Courses

An interdisciplinary first-year seminar focused on fostering student inquiry and developing skills in critical reading, thinking, and writing.

Fall Semester information

101A: HONR FYS:Ruin and Re-begetting

Our study of the imagery of ruin and re-begetting will allow us to explore a triple theme--creation, destruction, and re-creation--and to consider how language conveys the human attempt to counter fragmentation, chaos, or oblivion. Reading works by Plato, Shakespeare, Donne, Woolf, Jones, Kingsolver, and others, we will explore the longing to triumph over transience, destruction, and death. I hope that throughout this semester you will find that words matter--not only in the texts you read, but also in your own writing--and that as you hone an argument and polish your prose, you will take pleasure in your own creations.

101B: HONR FYS:The Making of the Modern Mind

The medieval world was filled with witches, angels, and absolute rulers who justified their authority through religion. Superstition and irrationality reigned supreme. The modern world, by way of contrast, looks to science, evidence, and reason to explain the natural world that surrounds us and to fashion our approach to the pressing political questions of the day, or so, until recently, we liked to think. The seventeenth century was the fulcrum marking the change from the medieval to the modern world view, a century where all previous beliefs were challenged and the groundwork laid for their eventual displacement by new touchstones which would become the centerpiece of the Western worldview--superstition, irrationality, and reliance on religion replaced with skepticism, empiricism, and the reliance on reason.
Through a close reading of the seminal works of seventeenth-century political theorists, scientists, and philosophers, thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, we will study the new intellectual approach to the world that they created. What characteristics did these thinkers share in their works? How did they challenge the norms and beliefs of their day? What ideas in their seventeenth-century writings can we find in our own intellectual lives? After reading these foundational works, we will then read contemporary case studies that question how much the thought processes which we think are foundational to the modern Western world view actually guide us in our thinking. Do we really assess all the evidence and make our conclusions from the facts alone, whether in science or politics? How do we actually decide what to believe? Are we really so different, mentally, from medieval thinkers?

101C: HONR FYS:Play, Game(s), Religion(s)

"All play means something," or so wrote theorist Johan Huizinga in 1938, suggesting the serious possibility that play constitutes the primary formative element in human culture? Playfully speaking, our serious work in this course considers the cultural meaning(-making)s of game(s) and religion(s) as complex and intersecting embodiments of deeply human (serious, play) forms. Transdisciplinary connections between Religious Studies and Game(r) Studies have a number of vectors, and, for the sake of convenience, this course plays with a four-part paradigm of puzzles: gaming in religion; religion in gaming; religion as gaming; and, gaming as religion. In balanced measure, we'll be making room for both the (serious) cultivation/enrichment of transferable, critical academic skills, through conventional coursework, and all manner of experiential learning contexts afforded through close-playing and reflecting on a selection of (social, tabletop, role-playing, physical, and video) games. How might we contextualize the play-ful ways folk relate to game(s) and religion(s)? More seriously, what discourses and relations of power are at work in such considerations, and how might we imagine the relationships we have with game(s) and religion(s), while growing in (self-)critical awareness of the ideological/contextual nature of engaging broadly with homo ludens, the human at/in play? Come and play!

101D: HONR FYS:The Cognitive Science of Religion

The course will explore ways in which individuals, groups, and societies create ways to make meaning. Where do we turn to inform us of how to create some type of structure through which we can construct an orientation to the cosmos? The course also explores questions such as, what changes might occur within one when a person experiences crises and trauma? Does this affect the way he or she experiences the world? How do we face death? How is meaning constructed by those suffering from mental or physical health issues? What good is suffering? Can religion be a cognitive science? How are questions of ambiguity and ambivalence answered?

101E: HONR FYS:Exploring U.S. History through Magazines

Popular magazines are rich sources for doing history, and in this class, students learn about modern U.S. history (focusing on the mid-20 century) by exploring old magazines, from glossy lifestyle titles to subcultural publications. By taking time to carefully analyze editorials, advertisements, articles, and photo spreads, students learn how to place a historical object in its context and how to ask questions for further research.