Death

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is an extended study of the phenomenon of death as it relates to human being, human experience, and the human relationship with God. Alongside sources from the Jewish and Christian theological traditions, we will engage philosophical, theoretical, spiritual, and comparative religious perspectives. The course will be composed of four units: (1) Death and Finitude, which concerns death as a structural feature of human nature and existence, (2) Death and Subjectivity, which concerns the manner by which conduct ourselves and compose our self-understanding with respect to our mortality, (3) Death in Comparison, which concerns the role and understanding of death in other religious traditions, and (4) Death and the Theological Virtues, which will explore the relationship between death and faith, hope, and love. The course seeks to cultivate an intellectually robust, conceptually sophisticated, yet distinctly Christian theory of death, its meaning, and its inevitability.