A study of the relation between Christian beliefs and contemporary scientific perspectives. Special focus on theistic understandings of biological evolution and on evolutionary understandings of theism. Attention also given for implications for Christian faith of developments in contemporary physics and to the role of science in the modern world. An exploration of the various forms of mysticism, meditation, and prayer. Emphasis is on non-Western as well as Western forms of spirituality, and on contemporary as well as historical forms.
Course involves occasional experimentation with particular forms of meditation and prayer.
This course deals with contemporary Christian responses to poverty, violence, environmental destruction, consumerism, and spiritual emptiness. It includes a required service-learning component, undertaken on a regular basis in the course of the term, to be determined by the student in consultation with the professor and the Volunteer Action Committee. An examination of pivotal contributions to the development of Protestant and Roman Catholic theology since the Enlightenment, with special attention to various ways of understanding the relation between God and the world, religion and culture, tradition and experience. This course is an expansion of ideas introduced in Religion 231, which is recommended but not required as a prerequisite. This course is a detailed study of the cosmology and metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead as articulated in Process and Reality and as it has been applied to topics concerning psychology, aesthetics, world religions, mathematics, and economics.