This course will examine the nature of Paul’s spirituality—the transformative, lived experience of participating in Christ by the power of God’s Spirit—as it applies to believing communities, individual believers, and ministers in Paul’s own day and in the life of the contemporary church. The class will combine close reading of selected passages and themes with …
View course details “The Spirituality of Paul”

By virtually all accounts, the Book of Ecclesiastes is a strange book and its presence in the canon, if not anomalous, is at least in need of some discussion if not formal explanation and defense. This course proceeds through Qoheleth (the book’s Hebrew name) while considering and pursuing “Qohelutian” themes in other, biblical and extra-/non-biblical …
View course details “A Skeptic in Scripture: Ecclesiastes & Its Friends”

Christian Poetics is an exploration of literary aesthetics, delving into what defines the nature and quality of literature. While this is primarily a course in literary criticism, students of art, literature, and culture will delight in discovering the interplay between form and function in the works of classical and Christian thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, …
View course details “Christian Poetics”

From the ancient through modern world, women have preached, taught, and led. Yet, for most modern Christians, knowledge of these women as well as the historical context in which they served the Church has been forgotten. This course explores not only forgotten women in Christian history but also the consequences of our historical amnesia for …
View course details “The Cost of Forgetting Church History for Women”

The course New Testament Foundations explores the literature of the New Testament (NT) with the purpose of providing a basis for engaged reading, further study, and application to life and church. The primary focus will be on reading the New Testament wisely, offering a multifaceted paradigm for reading/hearing this literature that includes a sensitivity to …
View course details “New Testament Foundations”

We live in a world of power and politics that deeply impacts the lives of individual Christians and the Church. Often too, power and politics are at work in the actions and decisions of our churches and their leaders. It is in such a world that God is at work. In this course we look …
View course details “God & the Kings: Power, Praise, and Pragmatics in 1-2 Kings”

This course will examine women’s lives in the New Testament and the wider Greco-Roman world (including Second Temple Judaism) by studying the biblical text, literary sources, and archaeological evidence. This course extends the discussion into the second through fifth centuries of the early Church, addressing women’s participation in the intellectual, liturgical, ascetic, and monastic arenas. …
View course details “Women in the New Testament & Early Church”

A survey of the teaching of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans. We will focus on the argument of the letter and on key theological and practical issues that are significant in that argument. Class discussion will encourage students to come to their own decisions about the meaning of the text and …
View course details “The Letter to the Romans”

This class surveys the history of the Bible in the United States from the War for Independence through the Civil War. It is a case study designed to sharpen awareness of how intellectual assumptions, cultural conventions, engrained interests, and spiritual motives shaped the understanding and application of Scripture. Special emphases are how Scripture was enlisted …
View course details “The Bible, Slavery, & the American Civil War”

Acts is an exciting book, telling the story of the beginnings of the church over its first thirty to forty years. It’s in the form of ‘edited highlights’, picking out key events, key people, and key themes in the establishment and growth of the church. The story itself is strongly driven by God himself: time after …
View course details “The Book of Acts: To the End of the Earth”