Selected Courses
Philosophy of Religions: Central Questions
(Albion College, Fall 2021)
Course Summary: In a great deal of academic and popular discourse around religion, conversations tend to focus on a set of important but narrow questions regarding the validity of theistic belief. Such questions, however, do not exhaust the philosophically rich domain of what we call “religion,” or the “philosophy of religion,” in no small part because such an approach already imports a number of assumptions regarding the nature of “religion” itself. However, over a century of research in fields like religious studies, as well as the social sciences, have brought to light the cultural and historical specificity of criteria that are often uncritically taken to be necessary aspects of “what religion is” and what it means. This course thus focuses on three core questions that emerge within this broader, more engaged, and more historically-grounded approach to the philosophical study of religion. This semester, we will devote roughly four weeks to an ongoing dialogue around the three of these core questions:
First, what is religion? We begin by exploring the problem of “defining” religion, which has been taken up by philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and others, and always seems to come up wanting. We will investigate “essentialist,” “functionalist,” and “family-resemblance” strategies for defining religion, before turning to genealogical accounts of religion and religious life.
Second, what is (a) religious experience? Many influential accounts of what religion is rely on appeals to forms of “religious experience.” We will read through some of the most influential investigations of this idea, including William James’ landmark Varieties of Religious Experience to ask just what these experiences are, and what conclusions we are warranted in drawing from them. Students will contribute their own case-studies of accounts of such ecstatic experience—whether explicitly religious or not—drawn from their own research in media or other sources.
Finally, what is religious freedom? While the right to both “free exercise” of one’s religious faith and the protection from the “establishment” of any particular religion on the part of the state are enshrined in the US Constitution, questions of what constitutes the free exercise of religion, as well as when and if other rights or concerns can, do, or should override that protection, are ubiquitous. We will closely investigate important legal case studies in US law, especially, the rules around conscientious objector status to participation in war, in order to understand how “freedom of conscience” has played out historically. We will also investigate cases such as bans and regulations against Islamic head coverings in places like France and Belgium. Finally, we will look at some controversial arguments that religion need not be protected as a special category, either because what constitutes “religion” or “conscience” are already protected elsewhere, or because it is not clear just what “religion” is from a legal perspective.
During each four-week block, we will engage philosophical, historical, sociological, and legal texts and resources in examining these questions. While these documents and sources will provide us a foundation, the course itself will be primarily based on close, careful reading and in-class discussion and dialogue. We will use these three central questions as our touchstone, and see where our ideas lead us from there.
Religion and Nonviolence
(Albion College: Spring 2021, 2022; The University of Chicago: Summer 2020; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Fall 2016, Spring 2019)
Course Summary: This course charts the development of differing conceptions of religiously motivated political non-violence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by way of a series of intergenerational, international and inter-religious conversations between major figures in the history of the nonviolent movement. Some of these conversations are direct, such as the correspondence exchanged between Indian nonviolent independence leader M.K. Gandhi and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, or Gandhi’s 1936 meeting with the influential African American theologian Howard Thurman King’s reflections on his 1959 visit to India, Other “encounters” are less immediate, such as the influence of American abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison on Tolstoy, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s lifelong engagement and adaptation of Gandhi’s work, through the influence of figures like Thurman and Bayard Rustin.
We will follow this conversation in real time, reading through the development of the concept of nonviolent resistance within the thought of each of these figures, and the life of this concept itself, as it grows and changes through their work and writing. We begin with an “epigraph,” in the form of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 poem “The Masque of Anarchy,” and Henry David Thoreau’s influential (and often misunderstood) “Civil Disobedience.” From that foundation, we will properly begin our journey in the United States with pacifist Abolitionists like Garrison, the Quakers, and others. From there, we travel to Russia and Tolstoy’s work, both fiction and (theological and political) nonfiction, including his preface to a biography of Garrison. We will then read the Gandhi-Tolstoy correspondence, before engaging not just Gandhi himself, but central figures in the Indian independence movement like B. R. Ambedkar and others. We then return to the United States, beginning with figures directly adopting Indian nonviolent methods in the struggle against segregation, like Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin, and engaging King in turn. We then address the Catholic tradition of nonviolence, especially in the anti-war movement, with figures like Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and many others. Finally, we will engage direct and powerful challenges to nonviolence as both a method and a worldview, by figures like Malcolm X, and others.
As we work through these materials and build our knowledge of this emerging conversation, we will continuously return to the relationship between all of these thinkers, their points of contact, mutual influence and divergence, in both lecture and discussion. We will pay special attention to understanding the ways that specific religious conceptions inform each thinker, in order to investigate the ways in which concepts and practices with one origin are translated, adapted, and enacted within another.
Partial Reading List:
Henry David Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
William Lloyd Garrison: “The Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention” (1838), “No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery” (1854), “John Brown and the Principle of Nonresistance” (1859), No Compromise with Slavery
Leo Tolstoy: “Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of God is at Hand” (1893), “Two Wars” (1898,), “Notes for Officers” (1901), “I Cannot Be Silent” (1908), “What I Owe to Garrison” (1904), “Ivan the Fool” (1886), “After the Ball” (1903)
MK Gandhi, “The Theory and Practice of Satyagraha” (1914), “Ahmedabad” (1919), “Satyagraha (Noncooperation)” (1920), “Limitations of Satyagraha” (1927), “On the Eve of the March” (1930), “Message to the Nation” (1930), “General Knowledge About Health, Accidents: Snake Bite” (1913), “The Doctrine of the Sword” (two versions)
Karuna Mantena, “Theoretical Foundations of Satyagraha” (2017), “How India’s Nonviolent Resistance Became a Shifting Global Force” (2017), “The Power of Nonviolence” (2016)
MK Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy, Letters, (1909-1910) B. Srinivasa Murthy, editor
Bayard Rustin, “Lesson Plan on Nonviolent Action” (1941)
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), “The Other America” (1968), “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience” (1961); “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (1959), “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi” (1959)
“Statement by Alabama Clergymen” (April 12, 1963)
Dorothy Day, selected Catholic Worker columns (1933-1979)
Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963), “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964)
Candace Delmas, “Uncivil Disobedience” (2019)
Selected Listening:
Paul Robeson, “John Brown’s Body”
Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn” (1964), “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” (1968)
John Coltrane, “Alabama” (1963)
Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going on? (1971)
The Social Gospel and Theologies of Liberation
(Albion College, Fall 2020)
Course Summary: Although often overlooked in contemporary religious and political discourse, questions of legal and social justice have been fundamental to Christianity from the beginning of that tradition. Drawing inspiration from Old Testament prophets like Amos and Micah, as well as the life of Jesus, Christians have asked what their obligations are in the face of injustice, oppression, and exploitation. While “Christian ethics” is often thought to deal with individual moral behavior or interpersonal relations between individuals, family members, and so on, the question of challenging unjust political and social relations raises questions fundamental to Christian thought and practice.
This course will take us through a brief, but thorough, introduction to a number of influential Christian thinkers on the ethics and theology of social and legal justice within the 20th century. We will focus on three central areas, in order to gain a thorough and representative sense of how some churches and traditions have addressed these questions in thought and in practice. First, we will look at Evangelicalism and the Social Gospel in the US at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; Second, we will read key texts from Catholic Latin American liberation theologians; Finally, we return to the US to work through theological accounts of justice according to the tradition of Black Liberation Theology.
Along the way, we will see how these specific approaches to the particular questions that are raised by issues of injustice reflect broader themes within Christian thought and ethics as a whole. In this way, the arguments and historical actions of these particular figures and movements will also serve as exemplary case studies that will allow us to highlight more general theological and ethical questions that arise from Christian belief and practice overall.
Our primary methods will accordingly be textual/literary, theological, and philosophical. We will analyze the arguments and ideas presented by all of our authors in both their historical setting and in terms internal to the works themselves, and work to understand the intellectual “landscape” of the texts in terms of the way arguments unfold, the ways in which authors draw on scripture, religious experience, influential theology, and so on.
Selected Readings:
The Bible: The Book of Amos, The Book of Micah, Luke 4-7, Matthew 5-7, The Letter of James
Walter Rauschenbusch, Essential Spiritual Writings
Leonardo & Clodovis Boff: Introducing Liberation Theology
Gustavo Gutierrez, Essential Writings
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation