| Fall 2008 (September — December) |
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Biblical Foundations
ICS 1215/2215 F08
Dr. Nik Ansell | This course will explore the Bible as the ongoing story of and for God and creation, paying special attention to the way in which God’s story is intertwined with that of humanity and the world. In asking whether and in what way the Bible is also our story, we will attempt to identify which hermeneutical methods might help us discern its significance for present day life, including the academic enterprise. |
Religion, Life and Society: Reformational Philosophy
ICS 1715/2715 F08
Dr. Shannon Hoff | An exploration of central issues in philosophy, as addressed by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and the “Amsterdam School” of neoCalvinian thought. The course tests the relevance of this tradition for recent developments in Western philosophy. Special attention is given to critiques of foundationalism, metaphysics, and modernity within reformational philosophy and in other schools of thought. |
Facing the Darkness: the (Human) Nature of Evil
ICS I822/2822 F08
Dr. Nik Ansell
• Video | We shall discuss the origin and nature of evil by engaging various biblical, theological, and anthropological resources. Topics will include lament literature (e.g. Job), idolatry and the demonic, original sin and the correlation between victim and agent, and the relationship between justice and mercy. |
Theologies of Art: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox
ICS 1131/2131 F08
Dr. Rebekah Smick | The course will explore significant ways that Christians have theologized the arts, artistry and art culture. The course will compare the varieties of theologies that have emerged from within the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. The study will involve looking at paintings, icons, altarpieces, and socially and culturally engaged works of art as well as pertinent theological writings. |
Pragmatism and Religion: Rorty and Stout
ICS 1522/2522 F08
Dr. Ronald A. Kuipers
• Video | How does pragmatism's central tenet that the meaning and worth of ideas lies in their practical consequences comport with religious forms of life and the understandings of morality they fund? Does pragmatism's suspicion regarding traditional “supernaturalist” theologies leave any space to think alternatively about God and the human relationship with God? What role do pragmatists see for religion in a democratic society, if any? In addressing these questions, this seminar will focus on the work of Richard Rorty and Jeffrey Stout. |
The Self and Its Others: Identity, Difference, and Responsibility
ICS 1621/2621 F08
Dr. Shannon Hoff
• Video | This course explores the notion that subjectivity is not merely given but produced through an encounter with society, language, and other selves, and explores the ethical and political consequences of this possibility. We will examine the construction of ethnic, religious, racial, and gendered difference, the forces that have constituted them as “other” instead of “same,” and the consequences this has for the construction of the self and its obligations and responsibilities. We will set up the theoretical issues by reading Kant, Sophocles, Hegel, and Levinas, but will focus especially on readings from Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Luce Irigaray, and Gayatri Spivak. |
Nature, Supernature and Miracle in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas
ICS 2421 F08
Dr. Robert Sweetman
• Video | This seminar examines Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between nature and the supernatural from the perspective of key texts in his Summa theologiae and its most important parallels. It does so in order to address the phenomenon of miracles and the role they play in his philosophical and theological construction. The seminar explores thereby the value of historiographical plotting of theoretical discourse at the intersection of perduring thought tradition(s) and current intellectual vogue. |
Who Put the Capital A in Art? Aesthetics, Art, and Virtue
ICS 1121/2121 F08
Dr. Rebekah Smick | Kant’s concept of the disinterested aesthetic is often presented as the idea that finally clinched the secularization of art that had begun in the Renaissance. The seminar seeks to refine this view by contextualizing Kant’s separation of the moral and the aesthetic within the virtue ethics of the Western poetics tradition. Through an examination of relevant late medieval and early modern texts, the seminar considers how late medieval reception of Aristotle’s Poetics set the stage for art’s secularization in the West. |
Hermeneutics and Deconstruction
ICS 1520/2520 F08
Dr. Jim Othuis | After giving brief attention to the hermeneutic theories of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, this seminar will focus on Derrida’s “deconstruction” as a hermeneutic theory. Attention will also be given to John D. Caputo’s exploration of religious themes in Derrida. |
Scripture, Faith & Scholarship
ICS 2231 F08
TBA | One of the hallmarks of the Reformational tradition is its commitment to scholarship that is integrally and radically Christian. This course, designed specifically for PhD students, explores the three foci identified in the title and the interrelations between them. Through the examination of various models of the way in which Scripture and faith function as a guiding orientation in Christian scholarly work across the disciplines, participants will be challenged both to reflect on their vocation and to grow in their practice as Christian scholars. |
| Winter 2009 (January - April) |
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Truth and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Being and Time
ICS 2732 S09
Dr. Lambert Zuidervaart | Martin Heidegger's Being and Time proposes a holistic conception of truth that can reconnect epistemology with cultural practices and social institutions. Yet his conception seems to make personal or communal “authenticity” the key to attaining truth. This seminar develops a constructive critique of Heidegger's conception of truth by examining its internal logic and its hermeneutical role. |
Faith and Judgment: Hannah Arendt and Religious Critique
ICS 2532 S09
Dr. Ronald A. Kuipers | This seminar will examine the role intersubjectivity plays in Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment, in order to explore ways in which her insights might help us understand religious communities as communities of judgment. How do faith communities become sites from which to make critical judgments of society? How, in turn, can members of such communities learn from and respond to criticisms that come from outside their faith community? |
Albert the Great, Meister Eckhart and Women's Spirituality
ICS 2431 S09
Dr. Bob Sweetman
• Video | This seminar examines Meister Eckhart’s mystical discourse and its conceptual configuration as a ‘contradictory monism’ against the backdrop of the “Dionysian” tradition of Albert the Great (and Thomas Aquinas) and the current efflorenscence of women’s mysticism represented by Marguerite Porete. In so doing it explores a properly historical understanding of a philosophical, theological or spiritual figure’s choice of discursive type. |
The Nature (and Grace) of Modern Theology
ICS 2832 S09
Dr. Nik Ansell | This course will explore the work of seminal Protestant theologians associated with the birth and early (re-)shaping of “modern” theology. The famous debate between Barth and Brunner on the nature-grace relationship, which we shall situate within our reading of Schleiermacher and Bultmann, will stimulate our own contemporary (post-secular?) reflections on the “covenantal” nature of existence. |
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
ICS 2432 S09
Dr. Shannon Hoff | This course will consist in a close reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. We will pay special attention to the basic theme of the logical and historical relationship between individual and social self-consciousness. We will also address Hegel's significance in relation to both his philosophical context and ours. |
Grace as an Aesthetic Concept
ICS 2121 S09
Dr. Rebekah Smick | During the Renaissance, a notion of grace served as the central critical concept for understanding art, and the achievement of grace in art was taken to be the highest artistic ideal. The course will exam the concept of grace within its theological, philosophical, and art theoretical contexts in an effort to understand more completely how art was thought to function in the early modern period. It will also consider the place of grace in the development of the aesthetics tradition |
IDS –Truth in Contemporary Thought
ICS 2930 S09
Faculty
| This seminar is designed to take up the philosophical conception of truth argued for in Zuidervaart's Artistic Truth and test its fruitfulness by using it to examine and analyse discussions of truth that arise in a variety of contemporary philosophical and theological contexts: Reformational Philosophy, Pragmatism, Educational Epistemology, Modern Theology, Postmodern Thought. |
