Asian American Religion/Culture

(Async) This course explores Asian American religion and culture through the lenses of identity, migration, and resistance. We will examine how Asian American religious communities in the Americas navigate and reinterpret sacred texts, cultural memory, and social structures to create meaning and resilience. Engaging literature, film, theology, and lived experience, the course invites students to develop interpretive frameworks that are attentive to race, gender, colonialism, and diaspora. Students will reflect on their own cultural contexts and consider how interpretive practices shape religious and political belonging.

Image source: https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2021/05/28/asian-american-artists-aapi-heritage

Preaching and Spiritual Leadership

(Async) This course explores preaching and public witness as embodied acts of resistance, rooted in the lived experiences of queer and BIPOC communities. Students will engage with liberative theologies, trauma-informed approaches, and ancestral storytelling traditions to reimagine what it means to proclaim “good news” from the margins. Through reading, listening, practice, and reflection, students will craft sermons or spoken-word pieces that center justice, dignity, and hope. The classroom will serve as a laboratory for experimental homiletics—where breath, movement, voice, and silence are all forms of theological expression.

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