In this menu please find links to course syllabi I offered in the Divinity School (RETH) and the College (FNDL/RLST). I organized each of them around a thesis or intellectual narrative to justify my selections for each course. All of these courses aimed to interrogate the topics and literatures under review by carrying out close and careful readings of the assigned texts. One goal was to provide material that can inform research projects, dissertation ideas, and teaching portfolios. Another goal was to ensure that students in Religious Ethics have a solid and enduring foundation for their future research and teaching, regardless of their specific areas of interest.

Note that two “trios” of courses each comprised a separate mini-curriculum in the Religious Ethics Area.

One trio was: Contemporary Religious Ethics I, II, and III. This set of course offerings aims to provide an arc of signature works in contemporary religious ethics, starting in 1970, and to track patterns and scholarly initiatives over the past 50 years. Students were not required to take any one class to enroll in another, but those who do could see how contemporary religious ethics has taken shape as a distinct subfield in the study of religion and ethics, and how it has sought to define and expand its self-understanding.

Another trio is: “Contemporary Political and Social Ethics,” “Religion and Democracy,” and “Rights and Justice.” Here again, students were not required to take any one class to enroll in another, but those who did could see how ideas of some key figures on one syllabus inform topics and issues that appear on the others. These three courses examined modern and contemporary authors on matters of social justice, broadly conceived. Understanding their ideas could be deepened by taking “Religion and the Political Order,” a course in the history of Western political theory that was designed to support the RETH Qualifying Exam reading list of the same title.

I also offered two courses on religion and practical ethics, namely, “The Ethics of War: Foundational Texts,” and “Religion, Medicine, and Ethics.” These courses aimed to ensure that students in Religious Ethics were trained to reckon with concrete problems in religion, ethics, and public life—and to do so in ways that are both historically informed and sophisticated about matters of theory, method, and comparison.

There are other syllabi in this menu as well. One course that was especially popular was “Augustine, Kierkegaard, and the Problem of Love”; another was “The Ethics of Belief.”

University of Chicago Courses:

Graduate (with some undergraduate enrollment):

DVSC 51000 Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion

RETH 30802  Contemporary Religious Ethics I: Method and History (1970-1990)

RETH 30803   Contemporary Religious Ethics II: Identity and Difference (1990-2010)

RETH 30804/RLST 25804 Contemporary Religious Ethics III: Peril and Responsibility

RETH 36002   The Ethics of War: Foundational Texts

RETH 42902  Rights and Justice

RETH 43302   The Ethics of Belief

RETH 43900   Religion and Democracy

RETH 44802   Contemporary Political and Social Ethics

RETH 45102   Religion, Ethics, and Medicine

RETH 45502   Religion and the Political Order

RETH 53510   Augustine, Kierkegaard, and the Problem of Love

Undergraduate enrollment only:

SOSC 19029 Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Civilizations – CIV II Topic: Western Religions, Political Ethics, and Conflict

FNDL 27002, RLST 25102, MDVL 25102 Reading Augustine’s Confessions

RLST 24100/FNDL 24500: The Ethics of War: Reading Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations