This course examines how religious movements and ideas shape daily life, politics, and world events in the twenty-first century. It emphasized the historical contexts out of which these movements emerged and how they continue to exert influence in contemporary culture. It contends that understanding the obvious, subtle, and unexpected ways that this influence manifests helps us engage more effectively with the pressing issues of our time.
This course examined key thinkers and themes in theology and religious life in the nineteenth century in their various contexts, tracing the notable developments and innovations across the period. The course oriented students to the wide landscape of modern theology in this profoundly formative age.
This course focused on the legal, social, and political issues surrounding one of four selected cases pending before the Court in 2021-22. Topics include separation of church and state, free speech, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and so on.
This course explored the transformation of Christianity in the early medieval period, and the impact of the conversion of Germanic, early English, Celtic, and Nordic communities on Christianity.
This class explored a variety of religious traditions, including Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, Manicheism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. Discussions include how religions, languages, and ethnic identities were understood in traditional Asia.
This course introduced political theory by reading and discussing classic works. We discussed the meaning and significance of law, justice, virtue, power, equality, freedom and property. Readings included: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx and Nietzsche.
This course surveyed Roman political thought, with attention to how it has come to shape our own political landscape. The course focused on how Romans explored, and struggled with, the problem of ambition. Our study of Roman political ideas aimed to recover and explore this perspective, with a view to what it might have to offer us today.
This course examined the relationship between metaphysics and morality in German philosophy including Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt, including the place of God and religion.
What would a just form of democracy look like in a pluralistic society that involves people with diverse identities and values? What policies and laws should the state adopt to counter discrimination and social inequality, and how do they fit (or conflict) with ideals of liberalism? What are social identities, and how do they operate? How are social identities mobilized in different social movements, such as forms of fascism and populism? In this interdisciplinary course, we examined these and other questions about social identity and its relation to ideals of liberalism, democracy, and justice.
This course served as an introduction to philosophical thought in antiquity, especially that of Socrates, Epicurus, and the Stoics. The course focused on ethical questions; e.g. what kind of life is best for humans to pursue, how thoughtful persons should weigh the potentially competing claims of reason, pleasure, and emotion; and on how intellectual activity was perceived at Athens and at Rome.
In this course, we read short but revolutionary books from different centuries, different kinds of writers, and different media. Topics included loss, love, loyalty, and law. Can the books we read in this class really change your life? (What would that even mean?) Maybe; maybe not. But they're certainly going to try.
This course served as an introduction to the evolution of physical theories and models of natural phenomena from ancient Greece to modern times. Topics include Pre-Socratic and Aristotelian natural philosophy; the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, and the birth of mechanics; electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and the physics of light in the nineteenth century; the emergence of quantum mechanics and relativity theory; modern particle physics and the search for unification; the interface of particle physics and cosmology; and physics and its contexts.