First-Year Seminar: From the City On a Hill to 9/11: Religion and Social Justice in America

3 units

From the Puritans' search to build the city on a hill, to the growing conflation of Islam with terrorism, Americans have long nurtured a self-identity as God's chosen people, an idea that has helped them justify and normalize a theology of both conquest and suffering. This course will analyze how religion served to both buttress and contest notions of social domination, punishment, reform, and revolution in the U.S. from the colonial era to the present. Topics will include the American Jeremiad, abolitionism, slave rebellions, Native American Catholicism, Fundamentalism, the Catholic Worker Movement, Pacifism, the Black Freedom Struggle, the Moral Majority, and Post-9/11 military and gender interventions with the Islamic world.