Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

The course explores the intersection between religion, healing, and medicine through a cross-cultural framework that includes Western religious and other cultural traditions such as Asian, South American, and African-Diasporic. In varying degrees, many religious traditions focus on therapeutic means of dealing with illness based on their understanding of the relationship between illness, disease and spirituality. In other words, the religious and spiritual beliefs of those who are ill are linked in some way or other to their health and wellbeing. Today, there is an increasing reconfiguration of the relationship between religion, healing, and medicine. Amongst other things, this reflects attempts to transcend the traditional dualism between religion, healing, and medicine in Western culture. Consequently, major course goals include exploration of the juxtaposition between religion, healing, medicine, and culture, theories of interpretation and approaches that reflect on their intersection, diversity in practices, types of discourses in the field under study, conversation between modern and traditional ways of understanding religion, healing and medicine, and specific issues that elaborate on their relationship. In the final analysis, the course hopes to develop students’ skill in an ethics of care. In terms of global health, the course explores how individuals, communities, states, cultures, and religious traditions manage assaults on human well-being. Thus said, it is an ethics of the discipline of care that seeks to address these pressing contemporary issues. “The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.”

Student Outcomes

In keeping with the foregoing statement, the following Student Outcomes apply to this course in Religious Studies: • Students will be able to develop a solid foundation of credible knowledge about diverse religions and the concept of “religion.” • Students will be able to cultivate a greater global and cultural awareness of self and other by engaging with peoples and cultures from around the globe. • Students will be able to develop robust and responsible ways to think comparatively about religious similarities and differences. • Students will be able to understand, critically reflect, and write on the intersections between religion, healing, and medicine in Western, Eastern, and other religious traditions.

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