Lance Lazar
118 Saunders Hall
962-3931, lazar@email.unc.edu
Off. Hrs.: Tues., 12-2 pm and by appointment
Welcome to Religion 30, an introductory study of several "critical issues in western religious history." This spring, we will be concentrating on the period from roughly 1100-1600 CE, when Christians in the West came to define attitudes toward The Outcast and The Other --perceived threats from within and without. In this foreign land of the past, we will explore the timeless social problems of poverty, prostitution, and groups seen as subversive. Precisely because the past is different and strange to us, it helps us to understand the forces and ideas that shape our reality today. To echo Michel Foucault, we do not look to the past in terms of the present (that would be anachronistic), but we are looking for the history of our present. This spring we will be looking back in the family album, at our intellectual and ideological forebears.
Because RELI 30 is an introduction, you are not expected to have prior knowledge, and lectures and discussions will proceed with that in mind. RELI 30 also provides you a Philosophy Perspective because we are primarily concerned with the ideas that have shaped the "Western Civilization" in which we find ourselves. So we learn in RELI 30 what some people in the past were thinking, and to some extent, why. But RELI 30 will not teach you what to think. Nor do you need to be a believer in Christianity or any other religion; simply being alive and being inquisitive are qualification enough. Ideally, the lectures and discussions will encourage you to reflect on what you think (and why) about poverty, persecution, justice, and morality, in light of what selected predecessors have thought.