by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, Trinity College
Indian Secularism and Scientific Opinion:Data from the Worldviews and Opinion of Scientists – India 2007-8 Summary Report (1,100 Ph.D. scientists) [slideshow]
Barry A. Kosmin, Founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and research professor of public policy and law at Trinity College
The Secularization Debate in the Public Square: Media responses to ARIS 2008 (slideshow)
by Michael Lestz, Associate Professor of History, Trinity College
I. Course Description:
In the 19th century, societies across the Asian map were governed by autocratic states that derived their legitimacy from religious or meta-religious worldviews and their accompanying ideologies. In China, the dynastic state based its legal and institutional framework on Song Neo-Confucianism; in Vietnam and Korea, Confucian monarchies, likewise, dominated the state. In Cambodia and Thailand, dynasties found legitimacy from the Hindu notion of the “god king” (devaraja). And in Japan, a hybrid mixture of Shinto and Confucianism provided a template for imperial and Shogunal rule.
These traditional schemes of legitimacy vanished in the twentieth century. Struggles against colonial rule, revolution, and complex post-colonial conflicts about the appropriate nature of the state yielded new states. Communism, development dictatorship, democracy, or military rule were the dominant political templates for the states that emerged in the ruins of the traditional order.
Within these states, secular values often motivated dramatic acts of personal sacrifice and passionate devotion to goals such as national unification, socio-economic transformation, and resistance to real and perceived forms of oppression. In addition, there was often an explicit renunciation of the traditional values as they were deployed in the political arena.
At the same time, however, the bedrock of the Confucian, Buddhist, or Shinto past continued to channel the “dao” or “way” of secular states.
Using memoirs, novels, documentary material, and historical monographs, this course will investigate the intellectual fabric of such powerful secular commitments in a number of Asian societies. The course will be formed around the lives of particular historical actors, revolutionaries, humanists, soldiers, and proponents of secular change, in China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and perhaps other East and Southeast Asian societies.
This course will be a senior seminar and will be offered during the 2010-2011 academic year.
II. Bibliography (abbreviated/*starred titles to be ordered or duplicated for the course):
III. Class Schedule:
Week I: The Confucian State: China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan
Week II: The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the Republican State in China
Week III: Fascism in China
Week IV: Confucianism and the Yan’an Way in Northern Shaanxi
Week V: The Plight of Korea: The Creation of New State Orders Below and Above the 38th Parallel in the Wake of Japanese Colonialism
Week VI: Occupation Japan: The MacArthur Constitution and the American-sponsored Invention of a New Constitutional Order
Week VII: Communist Revolution and Its Acolytes in Vietnam After 1954
Week VIII: Singapore and Li Kuan Yew: The Emergence of a Denatured Confucian Autocracy
Week IX: The Buddhist State: The Cambodian Variant
Week X: Sihanouk’s, the Devaraja System, and Development Dictatorship
Week XI: The Pol Pot Experiment; A Communist State Founded on the Ruins of Angkor
by Bruce Coats, Professor of Art History, Scripps College
Rationale:
This course will explore changing attitudes toward nature developed during the 18th century in Europe by surveying representations of nature in the visual arts (paintings, gardens, architecture and furniture), in the performing arts (music, dance and theater) and in texts (essays, poetry and novels). Concepts of reason, liberty and society as formed by the natural world or reflected in nature will be examined, especially in England and France during the Enlightenment.
In the late 17th century, European concepts of nature were still informed by church teachings and by political systems of strict hierarchies, as typified by the reign of Louis XIV and his gardens and palaces at Versailles. Throughout the 18th century new secular ideas about nature, based on scientific discoveries, geographic explorations, agricultural experiments, political developments, and philosophical speculations, resulted in radically varied views about Nature and in extraordinary representations of the natural world in the visual and performing arts. Country estates, such as Stowe in Buckinghamshire, were designed to reflect these political and social changes, in the statuary and pavilions placed around the garden and in the freedom to roam without pathways or an imposed agenda. People were expected to enjoy nature (Edmund Burke), to learn from nature (Jean Jacques Rousseau) and to respond to nature through reason and emotion (Immanuel Kant). By the early 19th century, nature was seen by some as a source for personal spiritual understanding, outside religious institutions, and as a resource for social improvement in new towns, public parks, and landscaped cemeteries. Such varied attitudes toward the nature of nature reveal much about the Enlightenment in Europe.
Required textbook:
Lecture/discussion sessions:
This seminar will survey the varied ways in which Nature and the landscape were viewed in Europe during the 17th -19th centuries, with particular attention to how developments in secularism affected traditional iconographic interpretations of natural elements and influenced the creation of gardens and the depiction of landscape scenes.
I Introduction and Changing Definitions of nature
II Divine Realms
III Biblical and mythological representations of the natural world
IV Moorish and medieval monastery gardens – visit to Margaret Fowler Garden
V Imperial RealmsFormal gardens in Italy and France as symbols of Music, theater and visual arts in the iconographic p
VI Fantasy RealmsRococo architecture and the paintings of Watteau Discussion of Defoe’s novel
VII Botanical Realms Rousseau’s essay Botany
VIII Linnaeus and Botanic Gardens in Padua, Leyden, Paris Versailles and Oxford
IX Botanical Gardens and Menageries
X Political Realms Stowe and the early English landscape garden
XI Seasonal Realms
XII Agricultural Revolutions: Plows, fertilizers, native plants, and exotic imports
XII Creating the Picturesque Landscape in paintings and gardens: freedom of thought and of movement
XIV Man in Nature and the Sublime Landscape
XV The Sublime Realm: Ermenonville, Desert de Retz and Monceau
XVI Poetic Realms and Picturesque Places
XVII Personalized Realms: self expression in Constable and Turner
XIX Analysis of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony “The Pastoral”
XX Conclusion: Knowledge, Culture and Representation of Nature
by John Eldevik, Ph.D, History Department, Pomona College
Catalogue Description
This course will attempt to understand and unravel the complex relationship between secular and sacred ideals of political and social order that characterized much of medieval intellectual discourse. We will examine the ways in which medieval jurists, theologians and religious dissenters reconciled notions of authority and order received from tradition and classical antiquity with the demands of divine revelation and the claims of the Church from the time of Augustine through the age of Conciliarism (ca. 300-1450).
Course Overview
Strictly speaking, “secularism” was an term coined in the nineteenth century. Yet the idea of defining a distinction between claims about life and society grounded in humanistic philosophies versus knowledge attained through divinely revealed texts or traditions is one that goes back to the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment was not an inevitability, but neither could it have taken place without the intellectual framework erected by medieval jurists and philosophers who grappled with the relationship between church and state, or, as they put it, regnum et sacerdotum – between priestly and royal authority in society. Out of this debate emerged the strains of thought – religious, historical and philosophical- that would eventually form the foundation of a modern idea of the political, that is, a sphere of thought and action based on empirical perceptions of the world and society and not beholden to revealed authority. The course will not attempt to locate the “origins” of secularism in any particular medieval discourse, but emphasize instead the enduring problem of authority and order and they ways in which those same questions resonate with us today in the form of debates over things like individual liberty versus the security of the state. Instead, medieval thinkers conceived of the universe and humanity as a single, divinely-ordered system, or body, but distinguished within it sacred and profane (rather than “secular”) spheres of authority, life and knowledge, and within those sacred and profane spheres, many nested orders of hierarchy. How those realms and their hierarchies related to each other within the body politic formed the crux of medieval political philosophy.
The three great monotheistic faiths that have shaped the Western tradition have all faced the same fundamental problem when it came to the question of civil governance and social order: is all government ordained by God, and thus to be structured according to Scriptural and hierocratic principles, or did God envision a dual system of governance for the world and his followers, namely a sacred and a profane? If so, were they equal, or did one have preeminence over the other? Is political organization, and by extension, civil government, a product of nature (Aristotle), or does it arise from divine providence, or merely the need to control evil in a fallen world? These questions were first articulated and debated in Christian antiquity, which inherited a complex metaphysical and tradition on one side from Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and on the other from the Bible and patristic theology. Proceeding from the theopolitical synthesis presented in St. Augustine’s masterpiece, De civitate Dei, this course will trace the dialectic between hierocratic and royal/secular conceptions of political power and social authority across the medieval West, examining issues such as theories of kingship and divine rulership, ideologies of reform, social justice and political dissent in their historical contexts. The struggle to define the relationship between royal and papal authority will certainly occupy a central place in the syllabus, but we will also explore issues such as biblical exegesis and political theory, the Crusades, the formation of the ius commune (which blended canon and Roman legal traditions), as well as alternate systems of thought and dissent, particularly mysticism and popular theologies. An important part of the course will also consist of understanding the key contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophy to Christian political philosophy in the Middle Ages.
Some of the key texts this course will utilize include the writings of St. Augustine, particularly The City of God, the Ten Books of History by Gregory of Tours, texts from the eleventh century reform movement and the Crusades, Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, selected works by Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Dante, Bartolus of Sassoferato, William of Ockham and Lorenzo Valla.
Reading Schedule (by week) with possible texts
1. The Greco-Roman Tradition of Statecraft
2. Religion & Politics in the Bible
3. The Constantinian Revolution
4. The Augustinian Synthesis
5. The Politics of Holiness in the Dark Ages
6. Carolingian Thought
7. Religion, War and Violence in the Age of Crusades
8. Reform and Politics in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
9. The New Schools of the Twelfth Century and Political Theology
10. The Iberian Masters
11. Aquinas and the Parisian Controversies
12. The Avignon Papacy and the Crisis of Church and State Part I: The Case for the Church
13. The Crisis of Church and State Part II. The Case for the State
14. The Politics of Faith and Popular Dissent
by Barbara Benedict, Charles A. Dana, Professor of English Literature
Description:
This course is designed for first- and second-year students as a close-reading introduction to basic literary techniques and categories, with a strong writing component. It is not directed solely at upcoming English majors but they will probably be the majority of the class.
How important is your “stuff” to you? What does it mean? When is a thing just a thing, and when does it represent something else? In this course, students will examine the literary representations of material culture, including clothes, tools, collections of things, paintings, jewelry and books, in a range of works from the Renaissance to the present time. We will analyze what different kinds of things mean at different periods of history, and how writers invest them with magical, religious, satirical and sentimental significance. Readings will include drama, novels, poetry, and journalism, as well as some history, and anthropological and literary theory. This course fills a cultural context requirement for English majors.
Book List:
PART I: The Body and Things: where does the body stop and clothes begin? short introductory lectures on Renaissance, pre-industrial British society, sartorial laws, Catholic rituals, and literary traditions of dream-visions in which things mean something immaterial that reveals/conceals a moral truth; the eighteenth-century influx of cloth goods; changing notions of cleanliness and the borders of bodies and things; and modern theory on clothes, bodies and identity.
Readings for Weeks 1, 2 and 3:
PART II: Things, Spirits and Sins: where does the material begin and end? how can thing embody evil? short introductory lectures on the repression of superstition in the 18thc, witches, devils, empiricism, the Royal Society and the rise of science.
Readings for Weeks 4, 5 and 6:
PART III: Collecting Things: when does possessing something possess you? how can ownership change the owner’s personality or identity? Short introductory lecture on Victorian culture and the history of auctions and collecting.
Readings for Weeks 7, 8 and 9:
PART IV: Remembered Things: are things what one remembers them to be? how do they furnish the mind and shape the idea of the past? short introductory lecture on WWI.
Readings for Weeks 7, 8 and 9:
Jonathan Elukin, Associate Professor Department of History, Trinity College
Introduction:
For most of human civilization, people thought the world was filled with the spirits of gods that directly affected their lives. This “enchantment” took the form of beliefs in magic, angels, demons, and miracles. Such a conception of an enchanted world thrived in the Christian society of pre modern Europe as well and continues to characterize many societies or sub cultures throughout the contemporary world. The process of secularization–that is, the shift away from thinking of the world as enchanted–should be studied systematically. Moreover, the impact of the process of secularization needs careful study as well. The disenchantment of the world affected many aspects of European society in the early modern period, including attitudes towards tolerance, nature, human identity, authority and government. In many ways, our contemporary debates about the nature of secular societies grow out of these medieval and early modern ideas about the enchantment or disenchantment of the world.
Week 1: Ideas of Secularization
The introduction to the course will survey attempts to understand what secularization means. Does it happen to different societies at different times? Is there one definition of secularization? Is it purely a post-Enlightenment European phenomenon? Are there secular or religious ways of thinking? Can we really divide society into sacred and secular?
Week 2: Christianity and the Miraculous
Week 3: Supernatural Beliefs in Medieval Europe
Week 4: Miracles and Skepticism in the Middle Ages
This part of the course will survey the nature of religious belief in the ancient and medieval worlds. It is crucial here to note that the readings will introduce the problem of the extent and nature of belief in the miraculous in these societies. In other words, we will study the complicated reality of religious belief and challenge the idea of a uniformly religious medieval or pre-modern world. Secularization happened to societies that had been grappling with different levels and kinds of religious belief for centuries. The vocabulary of skepticism and un-belief had its origins in religious societies.
Week 5: Sacred and Secular in the Early Modern World
Week 6: Science and Secularism
This section of the course will study the development of secular thinking in the early modern period, with a particular focus on the evolution of critical attitudes towards the biblical text and the appearance of scientific modes of thought. In both cases, however, we will try to see these developments as arising out of a religious context rather than appearing as an alternative to religious mentalities.
Week 7: Secularism and Tolerance
Week 8: Tolerance in the Medieval World
Week 9: Tolerance in Early Modern Europe
Secularization is often thought to have created the possibility of a new kind of tolerance. Human beings were no longer trapped in the religious mind-set of absolute truth that promoted or facilitated persecution of one faith by another. Recent scholarship on the nature of medieval and early modern religious relations has challenged that narrative. This section of the course will attempt to assess this new historiographical challenge to the narrative of secularization and tolerance.
Week 10: Whither Secularism?
Week 11: Science Fiction or The Survival of Religion in Secular Forms
Week 12: Return of Religion
Week 13: Conclusion
The final weeks of the seminar will study the resurgence of religion in the modern world and the creation of alternative modes of enchantment. Is religion or religious mentalities being preserved in art or science fiction? Can true secularism survive? How will new religious cultures in the developing world and in some western societies interact with modern secular ideology?
by Andre Wakefield, Assistant Professor of History, Pitzer College
Course Description
Many Enlightenment authors expressed confidence in the relentless progress of knowledge, but they also exuded skepticism and unease about reason. New questions about nature, and new approaches to studying it, unleashed fears about humanity’s place in the world. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz worried that the specter of infinite time might eliminate the need for God; David Hume doubted the necessity of cause and effect; Immanuel Kant limited reason to make way for faith. Each of these writers used reason to question the religious and metaphysical foundations of knowledge. But reason also created its own fears about faith and reason, about certainty and belief. This course is about those fears, and what lay behind them.
Secularism caused anxiety, even in the age of reason. That is the heart of the matter, and what we will be exploring in this course. Even as Spinoza and Kant and Leibniz sought to unify scripture with reason, their writings both reflected and unleashed fears about how new modes of knowing might undermine old ways of believing. It is the dynamic that we will examine.
Required Readings
Reading Schedule
Part I: Time, Fossils, Metaphysics
Part II: Reason, Faith, Skepticism: The Secular Challenge
by Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History, Trinity College
Course Syllabus
The purpose of this course is to use the modern Jewish experience in order to introduce students to the complexities and challenges of understanding and defining the development of modern nationalism. The course will consist of two major parts. The first part will examine theories of nationalism and then survey the rise of modern nationalist ideologies in Europe. The second part will take up the Jews as a “case study”. In what ways does the development of modern Jewish nationalism conform to various topographies of nationalist ideology? How was modern Jewish Nationalism influenced by non-Jewish models and doctrines? By the same token, in what ways was the Jewish experience “sui generis” or unique? How can a case study of modern Jewish nationalism clarify wider aspects of nationalism as a political issue?
The course assumes that in studying the development of Modern Jewish Nationalism, and especially Zionism, the student will come to understand the complexities and apparent paradoxes that mark the rise of modern national identities. On the one hand Zionism strove to make the Jews a “normal” people, yet on the other hand modern Zionism drew much of its inspiration from the traditional conviction that Jews were a “special” people and that their modern liberation movement had to create a model state and not just, to quote Ahad Ha’am, a “kind of Jewish Latvia” (i.e., just another tiny ethnic nation state. We apologize in advance to any Latvians). In many ways Zionism was a strikingly modern movement that borrowed freely from the national awakenings of neighboring peoples and that offered new models of leadership and new modes of mobilization and propaganda. But on the other hand, Zionism also was inextricably linked to an ancient religious tradition, to the Bible and to powerful national memories and myths. While other national movements also appropriated and invented convenient “usable pasts” and fashioned stirring “imagined communities”, it was modern Jewish nationalism more than any other that had to renegotiate and redefine the complex interplay of religious and ethnic identities and motifs.
Students will begin by surveying some of the recent scholarship on Nationalism and then discuss some of the major issues that have preoccupied scholars. Is nationalism a largely modern phenomenon, an invented instrument that uses modern forms of communication to create “imagined communities”, mobilize backward masses, facilitate industrial development and bolster the power of self anointed elites? Or must one modify this linkage of nationalism and modernity in order to admit such decidedly pre-modern antecedents and models as the Bible, the Reformation and atavistic ethnic bonds? The first part of the course will also examine and redefine the common distinction between “ethnic” or “civic” nationalism. It will consider the complex role of religion in modern nationalism, as well as the reasons why some nationalisms proved to be more aggressive and exclusive than others. Studies will then study the complex interplay of ideology and nationalism as they consider critiques from the Left and from the Right.
Part One: Defining a Nation
Week One
Week Two
Part Two: The ideological context of modern European Nationalism
Week Three
Week Four
Defining European nationalism from the Left
Week Five
Defining European nationalism from the Right
Part Three Modern Jewish National: How Secular? How Modern?
In this section of the course we will chart the development of modern Jewish nationalism through a study of the interplay of Jewish and non-Jewish history in Modern Europe. We will begin with a special consideration of Pinsker and Herzl and survey the impact of growing disappointment in the prospects of long term integration of the Jews into European society. Our study will return to the theoretical suggestions of Miroslav Hroch as we examine the role of writers and historians in the growth of modern Jewish nationalism. We will then consider various tensions within Zionism and the various attempts to create socialist, religious and integral nationalist versions of the movement.
Week Six
The Rise of Modern Jewish Nationalism: some general issues
Week Seven
The role of the historian Heinrich Graetz:
Week Eight
The role of the writer
Week Nine
Rediscovering Language
Week Ten
The Zionist Project
Week Eleven
Labor Zionism
Week Twelve
Religious and Revisionist Zionism
Week Thirteen
Diaspora nationalism: the case of the Bund Film:
Week Fourteen
America: a New Zion?
The Jew in the Modern World
by Suzanne Obdrzalek, Philosophy Department, Claremont McKenna College
Required Texts:
Course Description:
Plato is considered the first philosopher in the Western tradition to propose significant theories in ethics, moral psychology and political philosophy. This course will focus on a close reading of Platonic dialogues such as the Protagoras, the Republic and the Statesman. We will examine Plato’s views on virtue and vice, psychological conflict, our moral obligations to others, and the political role of the philosopher. We will assess Plato’s views for their philosophical merit, as well as discuss their influence on subsequent philosophers.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments:
Week One: Introduction (no assigned reading)
Week Two
Week Three
Week Four
Week Five
Week Six
Week Seven
Week Eight
Week Nine
Week Ten
Week Eleven
Week Twelve
Week Thirteen
Week Fourteen
Week Fifteen