Urban Law and Policy

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar in social science, history, and religious studies, will be dedicated to the critical investigation of three interrelated themes: (1) A critical discussion of the three available types of theories of globalization: (a) economic theories of the capitalist world system, (b) political theories of the global expansion of the Westphalian system of territorial nation-states and of a world polity of isomorphic institutions, and c) sociological theories of world society and global culture; (2) A historical sketch of the role of the Jesuits as pioneer globalizers in the early modern phase of globalization and the confluence of global forces which led to their suppression at the end of the 18th century. The Jesuits will be used as a critical prism through which to reconstruct some of the complex world-historical processes of globalization which have led to our global age in order to conceptualize the potential role(s) of religion(s) in such processes; and (3) a critical reconstruction of the modern emergence of a religious-secular global field and the critical discussion of contemporary global religious-secular dynamics.