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.