RELI 250 - Across Religious Boundaries: Understanding Differences

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The study of a selected topic or theme in religious studies that cuts across the boundaries of particular religions, allowing opportunities for comparison as well as contrast of religious traditions, beliefs, values and practices.

Topic for 2017/18b: Global Christianities. This course provides an introduction to the Christian tradition by examining what unites and divides contemporary Christian communities around the world. It focuses on the concrete ways in which Christians encounter divine power, construct meaning out of the vicissitudes of life, and embody holiness. We attend to the diversity of Christian experiences and practices using ethnographic, historical, and theologicalsources devoted to communities in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. We begin with an introduction to the origins of the Christian movement in late antiquity and its global expansion in modernity through European evangelization and colonization. From there, the course divides into thematic units, each of which explores a different facet of Christian culture, such as personal and communal experiences of the divine, the role of language in spiritual revelations, the place of the body in Christian worship and ritual, and finally, Christian politics in modernity. Klaus Yoder.

Two 75-minute periods.

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