Major & Minor

These seminars focus on change and diversity within a tradition or traditions (e.g. Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Modern Catholicism, Islam in Medieval Europe), and foster advanced skill development in the historical and diachronic study of religions. In addition, these courses pay particular attention to racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or geographical diversity within religious traditions.

This course introduces students to foundational topics in Christian systematic theology, including doctrines of God, Trinity, Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology, and explores challenges to and re-articulations of these traditional themes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including, for example, liberation theologies, black theologies, feminist and queer theologies, theologies of religious pluralism, and ecological theologies. The course encompasses both historical foundations and contemporary conversations in systematic and constructive theology, with attention to communities of Christian thought outside of the Western European and North American contexts.

Focusing on a specific theme each year, this capstone course familiarizes students with key concepts and tools in Theological and Religious Studies, while asking students to use those concepts and tools to produce knowledge about religion through site-specific New York City-based research projects (e.g. Trauma and Memory at Ground Zero, Excavating Religious Experience at NYC museums, Prophetic Religion in Bronx Communities, Urban Contemplation).