What Is Religion?
Karen Armstrong
See the clip on YouTube

Karen Armstrong observes that it sometimes seems that we are developing exactly the kind of religion that people such as the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Jesus and Muhammad wanted to get rid of. How, she asks, did the preoccupation with orthodoxy become so important in the Western Christian tradition? Confucian, Daoist, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Greek and monotheistic traditions were not much interested in metaphysics or theology, and each one of these faiths began in recoil from the violence of their time. They developed an ethic based on compassion and the Golden Rule, which they declared to be the essence of the spiritual quest. In a series of four, one and one half hour classes, she looks in detail at the implications of this conviction to see what it has to say to us in our conflicted world.

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous books, including the international best seller, A History of God, and most recently The Great Transformation.

4 DVD set, 6 hours, $65.00   Add to cart

More audios and videos by Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg,
Dominic Crossan, Karen King & Others.

Rethinking the Death and Life
of Jesus
Stephen J. Patterson

Early followers of Jesus said many things about his death and what it meant to them. But did their words mean the same thing then that they do today when repeated by Christians in the twenty-first century? In this seminar Stephen J. Patterson will try to answer this question historically, by placing early Christian claims about the meaning of Jesus' death in the context of the ancient Mediterranean basin in which they were first uttered. Why did early Christians say Jesus' death was "for us?" Why did they call his death a "sacrifice?" Where did this language originate? The answers to these questions are sometimes quite surprising.

Stephen J. Patterson (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School) is Professor of New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in 1986, he is the author of several books, including Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus (2005), The God of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (1993).

4 DVD set, 6 hours, $65.00   Add to cart

Christianity after Christ
Thomas Sheehan

What happens now that Christianity's worst nightmare has come true? What becomes of the traditional theological core of Christian religion and practice in the light of the settled findings (1) of natural science regarding, for example, the age and origins of the universe and the origins of consciousness, (2) of historical science regarding what Jesus of Nazareth said and did not say, did and did not do, or (3) the relation of science to faith, reason, and philosophy. Thomas Sheehan will explore what, in fact, the theological core of Christian religion and practice is, if it is to exist at all. In short: What forms might "Christianity" take in light of the Copernican revolutions that have given us contemporary science, history, and culture?

Thomas Sheehan (Ph.D., Fordham University) is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of several books in philosophy and religion, including The First Coming (1986), a widely acclaimed and controversial account of Easter.

4 DVD set, 6 hours, $65.00   Add to cart

Additional Summer Institute videos still to come. Please check back.