I start teaching again next week so have been adding the finishing touches to my new semester syllabi. At Winchester we have a course rotation system whereby a bunch of our courses for second and third year students run every other year, which is nice for the students insofar as it gives them more options, but currently a bit exhausting for me as I begin my second year in post with an almost entirely new teaching roster (I’ll be posting my syllabi for a course on Hegel, Marx and Dialectical Thinking and an Introduction to Political Philosophy one over the next couple of weeks).
My Great Christian Thinkers Part 1 class focused on introducing Augustine, key concepts in Christian theology, and core study, research and writing skills to our first year students, all organised around the theme of suffering and the question of whether it is, as Phillip Goodchild suggests, ‘what matters most’. Part 2 aims to give students an overview of some key developments in Christian history via a survey of five important Christian thinkers. I’m hoping that we’ll use the five in different ways to think about what it means to be a ‘great’ thinker; what makes someone specifically a Christian thinkers, and what counts or gets recognised as ‘thought’. So I’m opening the semester with Ursula Le Guins’ ‘The Mother Tongue‘, a commencement address she gave at Bryn Mawr college in 1986, where she talks about the kinds of thought that universities train students in and the limits of that training.
I’ve decided that my canon this time around will consist of Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Gustavo Gutiérrez. I’ve tried to pick primary and secondary texts that give a feel for what’s distinctive about them as thinkers but also as representatives of particular historical periods, and that focus on some of the themes of suffering we covered in semester one. You can take a look at my complete syllabus here.
An und für sich 
Sounds really interesting Marika. Have you thought about including Ivan Illich as an excursus of sorts for Gutiérrez? He was in the background for a lot of the early formulations of liberation theology, as well as developing his own ideas around suffering in the modern world.
Oh interesting! I hadn’t thought about that but will take a look next time I teach the course and think about whether there’s space for him.