RS 258:  SEMINAR IN RELIGION IN AMERICA

 

American Religious Thought:  Newer Views and Visions

 

Spring 2008

Tuesdays, 12-2:50 pm

3041 HSSB

Catherine L. Albanese

 

 

Description

 

This seminar will explore American religious thought, mostly in the twentieth century.  Moving out from the mainstream liberal tradition, the seminar will look at a variety of perspectives that reflect the new cultural context of the United States as it encounters ideas and peoples outside the Anglo-Protestant consensus.  Some views center on individual fulfillment, others focus on the public good and commonweal, and still others bridge both themes in various forms of universalism.  These writings, as older ones, signal the presence of the vernacular—of armchair philosophers and do-it-yourself theologians but also of trained conceptual operators.  Together they offer an exciting panoply of opinion and idea during the period that is the gateway to the present.

 

We will read and interrogate these works, inserting them in various cultural contexts and bouncing them off one another.   No previous background is necessary, and all are welcome.  Those who participated in last year’s seminar on mainstream liberal American religious thought in the Anglo-Protestant tradition will find points of similarity and contrast here.

 

 

Readings

 

April 1             Warren Felt Evans,  The Divine Law of Cure (Cosimo Classics).

           

April 8             Charles Fillmore,  Prosperity (Arc Manor)

           

April 15           John Dewey,  A Common Faith (Yale University Press)

     

April 22           Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society:  A Study of Ethics

                        and Politics, Introduction by Langdon Gilkey (Westminster John Knox Press)

 

April 29           James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books)

           

May 6             Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, 2d ed.  (Beacon Press)  

                                               

May 13           Thomas J. J. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse:  A Theological Voyage                                  

toward Authentic Christianity (Westminster John Knox Press)

 

May 20           John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology:  An                                           

Introductory Exposition, New (1977) Ed. (Westminster John Knox Press)

 

May 27           Ken Wilber,  A Theory of Everything:  An Integral Vision for Business,                               

Politics, Science, and Spirituality (Shambhala)

 

June 3             Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God:  An Uncommon                                         

                        Dialogue, Book I (Putnam Adult)

 

Requirements

 

Seminar process will include instructor’s input for background.  All seminar participants will be asked to do an oral summary or book criticism several  times during the quarter.  We will arrange a schedule at our first meeting.

 

All participants taking the course for a letter grade will be asked to do a paper on one important figure (your choice) in twentieth-century American religious thought.  The paper will be a (selective) exposition of the thought of the figure, and it will discuss that thought in the context of the ongoing concerns of the seminar.

 

Those taking the course for the S/U grade will be asked to do a review essay on all ten of the required books for the seminar.

 

All will be asked to present an oral summary of their final project.  We will begin these the sixth week of the quarter (May 6).