MR520: Popular Religious Beliefs and Practice: Cultural Views of Healing (4 units)

R. Daniel Shaw, Professor of Anthropology and Translation
Summer 2005 Pasadena

DESCRIPTION:

Religious experiences reflect religious beliefs and proliferate into a wide range of manifestations that often relate to healing and a concern for human wellbeing. This is of great interest to anthropologist, theologian, and missionary/medical personnel alike. This course seeks to enable students to appreciate these phenomena as manifestations of deeper pan-human issues that God has implanted in human beings created in God’s image. Religious beliefs are often manifest in practices that serve to maintain or restore wholeness and both spiritual and physical health. The course will address these issues as a product of beliefs and values relating to human interaction with transempirical power, both personal and impersonal. Particular attention is given to the relationship between structures of beliefs and symbols, the nature of ritual and ceremony, types of religious practitioners, and the dynamics of religious movements as they relate to maintaining spiritual balance and physical wholeness. Students will come to appreciate religion as a system of meaning as well as a system of expression. The missiological/health questions arising from this appreciation for concerns about God in the human context punctuate the entire course, which concludes by presenting a means to biblically critique religious systems while bringing healing to them in a culturally sensitive manner. Such an approach allows the love of Christ to shine into a religious context and break the power of sin and death that holds people captive.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

• Students will be able to appropriate an analytical model for religious understanding.
• Students will recognize and understand beliefs and practices in any religious context.
• Students will be able to appreciate and exegete ritual and ceremony and apply understanding to issues of

health, healing, and well being.
• Students will be able to make appropriate Christian responses and apply missiological understanding.

COURSE FORMAT: Lectures, films, and classroom discussion in a one-week format will provide opportunity for learning.

REQUIRED READING:

IMPORTNANT: Before attending the Summer Session, Hiebert et. Al. and Csordas must be read

Hiebert, P. G. , D. Shaw & T. Tienou. Understanding Folk Religion: A Christian Response to Popular Beliefs and Practices. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1999.
Csordas, T.J. Body/Meaning/Healing (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion). Palgrave Macmillan, Paperback ed.
Shaw, R.D. Course Syllabus. FTS, 2005.
Shaw, R.D. (ed) Course Reader, FTS, 2005

ASSIGNMENTS:

PREREAD: Hiebert et. al. and Csordas texts!

Reading and an annotated bibliography, small group interaction, final exam.
Th.M students add: A two-page paper indicating how this course content fits into the conceptualization, research and writing for the thesis. Either apply the field experience to the thesis or read one extra book that applies insight from folk religion/healing theory to the topic or region of the world in focus in the thesis.

PREREQUISITES: None.

RELATIONSHIP TO CURRICULUM: Elective.

FINAL EXAM: Yes.

Last Date Edited: March 21, 2005