I'm teaching!

This week I started teaching an introductory religion course here at Dayton. The class is designed for all students to take their first year, regardless of major, and we're fortunate at a Catholic University to have an administration that thinks the Catholic intellectual tradition is something very important and should be taken very seriously.

The design of the class is what I think is most interesting, and related to this blog. The course is framed by Benedict XVI's encyclical letter "Deus Caritas Est" (God is Love). We're using Benedict because he really brings out the particularity of the way Christianity as a religion has described God and love throughout history, against the reductive idea that "all religions are the same" that a lot of students come in with.

Benedict also talks about a lot of history, and references either explicitly or implicitly major figures from the Catholic intellectual tradition, like Augustine and Aquinas, and also modern critical figures like Marx and Nietzsche. So in this class we're going to start with Deus Caritas Est as a kind of introduction, but then read it again for the last few days of the course after the students have read many of the figures Benedict talks about, and the students can see how much of a richer understanding they have of the Encyclical and of the tradition that it's a part of.

We're also bringing in a lot of technology and research on teaching methods. I may post more on this, but for instance, we're incorporating videos into the course. Here's an example of one we used on the first day, that introduced the letter of 1 John as a way of getting into Deus Caritas Est.



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