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Living the Christian Life in a Secular Culture RTS New York Program – Spring 2019 Tim Keller Residential 3 Hour Credits

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Living the Christian Life in a Secular Culture RTS New York Program – Spring 2019 Tim Keller Residential 3 Hour Credits PT 514 – Living the Christian Life in a Secular Culture RTS New York Program – Spring 2019 Tim Keller Residential 3 hour credits Class format: In the classroom on these dates: (1) Tues, Feb 19 (2-5pm); (2) Tues, Feb 26 (2-5pm); (3) TBD evening dates with guest lecturer Dr James D. Hunter; (4) Wed, Apr 24 (6- 9pm); (5) Fri, May 3 (12-7pm); (6) Thurs, May 9 (2-9pm); (7) Thurs, May 16 (6-9pm). Course description This course consists of two parts. (1) First, it surveys, analyzes, and critiques our increasingly secular late modern western culture, and (2) then begins to lay out ways to both live and minister as Christians in such a society. Course learning outcomes (1) To make the underlying narratives of the culture more visible to students, so that they can detect their operation in art, economics, politics, and public discourse. (2) To identify ways to live and form distinctively Christian lives in such a society, and (3) To identify and develop ways to have a “missionary encounter with such a culture”, that is, to evangelize and lead members of this society to faith in Christ. Course required reading *James Hunter, To Change the World 275 pp. *Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed 200 pp. *Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks – 160pp. *Keller, Making Sense of God – 200pp Keller Syllabus “Christian Life and Ministry in a Secular Culture” – 240 pp. Approx 1100 pp. Course requirements (how grade will be determined) 1. Reading. At the end of the course, I want a simple statement that you did all the reading, and if not, how much you failed to read. (20% of grade) 2. Critical reviews of the five books marked by an asterisk. Summarize the book’s main points, its outline of topics, and its main arguments. Then analyze it, giving its strengths and weaknesses. 500 words each. (40% of grade) 3. Ministry application paper. In light of what you learned in this course about our culture: (1) Design a program or process for training lay people to evangelize in your local church and (2) Design a program or process for instructing new believers in your local church. In both cases explain how what you learned in the course has shaped your designs. 2500 words. (40% of grade) All are due at the last day of lectures/classes. Schedule of Tim Keller lectures and reading Feb 19 (2-5 pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus “Christian Life and Ministry in a Secular Culture” Have read Class Syllabus Introduction and Part 1- Chapters 1 and 2 Introduction What is a ‘missionary encounter’ with western culture? World-views, Grand Narratives, Social Imaginaries What is Modernity? Critique of modernity (part 1) The work of Philip Rieff, Jonathan Haidt, and Robert Bellah. Feb 26 (2-5pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus Have read Class Syllabus Part 1- Chapters 4 and 5 Critique of modernity (part 2) The work of Charles Taylor (with reference to Alaisdair MacIntyre) Before James Hunter’s Lectures Suggest having read Hunter, To Change the World Apr 24 (6-9pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus Have read Class Syllabus Part 1- Chapters 5 and 6 Suggest having read Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Critique of modernity (part 3) Summary and full critique of modern culture May 3 (12-7pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus Have read Class Syllabus Part 2 – Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Suggest having read Keller, Making Sense of God. Missionary encounter (part 1) High theory, apologetics, evangelism, ministry paradigms May 9 (2-9pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus Have read Class Syllabus Part 2 – Chapters 4 and 5 Suggest having read Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks. Missionary encounter (part 2) The Social Project, Justice, Sexuality May 16 (6-9pm) Bring the PT 514 Class Syllabus Have read Class Syllabus Part 2 – Chapters 6 and 7 Missionary encounter (part 3) Catechesis, Cultural engagement, the Grace of God CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR CULTURE: BASIC RESOURCES Foundational Texts: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Viking, 1959); _____________, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Harper and Row, 1966) _____________, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death(University of Chicago, 1972) _____________, My Life Among the Deathworks (UVA Press, 2006) Antonius A.W. Zondervan, Sociology and the Sacred: An Introduction to Philip Rieff’s Theory of Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2005) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 3rd Ed (Notre Dame, 1981/2007) ______________________, Whose Justice? Which Rationality (Notre Dame 1988) ______________________, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, 1990) Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg, Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics after MacIntyre, (University of Notre Dame, 2003) Part I, pp.1-84. Christopher Stephen Lutz, Reading Alaisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, (Continuum, 2012). Joseph Boyle, “On MacIntyre’s ‘After Virtue’ Robert Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (UCal Press, 1985; 2007 with a new preface) ________________, The Good Society (UCal Press, 1991) Tim Keller, Philip Rieff, Alaisdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah: A syllabus Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard U Press, 2007) _________________, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard U Press, 1989); _________________, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Harvard U Press, 2011); _________________, The Ethics of Authenticity, (Harvard Press, 1992) James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, (Eerdmans, 2014) Tim Keller, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age: A syllabus Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale Press, 2018) History of secularism and western thought Stephen Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford U Press, 2011) Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford U Press, 2002) Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington B. Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Maurizio Ferraris, trans Sarah De Sanctis, Manifesto of New Realism, (SUNY Press, 2012) Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Harvard U Press, 2000) ____________________ , The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (Noonday Press, 1996) Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (Yale U Press, 2014) __________________, Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 1983). __________________, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Wiley Blackwell, 1996) __________________, Ideology: An Introduction, New and updated edition, (Verso, 2007) __________________, After Theory, (Basic Books, 2003). Edward Docx, “Postmodernism is Dead” Prospect, August 2011.http://www. prospect magazine.co.uk/magazine/postmodernism-is-dead-va-exhibition-age-of-authenticism Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Harper, 2010) John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, (Basic Books, 2014) Daniel T. Rogers, The Age of Fracture, (Harvard University Press, 2011) Contemporary cultural analysis Christian Smith et al, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, (Oxford, 2005) __________________, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. (Oxford, 2011). Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) Marc J. Dunkelman, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community (W.W. Norton, 2014) Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage, 1964) Levin, Yuval, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (Basic Books, 2016) Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012, Vintage reprint, 2013) Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissim: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, W.W. Norton, 1979 _____________________, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, W.W. Norton, 1991. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009) Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic, 2012) ________________, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin, 2015) Joseph E. Davis, “The Young, the Uneasy”, The Hedgehog Review, Summer, 2016, vol 18, no. 2 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: 20th Anniv edition, (Basic, 1996) C.S.Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperOne, 2015) Religion and secularization Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Anchor, 1970) _______________, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, (Eerdmans, 1999) _______________, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, (De Gruyter Mouton, 2014) _______________, Grace Davie, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, (Routledge, 2008) Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century (Profile Books, 2010) David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Routledge, 2005) Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, (University of Chicago Press, 1994) Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious than Ever (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2015) Mid-20th century immanent critiques of modernity: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
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