The course will examine a range of issues bearing upon the relation of religion and violence mainly in recent scholarship.
Religiously infused violence has become a feature of life at the present time, and the relation of religion and violence has become a matter of considerable public debate. Critics of ‘religion’ accuse it of being the source and cause of violence, and members of different religious traditions, partly under this pressure, examine the way in which their sacred texts, history and present life contain not only actual violence in the name of God, but also symbolic and ritual violence that in some measure appear to validate further religious violence. This course addresses these and related issues in a reflective and analytic way.
Forum participation (10%); a two thousand-word essay (40%) and a 1.5-hour unseen written examination (50%).
John McDade was Senior Lecturer and Principal of Heythrop College, University of London. He became interested in theology because of what he saw as the urgent question about the relationship between ‘the historical Jesus’ and the Christ proclaimed by the Church.
