Courses – Professor James K. Wellman, Jr.

Prof. Wellman’s Fall Quarter Course, 2021:
- JSIS 478 / 541: RELIGION AND CONFLICT IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS:
  - This course begins with a look at our “pre-understandings.” What do we take for granted? What assumptions do we bring to our work? We are arguing that whether we are religious or secular, our awareness of our identities is a key building block for our goal of understanding others as they understand themselves. This introduces us to the process of cross-cultural religious literacy—with an aim to understand what it means to recognize and respect the other as we do ourselves. In this process, we adopt a form of covenantal pluralism, which we define as a cosmopolitan view of ourselves and neighbor, recognizing and respecting our own and the other’s ultimate claims, whether religious or secular. We take all of this into our work to explain religious conflict–whether it is in the ancient origins of Western religions; in our own country’s foreign policy; in the rise of religious nationalism and authoritarianism in so many parts of the contemporary world. We seek to give each student a chance to practice this craft of explaining these tensions by taking up a conflict, a region, and a religion to do so. Our goal is to comprehend these dynamics of difference to develop methods on how to mitigate these conflicts through strategies we study in this course. We do all of this for the sake of a more secure and just international world.