RELI 280 - The Devil You Know: Personifying Evil in the West

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This course addresses a set of theological and moral questions: what does it mean to be evil? Is evil something external, foreign, and Other, or does it abide in us all? Is evil a product of circumstances, psychology, or the exercise of free will? How much power does the category of evil have in contemporary culture and discourse? In order to approach these questions, we trace the history of the Devil in the Christian thought and proximate cultural milieus. What are the intellectual and cultural sources of this personage and how has he changed in different moments and locations in history? Why are certain personifications of evil (demons, the Devil, heretics, monsters, and witches) most visible at a given time and what do these evil characters say about the values and anxieties of a given culture or civilization? In this course we investigate the different stories that get told about the Devil in Christianity and Christian-influenced societies from antiquity to the present in order to de-familiarize, contextualize, and re-interpret the concept of evil.. Klaus Yoder.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS