RLG197H1S: Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment (Winter 2024)
The problem of “disenchantment” has come to increasingly embody the most essential intellectual problems at the heart of modernity: globalism, capitalism, materialism, secularisation, and Western hegemony. As famously articulated in Max Weber’s thesis on disenchantment, this contested term is often deployed to characterize a process which began in the Enlightenment and culminated in the early twentieth century, ultimately replacing the “enchanted” and sacramental worldviews of the premodern eras with a rational, scientific, materialist one. In this way, the realm of knowledge became entirely commanded under the purview of science—with every kind of natural phenomena rendered open to rational explanation—while the authority of religion was delegated solely to matters of values and beliefs. At the same time, numerous spiritual, artistic, literary, and philosophical movements both within academia and beyond have come to continually engage with notions of “re-enchantment”, positing a rebellion against these boundaries between religion and science, while cultivating a deep longing and nostalgia for an enchanted past.
This course will consider the intellectual history of these categories of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. By drawing on readings from Western philosophy and theology, we will map out the evolution of these terms, examine their understandings of modernity, and reconsider these same articulations as a set of intellectual problems, rather than as linear historical processes. We will also examine the kinds of spiritual and scientific traditions which were deliberately excluded from the creation of a philosophical canon, especially those who resisted the construction of these emerging boundaries between reason and religion: occultists, alchemists, and those relegated to the problematic category of “esotericism”.
This course will consider the intellectual history of these categories of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. By drawing on readings from Western philosophy and theology, we will map out the evolution of these terms, examine their understandings of modernity, and reconsider these same articulations as a set of intellectual problems, rather than as linear historical processes. We will also examine the kinds of spiritual and scientific traditions which were deliberately excluded from the creation of a philosophical canon, especially those who resisted the construction of these emerging boundaries between reason and religion: occultists, alchemists, and those relegated to the problematic category of “esotericism”.
RLG318H1F: Religion & Nature (Fall 2022)
How did we get to where we are now? A place where as a species we are so collectively alienated from the nature of which we are a part, that we seem incapable of not destroying our shared home. This course aims to tell a story which will help us understand this state of affairs. Its readings, from antiquity to the present will allow students to gain a deeper critical awareness of our conceptualisation of nature. We will do so by examining the deeply-embedded concepts that structure the human-nature relationship itself, in particular religion.
This course will examine how religion, in particular Christianity and its global secular intellectual inheritance, has shaped our understanding of, and interaction with, nature. Christianity has understood creation in many different ways: as a book of divine revelation to learn from, as a gift to nurture and care for, as a wild garden to cultivate, and as a resource for the betterment of the human condition. These ideas have, and continue to inform, our relationship with nature, shaping everything from resource extraction to environmental activism. In understanding the pathology of our environmental crisis, we can begin to properly diagnose it, going beyond political and technological fixes, to address the cultural and civilizational issues at the heart of our broken relationship with nature.
This course will examine how religion, in particular Christianity and its global secular intellectual inheritance, has shaped our understanding of, and interaction with, nature. Christianity has understood creation in many different ways: as a book of divine revelation to learn from, as a gift to nurture and care for, as a wild garden to cultivate, and as a resource for the betterment of the human condition. These ideas have, and continue to inform, our relationship with nature, shaping everything from resource extraction to environmental activism. In understanding the pathology of our environmental crisis, we can begin to properly diagnose it, going beyond political and technological fixes, to address the cultural and civilizational issues at the heart of our broken relationship with nature.