Course Offerings
Spring 2025 Course
CCTS 32000 / RLST 26306 / CHST 26306 / HIP 26306
Religion, Medicine, and Human Flourishing on the South Side of Chicago
Spring 2025 (100 units), The University of Chicago
Date/Time: Fridays 9:30AM-12:00PM
Course Description: Historically, medicine has promoted health as central to the good life. The contemporary turn in the medical and social sciences to the more capacious concept of human flourishing, however, presses these disciplines into conversation with longer traditions of inquiry–more specifically religious traditions–on the nature of the good life for individuals and communities. How might religious traditions reveal the possibilities and limits of contemporary views of human flourishing? How might they add elements to discourses of health such as forgiveness, dignity, and character, that might otherwise be missing from medical conversations? How might they challenge assumptions around our understanding not only of the health of the person (human flourishing) but also the health of the body?
Just as medicine is understood best in its practice, so too this course seeks to understand religious traditions as embedded within and responsive to the communities they serve through religious nonprofits and congregations. How does the on-the-ground experience of these community organizations seeking to advance human flourishing on the south side of Chicago challenge these categories?
Sponsored by the Program on Medicine and Religion, the Hyde Park Institute, the Lumen Christi Institute, InterFaith America, and the Chicago Collective on Faith & Flourishing, this course is an innovative experiential course open to all undergraduates in the College. In partnership with Chicago Studies, this course takes the city as our classroom. Students will meet weekly with organizations on the forefront of health and human flourishing in Chicago, addressing issues such as food insecurity, bodily well-being, violence and community, economic well-being, migration, and death.
Through this seminar, students will engage texts to better understand the context of institutional religious action towards human flourishing, and will walk away with a more robust understanding of the bricolage of health among underserved communities on the South and West Side of Chicago.
Course Instructor: John Yoon MD Email: jdyoon@uchicago.edu
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Non-Credit Course | Science and Religion: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (Lumen Christi Institute)
Oct 8–29, 2024 For more details, see website link here.
RETH 31000 – Good Hands: Research Ethics
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Basic research is intended to explore and evaluate truth claims at the edge of our understanding of the natural and physical world, and it is this very quality that renders it useful as science. Yet, this often creates significant ethical questions for the research as well as for the social order in which all research takes place. Often, courses in research ethics focus on the establishment and enforcement of canonical rules of behavior, where the goal is to inform the investigator about how to follow these established rules. This course will turn to a different set of problems in research ethics. While we will begin with a foundation in the history of research ethics, reviewing the key cases that shaped the policies about which we have consensus, (human and animal subject protections; authorship, etc.) will consider the problems about which there is not yet a clear ethical course: what are the limits of human mastery? Why is research deception so prevalent? Are there experiments which are impermissible and why? What is the obligation of the researcher toward their community? How can we think clearly and ethically in situations of deep uncertainty? We will consider how moral philosophy as well as theological arguments have shaped research science and reflect on the nature, goal and meaning of basic and translational research in modernity. Course Note: Required course for MS program in Biological Sciences. Laurie Zoloth
THEO 46006 – Approaches to Suffering: Theological Perspectives and Contemporary Meditations
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Framed by a consideration of Susan Sontag on the representation of suffering, Elaine Scarry on The Body in Pain, and Judith Butler on grievable life, this seminar will seek to extend and enrich such contemporary meditations through conversation with varied theological approaches to suffering. One thesis of the course is that theodicy need not be viewed as the chief theological approach to suffering. Through close reading of selected works, we will consider interpretive frames such as creation and providence, wounding and healing, and crucifixion and resurrection, together with religious responses such as introspection, contemplation, mourning, witness, and resistance. PQ: Previous work in theology. Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll. Kristine Culp