This course invites students to answer for themselves, is the Cross beautiful? That is, can beauty redeem suffering?Students are encouraged to think of this course as a meditation on beauty and suffering, negotiated through theological discourse on the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

This course prepares students to think critically about the task of doing constructive theology. The goal of this course is to survey, compare and contrast, and evaluate various contextual, constructive, and interdisciplinary perspectives on the doctrines of God, Creation, Theological Anthropology, and Pneumatology from the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. Students will be able to articulate an understanding of what God is doing in the world, with implications for how they think, listen, live, and lead.

Deconstructing Purity Culture: Personhood, Agency, & Sexual Ethics examines the historical and systemic foundations of evangelical purity culture in the United States. Students will explore the theological, social, and political contexts that gave rise to purity culture and critically assess how purity ideology has shaped understandings of personhood (e.g. race, gender, sexuality) and agency within the context of American Protestantism. The course culminates in the constructive work of developing alternative sexual ethics that honor embodiment, consent, and human dignity as well as religious commitments and personal values. Through interdisciplinary readings in religious studies, gender theory, and ethics, students will gain theoretical tools to analyze purity culture’s enduring societal influences, while also imagining more liberative approaches to sexuality and relationships for oneself and one’s future clients and communities.