Faculty: Mary Kendall Hope, Ph.D., Professor of Mediation Studies (Profile)
Description: This course examines female administrative leadership and begins the process of defining contemporary beliefs and pre-conceptions. Basic cultural norms, traditions, and barriers to female leadership are discussed to assist the student in understanding the most salient challenges that face professional women in roles of administrative leadership. Students will be encouraged to examine their own personal histories and norms with regard to the specific challenges that face females in administrative leadership positions.
Required reading:
How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals By Alan F. Johnson 2010, Zondervan Publishing
Faculty: Mary Kendall Hope, Ph.D., Professor of Mediation Studies (Profile)
Description: This course explores the skills and concepts needed to develop female administrative leadership in a mainstream culture unaccustomed to women in decision-making positions. Contemporary beliefs, pre-conceptions, and obstacles are defined and expounded upon and methods for response and address will be explored. Basic cultural norms, traditions, and barriers to female leadership are discussed to assist the student in understanding the most salient challenges that face professional women in roles of administrative leadership. Techniques for meeting these challenges with hands on options are outlined to encourage open minds and open hearts to the potential that female guidance and partnership will provide to the church environment.
Required reading:
How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals By Alan F. Johnson 2010, Zondervan Publishing
Faculty: Dr. James O. Wolfe III (Profile)
Description: This course will explore the biblical and theological bases for the exercise of ministry by women in the Church. An investigation will be made of biblical texts which intimate women in ministry and a full range of theological traditions will be considered including the historical sweep of the subject as a theological issue in historical theology.
Required Reading:
Faculty: Susan Fowler, Ph.D., Dorothy Day Professor of Spirituality (Profile)
Description: Spiritual direction is a process of looking at one’s own life and journey in the context of one’s values, agency and selfhood, and relationships to self, others, God and the world.
In this tutorial, students will gain an understanding of how dominant theological and cultural worlviews impact women’s spiritual experience: - e.g. patriarchal and androcentric views of God, the person and human relationships; traditional understandings of sin that distort and diminish women’s self-understanding and relationships; - and reinterpret these in light of feminist theological reflection that yields models that redeem and affirm women’s experience as the locus for knowing and being in the world.
Required reading and viewing:
Faculty: Susan Fowler, Ph.D., Dorothy Day Professor of Spirituality (Profile)
Description: Do we have a moral obligation to resist suffering? If so, what grounds it? Suggesting that “tragic suffering cannot be atoned for; it must be defied,” feminist theologian Wendy Farley offers compassion as the moral response which resists (it), and proposes a new paradigm that challenges classic Christian theodicy (justifications of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil): namely, that suffering rather than sin is the locus of redemption and resistance, and compassion rather than punishment is the governing paradigm of God’s relationship to the world.
Faculty: Mary Kendall Hope, Ph.D., Professor of Mediation Studies (Profile)
Description: This Course explores the methods and techniques for helping women heal who have been the victim of domestic violence. The concept of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is clearly defined in terms of domestic violence with an emphasis on how an understanding and identification of the symptoms of PTSD can assist women to define their behavior and specify new patterns of thinking and living. Methods for dealing with the emotional pain and suffering of domestic violence are explored with an emphasis on letting go of faulty socialization patterns. The course is designed to teach professionals how to stimulate this clientele to embrace healthy relationships and positive assertive behavior and identity. Also new ways of integrating a healthy lifestyle within the support of Christ’s love are encouraged through techniques designed to build and maintain good self-esteem and positive relationships in the church.
Required reading:
Healing the Trauma of Domestic Violence: A Workbook for Women
By Edward S. Kubany, Mari A. McCraig & Janet R. Laconsay 2004, New Harbinger Publications
Faculty: The Reverend Dr. Joanne Neal Visiting Professor of Pastoral Leadership (Profile)
Description: This e-tutorial focuses on two essential questions:
Required reading:
Lederach, J.P. (2003). The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. PA: Good Books. (available at www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca)
Du Maurier, D. (1957). The Scapegoat. London: Virago Press. (available at www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca)
Crosby, M. (2008). The Paradox of Power: From Control to Compassion. Crossroad Publishing. (available at www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca )
Faculty: Dr. Ann-Marie Neale (Profile)
Premise: Dr. Karen Horney (pronounced Horn-eye) was one of the most prominent and well-respected psychiatrists, psychoanalytic therapists and personality theorists of the twentieth century. She was one of the first female psychoanalytic personality theorists to publically challenge the traditional (Freudian) psychoanalytic explanation for female personality development. In addition, Dr. Horney was a pioneer in the recognition that cultural influences are significant factors in understanding early human development as well as subsequent behavior and motivation. She also differed from traditional psychoanalytic theorists in her emphasis on present day circumstances rather than childhood. Karen Horney’s significant Mature Theory of Personality which examines the importance of self in relation to others is covered in the e-course: The Mature Personality Theory of Karen Horney, MD.
Faculty: Dr. Marie Vianney Bilgrien, SSND, is Professor of Moral Theology (Profile)
Course Description: This course takes a deep look at the moral and spiritual life. All is relationship. Relationship with God, the self, others, and all of creation. We will search deeply on how conscience is formed, all its components. Then we will look at our everyday lives and how we can live those relationships more deeply. It will be reflective and contemplative as we describe the mysteries of our everyday lives which are more spectacular than we now believe because we don’t reflect on the everyday in which we live those relationships. This is not mundane, but simple and deep. As we examine our everyday lives we will see how the practices of our daily lives form those relationships and enhance our lives as deeply human.
Required reading and viewing:
Faculty: Mary Kendall Hope, Ph.D., Professor of Mediation Studies (Profile)
Description: This course explores the advantages of expanding the existing church’s ministry to include the Internet and World Wide Web to reach new membership and stimulate existing members to become more involved in the church’s mission. The importance of using the Internet in the church is emphasized to help the church remain a vital part of the contemporary community.
Required reading:
Web-Empower Your Church: Unleashing the Power of Internet Ministry
By Mark Stephensen, 2006, Abingdon Press
Faculty: Dr. Shaykh Ibrahim Abdul-Malik (Profile)
Required reading: (Book are available from amazon.com)
Faculty: Dr. Ore Lee Spragin, Jr (Profile)
Description: Women have played a vital role in the birth and development of Christianity since, and even before, the birth narratives of the Gospels. However, many church histories poorly or hardly acknowledge this fact. At least one aspect of feminist theology is its struggle to correct this oversight by attempting to prove and/or validate the essentiality of women in church history, particularly by pointing out the ways in which women have been oppressed by the church throughout its history. By contrast this course seeks primarily to examine the importance of women and the roles women have played in the development of the Church, particularly in the United States, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.
Required Reading:
Additional Graduate level Texts:
Faculty: Dr. Ann-Marie Neale (Profile)