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