republic, by Plato (trans. C.D.C. Reeve)
Teachings From the Worldly Philosophy, by Robert Heilbroner
The Virtual Self, by Ben Agger
and selections from Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam

The goal of the course is to get students inquiring into history, philosophy, sociology, and economics as they pursue questions surrounding the origins, composition, and interaction of American communities.

The structure of the course will be somewhat looser than COR 110, in that faculty will be tasked with coming up with more examples fitting the basic instructional parameters this time, rather than having the lion’s share predetermined. One goal is to have faculty create relevant entry points into each module, using each faculty member’s area of personal expertise and interest.

The research paper, coupled with a group project, will drive the information literacy goals for the course, and will build on material developed by the students during the semester. COR 120 will push students rather deeply into developing their research and information literacy skills.

The Global Module, which can begin at any time from about week four through week eight, depending on overseas partners, will focus on one of several themes; instructors may not have a choice of what themes they work with due to the vagaries of setting up international connections but all the module themes will be quite easily integrated into the COR 120 coursework. Gary Scudder is lining up partners in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and with luck Asia as well. Certainly a goal is to have as much instructor choice here as is feasible, and even when the module theme is predetermined, the way it is integrated will be largely up to the instructor, as long as certain basic parameters are met.

The team will be designing another two required institutional assessment assignments for the ePort; as before, the ePort will be available for more instructor-defined uses as well.

CDT Updates: Ideas for 2nd Year Courses

This month the CDT is focused on the master course for COR 120. This means that in most of our meetings we are working with Cinse Bonino (the instructional designer for these classes). But, our second main goal for this semester is to develop formal course proposals for the 2^nd year core classes. This is on the back burner right now, but I expect that in later October through December it will be our central concern.

Bob Mayer is posting an update on the COR 120 course, so I simply wanted to review our basic ideas for the sophomore year classes. These have not changed all that much since we sent out a series of course ideas to the faculty last March (I’ll try to attach those write-up here), but there have been some important developments since then.

First, some reminders about the overall plan for the year: The major theme of the second year is the Western tradition. The goal is to give students a solid grounding in some of the most important ideas and developments within our own culture before expanding into other global cultures in the third year. This is not a hard and fast line. Some courses are going to do more by way of comparing Western ideas to other traditions – and we are very much aware that the “Western” tradition includes many different experiences and perspectives. So, our guiding question really has become “What are the really central ideas, innovations, contributions from the West that students need to understand?”

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Here’s a quick overview of course ideas:

COR 210:Scientific Revolutions (FALLSEMESTER) This class will look at some major scientific revolutions in a historical, social and cultural context . Right now we are thinking in terms of looking at three major scientific revolutions: the Copernican Revolution in astronomy to Newton’s work (PHYSICS); the rise of modern atomic theory in the 19^th c. (CHEM); and Evolution/Darwinism (BIOLOGY). Our goal here involves discussing some important scientific ideas, but also we want to give students the chance to reflect intelligently on how science develops. We want them to learn to think of scientific ideas in light of the cultural attitudes and changes that produced them and how ideas like these also have an impact in art, literature, politics, etc.

COR 220: Aesthetics & the West. (FALL SEMESTER) The focus of this class is to get students thinking about artistic expression in all of its forms – music, painting, design, poetry, fiction, film, photography. Students will read about various forms of literary and aesthetic expression, for example considering how holistic and qualitative expression complements the analytic
and quantitative thinking they are studying in the concurrent COR 210 class. Echoing the art component of COR 110, they will be exposed to different varieties of literary and aesthetic expression, reflect upon this kind of expression, and they will be asked to engage in it themselves.

Dave and Robin have already expressed support for an “art studio” component of these courses where students will have some sustained instruction in a particular form of literary and artistic expression. For example, some students might take a studio that involves creative writing in poetry or in prose, others might take sustained instruction in drama, photography
or film, and still other art studios might be offered in arts such as drawing, sculpture, music.

COR 230: Capitalism and Democracy. (SPRING SEMESTER) What could be more Western? This is a class where students can think seriously about the foundations of our economic and political lives, and learn how these are rooted in the Western
tradition. Our hope is that this class will be rooted in contemporary experience – talking about problems and possibilities facing economics and politics today (mass media, globalization, community) and will use these as a starting point to explore the foundations of these issues.

COR 240: Religion & the West. (SPRING SEMESTER) We are still thinking about the basic idea here, but we want a course that (1) makes students aware of the important role that religion had in shaping our culture and our nation; (2) makes them think about how religious and spiritual traditions are the root of many of our contemporary (and secular) attitudes and values; (3) helps them see how other cultures with very different religious traditions think about the world in different ways (this, of course,
pre-figures themes to be taken up in the third year).

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So – this is a snapshot of where things might go. Most of these ideas have been out for some time now, but we figured people might like a reminder. Unlike the first year classes (with its deliberate consideration of interdisciplinary thinking) we were less concerned about making sure each discipline receives equal treatment in every class. For example, probably Art and Literature have a stronger perch in COR 220, and science, history, philosophy and mathematics have a strong connection with COR 210. Surely political theory and economics get more consideration in COR 230. But these courses really are interdisciplinary thematic courses, and allow room for all kinds of literature and methods.

Other points:

• Some books from COR 100’s will be brought back in the COR 200s.
• Some schoolwork and term projects from COR 100s might be the starting point for coursework in the 200s (reinforcing the value of the ePort)
• We hope to include Global Modules in one or both semesters. Our hope is these will become a desired component – whether required or not – in many classes.
• Some coursework might deliberately connect two different classes (e.g. you can see how a student’s course project in COR210 might be developed in common with the project in COR220 as the course themes are quite complementary).

Please let us know what you think – and we are always desperate for good text ideas. These are not developed course proposals yet, so now is the time for suggestions and changes. I expect that when mid-October rolls around and COR 120 is settled, plans for the second year are going to need to become very definite very soon.

Best,
David