Courses

Under the direction of a supervisor, students not writing a thesis will research and write a major paper of approximately 10,000-15,000 words in length.

Examines (auto)biographies as literary artifacts, responses to culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. Examines current theories of (auto)biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the literary order has its origins in intellectual and cultural spheres. Explores how life writing participates in the construction of identity and engages subjectivity as a narrative strategy. Theorists including Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, Richard Kearney, and Eva Hoffman are foundational to this study. The reading list includes (auto)biographical writings from authors such as Elie Wiesel, Victor Frankl, Eva Hoffman, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Foster, Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and other significant (auto)biographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course seeks to recover humanism as a central ethos of western culture and its Christian roots in two ways: first, by tracing, as much as possible, the story of humanism and its development from Christian roots to the Renaissance and to Postmodernity and its current “overcoming.” This historical exercise requires a counter narrative to the secularist master narrative that dominates both contemporary secular and Christian ideas of humanism. Secondly, students are encouraged to consider recovering Christian humanism as a possible philosophy of culture that could address the main malaise of our present cultural predicament. For this purpose the course draws on works from eastern and western theologians to establish theologically the theme of humanism as it arises from the Christology of the early church and persists into works of modern Catholic, Protestant, and eastern theology. All of this study provides the student with a deep sense that studying in the humanities may indeed be linked directly to Christology and ecclesiology.

Focuses on one overarching theme: how Christian thought is embedded in some of the greatest literary classics of the Western World, selected from the Patristic period up to the twentieth century. These include such diverse genres as St. Augustine’s autobiographical ruminations in his Confessions; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Goethe’s Faust; Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles; and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. This course deals with questions such as: What are we referring to when we speak of the mind? What is the nature of the human mind? Does it have a nature? Does it exist as something separate from the human brain? Is it a property of the human brain? Is it identical to the human brain? Or is it merely an abbreviated way of talking about bodily behaviours? More particularly, how is our phenomenologically rich and existentially weighted point of view on the world related to the neurophysiological conditions that underwrite it (or as one writer put it, “how is the water of the brain transubstantiated into the wine of consciousness?”)? How does the way we understand the answers to these questions inform the Christian belief that humans bear God’s image? And how does theology bear on our understanding of our bodies’ relationship to our minds?.

The impact of prominent Inklings author C.S. Lewis continues to grow, garnering both applause and, in other quarters, heavy criticism. Lewis is lauded as an intellectual giant, a Christian apologist without equal, and a gifted myth-maker, but also identified as misogynistic, racist, sado-masochistic, and enjoying violence. This course focuses on the literary achievement of C.S. Lewis, analyzing representative texts of his literary criticism, poetry, essays, novels, fictional narratives, and devotional writing, in order to examine his mythopoeic vision and its contribution to Christianity and culture. Through close reading of the texts, and considering these in relation to various forms of theoretical inquiry - historical, sociological, psychological, gender discourse, ecological, ethical and spiritual or theological - students will engage in the critical task of assessing the ongoing impact of the writings of C.S. Lewis.

Examines specific topics in the history of gender throughout the period known loosely as the modern world and is designed to clarify the process through which ideas of gender evolved and the ways in which masculinity and femininity have been constructed and experienced in a global context. Also examines group interactions across lines of race, class, ethnicity, region, and religion and the influence of groups striving to assert their own identities on ideas of gender.

An inquiry into a period of Europe's past in which beliefs, attitudes and institutions, moulded in the previous centuries, were consolidated into shapes that mark modern European (and North American) culture. The outlines of the modern state and of the modern family are examined. It is also an examination of late medieval civilization for indications of decline and rebirth. The course looks for signs of struggle between forces of tradition and of innovation, and between idealism and material or corporeal realities.

Examines the nature of religious reform in the sixteenth century. Religious ideas are the starting point for an examination of economic conditions, the existing social structure, the family, and the state. Examines how ideas were communicated to and received by the common people. It also examines displays of intolerance and tolerance, coercion and power, and relations between government and society and between women and men