Category: syllabi

Political Theology syllabus

~ Marika Rose

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for this course, and also to Sean Capener, some of whose ideas for excerpts I have borrowed, and to Robin James, whose pitch/thinkpiece assignment I’ve adapted! I’ll be starting to teach my joint second- and third-year course on Political Theology next week and I’m somewhat nervously looking forward to it – I think of all the courses I’ve taught this is the one with the most texts that have most profoundly shaped my thinking, which I know can sometimes make it more difficult to teach well.

Module summary:
“All significant concepts of the modern state are secularized theological concepts”. With this claim, Carl Schmitt began the discipline of political theology, which seeks to understand the relationship between theological conceptions of God and the world and politics. This module will seek to explore these interconnections, from the bureaucratic function of angels to the god-like power of money. How have theology and politics informed one another, and what does it mean to recognise the theological origins of many key systems and structures of many of our supposedly secular ways of thinking?

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Angels and Demons syllabus

~ Marika Rose ~ 1 Comment

Thanks to everyone who helped out with reading suggestions for this module. I’m currently somewhere between weeks 3 and 4 and so far it’s been really fun to teach. To recap, this course was designed as a medieval philosophy and theology module, in a department with a mixture of philosophy, theology and religious studies students. We didn’t have any existing modules that focused on the medieval period, so this is basically an attempt to cover some of the key bases of medieval philosophical theology but in a way that’s engaging for students who aren’t necessarily already invested in understanding what scholasticism is. I’ve tried to cover some of the key moments in medieval intellectual history: the arrival of Jewish and Islamic thought, the rise of scholasticism and then the emergence of nominalism and the beginnings of Enlightenment humanism and Renaissance science. I’m expecting to teach this course once every couple of years for the rest of my time at Winchester so it’s not too late to tell me about the brilliant book that I absolutely must read. Likewise, please feel free to borrow as much of this as you’d like, or drop me a line if you’d like to see any of my course materials.

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Updated Introduction to Political Philosophy Syllabus

~ Marika Rose ~ 1 Comment

I’m making some tweaks to my Introduction to Political Philosophy syllabus this year, so thought I’d post an updated handbook here. The two key changes are that I’m dropping Robert Nozick (who’s basically just Mill on steroids anyway) and replacing him with Carl Schmitt, whose discussion of politics as fundamentally concerned with the distinction between friends and enemies offers a more meaningful contrast with mainstream liberalism; and I’m getting rid of the free choice week I used to have in week 12 in order to introduce some anarchism via Errico Malatesta. I kept finding that I wanted to articulate something like the anarchist emphasis on our mutual dependency and the centrality of mutual aid to human survival as a contrast with the more individualist and sovereign visions of the human person that we were reading in Locke and Mill, and Malatesta’s Anarchy does a good job of articulating that in terms that make sense in the context of the tradition as I’ve constructed it here. So I’m hoping these switches will make for a slightly more rounded sense of the different alternatives at play within modern Western political philosophy. As ever, if you’d like to see any of my teaching materials, I’m very happy to share them – drop me a line on marika.rose@gmail.com

You can see from the weekly overview the way I’ve structured the module. The class has one two-hour teaching session per week, so I use the second half of one class to introduce a key concept and the thinker whose discussion of the concept we’re going to be reading; then the students go away and do the reading; then the first half of the next class we spend discussing the set text via a mixture of general questions and detailed analysis of extracts from the text. The module as a whole is still pretty indebted to Robin James’ Social and Political Philosophy syllabus.

The full module handbook is as follows:

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Syllabi by Marika Rose

~ Marika Rose

I’ve been putting the syllabi I’ve created up on the blog for a while now but wanted to have a single place I could point people to: here, then, is that post, with links to all the different syllabi I’ve uploaded. If you’re interested in syllabi by the AUFS authors more broadly, you can check our posts tagged syllabi; if you’re interested in our more general reflections on teaching, you can take a look at our posts tagged teaching.

First year undergraduate syllabus (on Augustine, suffering and study skills): Great Christian Thinkers: Joining the Conversation
First year undergraduate syllabus: Introduction to Political Philosophy
First year undergraduate syllabus (on Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Gustavo Gutiérrez): Great Christian Thinkers 2 
Second year undergraduate syllabus: The Making of Modern Christianity: Medieval Europe
Second year undergraduate syllabus: Hegel, Marx and Dialectical Thought
Second and third year undergraduate syllabus: Christianity, Race and Colonialism
Second and third year undergraduate syllabus: Gender, Sexuality and the Bible
Second and third year undergraduate syllabus: Angels and Demons
MA syllabus: Dazzling Darkness: Mysticism and Philosophy

Joining the Conversation syllabus

~ Marika Rose

For the past couple of years I’ve been teaching a first year introductory module called “Joining the Conversation”. The module exists to introduce students to key themes and concepts in Christian theology (hopefully in a way that engages both our philosophy and our theology students), to a key Christian thinker – St Augustine – and to a key set of study skills relating to reading texts, critically engaging with them, and writing essays. The module is organised around the theme of suffering, and the question of whether suffering is “What Matters Most”. Here’s the module descriptor I use:

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Christianity, Race and Colonialism

~ Marika Rose

My other new course this year is a new module I’ve designed entirely from scratch on Christianity, Race and Colonialism, which I’ll be teaching to second and third year undergraduates. I’m really excited and also extremely nervous about it, but currently feeling pretty pleased with the syllabus. I teach alternate week advanced seminars with the third years, so for those sessions we’ll be focusing on more advanced theoretical material and trying to think through how those additional readings relate to the course. I’ve given all the students a relatively open brief for the oral exam at the end of the course and am really excited to see what they come up with. The syllabus runs as follows:

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Dazzling Darkness: Mysticism and Philosophy Syllabus

~ Marika Rose ~ 1 Comment

We’ve launched a new MA programme at Winchester this year, and I’m looking forward to teaching postgraduate students again. We run a theology, a religious studies and philosophy module every year and this year I am designated philosopher, syllabus as follows and, as you might expect, featuring several of my co-bloggers and friends of the blog:

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Understanding Religion Syllabus

~ Stephen Keating

Marika inspired me to post my syllabus for the semester: Understanding Religion. This is my second semester teaching introductory religion courses at Montclair State University, and I’m much happier with this syllabus than the one I put together for World Religions (I was a *very* last minute fill-in for a retiring professor). Some of the assignments this time were borrowed from fellow professors.

Anthony wrote a helpful post about teaching intro to religion with some great comments, especially by Beatrice and Amaryah, that helped a lot. I have the Herling theory intro book on hand and may assign some short pieces while we move through the fiction. Also, in the second or third class I showed the “Religion” episode of Master of None (Season 2, Episodes 3). It was a great way to challenge what students think of when they use words like religion and belief. The discussion of Get Out–which I’m putting right before Scientology for better or worse–happens Wednesday: excited to see what students make of it when they have “religion” specifically in mind.

Anyways, you can find the syllabus here.

Great Christian Thinkers 2 Syllabus: Greater, Christian-er, Thinkier

~ Marika Rose ~ 2 Comments

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.

Help me plan a course about Great Christian Thinkers

~ Marika Rose ~ 4 Comments

I like to think that there will come a point in my life where I will have time to think about something other than teaching, but I think I’m a little way off that yet. I’m just over a third of the way into Semester 1 and already Semester 2 is looming large. I’ll be teaching three courses next semester instead of the two I’m teaching this semester, and if I make it through alive I’ll be in danger of believing in miracles. I’ll probably post about all three courses separately over the course of syllabus design and redesign, but I’ll be teaching Great Christian Thinkers Part 2, the second half of my first year intro course, an Introduction to Political Philosophy, and a module on Marx, Hegel and Dialectical Thinking.

The idea behind Great Christian Thinkers Part 2 is to give students an overview of some major Christian thinkers so they get some familiarity with some of the Big Names of Christian theology, some initial sense of the development of Christian theology over time, as well as a general sense of how some of the core theological concepts we’ve looked at in semester 1 play out in later thinkers. Last time around they did St Paul, Aquinas, Calvin, Schleiermacher and Barth.

This iteration of the course is themed around suffering, and in semester 1 we’ve been working through major Christian doctrines in relation to the idea of suffering as follows:

WEEK 1: What Matters Most
WEEK 2: Augustine, Theology, and the Problem of Suffering
WEEK 3: God, Evil and the Nature of Suffering
WEEK 4: The Fall
WEEK 5: Free to Suffer?
WEEK 6: The Devil
WEEK 7: ENRICHMENT WEEK
WEEK 8: Suffering Desire, Desiring Suffering
WEEK 9: Suffering and the Ethics of Sacrifice
WEEK 10: Political Suffering: A Tale of Two Cities
WEEK 11: Political Suffering: War
WEEK 12: What Matters Most?

This is probably the only module on the course where the students will spend a lot of time with pre-20th century Big Name Theologians so I’m trying to work out which of those thinkers are most important for the students to have some familiarity with. I’m tempted to keep the line-up roughly the same but perhaps swap out Barth and add in Catherine of Siena so we can really spend some time thinking about the crucial shifts that happen in the medieval period. But I’m also not a specialist on any of those thinkers (maybe more so with Aquinas), so would gratefully appreciate any thoughts on the following:

  • Which are the most indispensable Big Theological Thinkers, especially pre-20th century?
  • What’s some good secondary reading on any of those Big Names that might help me find interesting ways into thinking about them, especially when it comes to the role of suffering in their work? I’d love to use the Aquinas section to think about the crucial role of Christian  encounters with Jewish and Muslim thought in forming systematic theology, for example.