To: All undergraduate Religion Concentrators:
Re: New Course Announcement
I had hoped to present my courses that are open to undergraduates at the
CSR reception last evening, but was unable to attend at the last minute for
unforeseen reasons. However, I do wish to extend an invitation to
undergraduates who are interested in a course that I am offering on
"Christianity, War, and Peace from Augustine to Iraq." Due to a couple of
late course changes, I'm not sure that this course was properly listed
among the current offerings, so I wanted to make sure that it was brought
to your attention. The course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:30 -
1:00. All discussion sections will also meet during that time period, and
will be periodically scheduled throughout the course. A full syllabus is
now available at the following url:
http://icommons.harvard.edu/~hds-2279/
A link to a course web page on the FAS servers will be established in the
very near future, but in the meantime, please use the above link with the
Divinity School course number.
The purpose of this course is to do both historical and theoretical work
that will facilitate a discussion of how to understand, interpret, and
approach the current U.S. war in Iraq from within Christian intellectual
traditions. Certainly one of the primary ways that the war is now
discussed in public discourse is under the rubric of the "just war." We
will look carefully at stages in the development of just war argumentation
since early Rome, the contributions of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and
contemporary theorists, but also look at the larger intellectual and
religious context of varieties of ways to understand war throughout the
long history of Christian thought.
Hence, we will discuss "holy war" and the Crusades, but also read critics
of war from Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Thomas Merton and Dorothy
Day in the 20th century. Our goal is to work through the common questions,
concerns, methodological issues, and ethical claims to try to learn a set
of critical tools that will assist us in talking more intelligibly and with
more intellectual integrity than is often the case in our currently divided
and polemically oriented field of public exchange about the war. This
should be the case whether or not one finds the current justifications for
the war that have been offered by a variety of contemporary thinkers (and
our current Presidential administration) finally persuasive or seriously
flawed. Our goal, first and foremost, is not to agree or disagree with the
war, but to take a historical-critical look at our current "tools of
discourse" and what is at stake in our ways of understanding them.
Again, given some uncertainties as to the status of the course listings, I
want to make sure that undergraduate concentrators in Religion are aware of
the course and are formally invited to participate if this is an area of
study which is of interest to any of you.
With regards,
P. Provost-Smith
Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity, Harvard Divinity School
Member of the Committee for the Study of Religion, Harvard University