RST 8: Healthcare and Religious Ethics

This course examines how various religious traditions deal with the ethical dilemmas involved in healthcare. We will study topics such as the end of life, caring for the sick, humanity’s relationship to the natural world, growing up, birth, pregnancy, and conception. Rather than making judgments about what’s right and what’s wrong in a particular situation, we will investigate how different religious traditions categorize, understand, and encourage ethical actions in a given context.    We will also examine how religious ideas can, at times, complicate the process of providing individual healthcare as well the design and delivery of public health programs.

RST 140: Christian Theology

This course is structured around the theological questions that have formed and split Christian Traditions:

1. What is the nature of God?
2. What is the nature of Christ?
3. Is there free will?
4. What is the relationship of human beings to divine beings?
5. How should human beings ought to interact with sacred texts?
6. Why is there suffering if God is all-powerful?

We will not be answering these questions in this class!  This is a ten-week course in a public university, and as such is not a forum in which centuries-old doctrinal questions will be definitively answered.  Instead, we will be learning how, historically, a variety of thinkers in the Christian tradition have tried to formulate answers to these questions and why they fought over them. What have been the premises that they have used, and why?  For what reasons did they find some answers more interesting than others?  How and why did these thinkers agree, or more often disagree, with each other?  How did controversies over these questions shape the world that we now live in?

This course gives students the basic resources for understanding Christian theology both as a branch of intellectual history and as a constantly-changing, and hotly contested, aspect of global religious culture.

RST 152: Justice, Equity, and Privacy and Medical Humanities

This course connects the big questions and analytic tools of the Humanities and Social Sciences with Pre-med Education. The goal of training in the medical humanities is to foster critical and analytic engagement and, in keeping with the values of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, encourage students to cultivate an awareness of their own cultural preconceptions and a sense of the variety and complexity of human cultures.

This course  will enable students:

• To foster critical and analytic engagement with the human factors that shape the health sciences
• To cultivate self-awareness in the sense of both the ability to empathize with other people while maintaining clarity about one’s own limitations that comes with cultural humility.
• To develop a set of conceptual tools that allow students to engage with and learn from people of different cultures and backgrounds
• To understand present day issues in health equity from an historical perspective

RST 152: Advanced Religious Ethics

This is not a course in how to be good. This is a course that will enable you to understand how various religious traditions understand what “to be good” means and how to do so within a particular theological understanding of human relations.  The course introduces religious ethics in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions and provides an in-depth study of gender identity.  The main goals are:

• To give students a grounding in the theological basis of ethics in these traditions
• To understand the assumptions which inform these traditions
• To recognize different argument styles and structures employed in the study of religious ethics
• To enter the scholarly conversation about religious ethics

By the end of the course you may not know how to be good but you will know how various traditions understand the good—and the sometimes complicated—pursuit of it in the society of others.