Advanced Topics in Religion
Usually a category of religious phenomena, such as religious experience, mysticism, the nature of deities; or the role and status of persons; healing in religious traditions; sectarian groups; major thinkers or movements; or themes and approaches in the study of religion. May be repeated for credit with different topics.
| Distribution Area | Prerequisites | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 course |
Current Semester Information
Jeffrey Kenney370A: AdvTps:Death of God
AdvTps:Death of God
The title of the course, Death of God, is a metaphoric phrase intended to capture the supposed end-point of the secularization process. According to some advocates of secularization, God/religion would ultimately fade away - certainly in public life but ideally also in private life - as societies became more rational, scientific, and modern. Such predictions, of course, have not materialized. Indeed, religion now seems to be as strong as ever, in the West and elsewhere. Still, secularization has come to define a certain separation or balance of authority between religion and politics, one that is associated with Western democracy and two of its supposed fruits: pluralism and tolerance. Our task is to tease out the legacy of secularization and assess its continued usefulness as an idea and practice for understanding what it means to be modern...in the West and non-Western societies where secularization has a checkered reputation.
Geoffrey Goble