Religious Intolerance in the Contemporary U.S.: This course explores several important facets of religious tolerance and intolerance in the U.S. today. It begins with the development of religious pluralism and the separation of church and state, but then questions the limits of this separation through examining the evidence for "public Protestantism" in the U.S. The rest of the course examines instances of religious intolerance in the U.S. - both intolerance of specific religions and religiously-based intolerance of specific groups - in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We'll explore the contours of religious intolerance, from hate crimes and violent protest to more subtle events and attitudes in our own communities and our own lives. Equally importantly, we'll also consider ways to combat intolerance in all its myriad forms.

The Iraq War: The purpose of this course is to study the national, regional, and global politics of the Iraq War. Beginning with an historical overview of the region and placing the war within the context of post-Cold War security politics, the course will interrogate the case made for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (e.g. war on terror, the human rights protection, weapons of mass destruction and the violation of U.N. resolutions, democratization of the “Greater Middle East,” energy resources), as well as the issues generated by the execution of the war and the occupation and insurgency that followed. These latter include military technology and strategy, the legal status of enemy combatants and the Geneva Conventions, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, insurgency and civil war, regional religio-ethnic politics, and the production of military/diplomatic options on the “home front.”

The Literature of Peace: Reading and discussion of a group of religious peace activists of the twentieth century (Dorothy Day, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Daniel Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Bernie Glassman) and the religious texts that inspired their non-violent theories.

Critical and Alternative Voices: This one-semester extension of the First-Year Core will call into question the “dominance” of traditional western world views by critically examining the historical and ideological roles played by “others.” The aim is to learn to listen to these alternative voices in their own contexts. Such voices will include those geographically “non-western,” as well as those excluded or subordinated by way of race, gender, or class within Europe and America.