Update - COR 230: The Secular and the Sacred

As we await the consideration of the four second year Core classes by the Faculty Senate, the Core Development Team is working on the design of the four courses. This includes COR 230: The Secular and the Sacred, and that is the focus of this posting.

First, the basic rationale for the course, from the proposal:

COR 230 is part of the second year of the general education Core curriculum. It focuses on the influence of religion and religious practice on the traditions and institutions of Western society. The role of religious belief and institutions in the development of the West is profound, and any understanding of the contemporary Western world is impossible without a solid grounding in these influences. Paired with COR 240 Capitalism and Democracy, COR 230 forms the second semester of the Core second year focus on Western traditions.

And the catalog description:

What does God have to do with anything? Everything, or nothing—both answers have deep roots in the Western tradition. Students delve into an interdisciplinary examination of the influence of religion and religious institutions on Western society from the earliest roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition through the modern era. The course focuses on the way religion and reactions to religion have shaped personal, political, social, and cultural institutions and practices in the West.

And finally the topical outline:

Topically, the course will look at beliefs, attitudes, and actions influenced by religion and religious practice in the West, along the following lines:


The Influence of Religion on Personal and Public Life

• The effect of the assumption of power stemming from one divine or quasi-divine source
• The influence of monotheism on concepts of large and small scale patriarchy and paternalism
• The roots and evolution of Western views of power, sacred and secular

Religion as a Bulwark of the Status Quo

• The dynamic balance between religious authority and secular power
• The role of religion in the creation, evolution, and expansion of state power

Religion as Revolution

• The shift from communal to individual religion and its effect on Western society
• The change from religion as a source of public policy to a source of private morality
• The growth of religion as a private rather than public practice

That’s pretty basic, and what the CDT is working on now is fleshing this out into a full-fledged course.

One of the approaches we’re looking at is a version of the familiar three-module approach, focusing first on foundations, including the relation between mythos and logos, or mythical understanding and logical understanding or reason. This module would cover the origins and foundations of Western religious thought, including selected mythic traditions of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, the evolution of Abrahamic traditions, and the early Christian churches.

In short, this module would establish what is the basis of Western religious tradition, and what it meant in terms of the intellectual, cultural, social, and political transformations of the late Roman period.

The second module, in this structure, would focus on the developments of church and state in the Medieval period, the evolution of forms of social and political organization influenced by religion, and the formalization of Western thought about God, man, and the state. This module would pick up with the Romanization of Christianity and carry through the Reformation, though not in great detail. The emphasis would be on investigating how religion shaped the idea of “Christendom” which became synonymous with Europe, and how the very success of this new Europe ultimately put pressures on the idea of a “universal” religion and helped create more individualistic expressions of faith with theological and practical consequences.

Essentially, this module would look at how the Christian religion became intertwined with the development of Western political, economic, social, and cultural traditions, and how that affected the personal and public spheres of Medieval Europe.

The third module would carry us from the Enlightenment era through the present, and would focus on the decoupling of formal ties between social and political organization and religious institutions, and the growth of individual religious experience at the expense of collective religious allegiance. Areas of focus in this module would include the re-politicization of religion as both a conservative and a revolutionary force, the development of secularism and separation between church and state in Western political and philosophical thought, and the growing importance of religion as a personal rather than a public commitment. The module would also look at fundamentalism as a response to the changing nature of public religion.

Basically, this module would concentrate on the Western idea of separating religious and secular authority and power and the meshing of religious observance with democratic politics. It’s focus would be on the changing definition of religion in the West, the effects of classical liberalist thought on the role of religion, and the contemporary role of religion in the West.

This approach would focus on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Actions in each module, and would be chronological in its basic layout.

Another approach under consideration is a more thematic approach based off the topical outline above and running chronologically within each module, from early to contemporary. This approach doesn’t seem as promising but does have some attraction.

The basic ideas we want to get across, to amplify what is in the course proposal, include but are not necessarily limited to the following:

• The role of myth in understanding the origins of Western religion.
• The role of the Abrahamic tradition.
• The social and cultural as well as theological foundations of the early Christian church.
• The synthesis of Church and state in the Medieval period.
• The doctrines, practices, and beliefs that made up Christian practice in the West over time.
• The conflict between community and individual as played out in matters of faith.
• The role of the nation state in changing the nature of religion in the West.
• The institutional effects of the changing nature of religion in the West.

Because there is a huge amount of “stuff” that could possibly be covered in a class like this it is necessary to focus pretty closely on a few key elements. The three-part approach detailed above seems doable. In some ways the interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the course makes this a bit easier, as the different approaches from each discipline actually communicate more through their very diversity than might be true from a comparable volume of single-discipline material. For instance, studying the origins of the early Christian church of necessity brings in myths, politics, sociology, geography, history, literature, cultural studies, and more.

Texts
One of the most vexing parts of this entire process is dealing with texts and their selection. One of the plans under consideration is a three-tiered structure for the second year courses. The first tier would be texts used across all four semesters. These would be few in number—perhaps one or two—and would offer a broad synthesis that could support all four courses. The second tier would consist of texts that supported both courses in a single semester, texts that for instance would be equally valuable for science and aesthetics or religion and capitalism and democracy. These would be less sweeping than tier one texts but broad enough to be equally applicable to both supported classes. Tier three texts would be specific to a single class, and would be more narrowly focused on that class’ topic.

Using this approach, there could be a large degree of instructor freedom within each class to choose materials that work for them. With all students gaining commonality through tier one and tier two texts, many of the tier three texts could be instructor selected, perhaps. In terms of total quantity, it seems unlikely that students would have to purchase more books than the four per course they are being asked to buy now, and some of the books, notably those in tiers one and two, would be doing double if not quadruple duty.

As for actual titles, that’s of course the thorny issue of the moment. The CDT is soliciting suggestions that fit in with this course’s framework, and would love to hear from you.

The CDT
February 21, 2008