Courses

Peace Studies (PAX)

PAX 225
The Life and Thought of Gandhi (3)
Mohandas Gandhi treated life as an indivisible whole. He regarded the personal and the public, the religious and the political as fundamentally interrelated aspects of his existence. This course examines the interplay between the life of social activism and the political thought of Gandhi. It explores a series of personal and social experiments he conducted to make self and society. His perspectives on religion, freedom, nonviolence and women are among the issues we closely examine. Wherever possible, we seek appropriate lessons from his life for our time.

PAX 233
The Socially Engaged Imagination (3)
This course explores the role of the imagination in nonviolent social change initiatives. We read and discuss imaginative representations of social conflicts, noticing what happens in us and through us, individually and collectively. Moving back and forth between reading and writing, we investigate how texts speak to us and how to “speak back” through writing. Readings range from Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Ursula K. LeGuin, Rebecca Solnit and Alice Walker. While turning our attention to the politics of the imagination at home and far away, we create a collaborative, participatory learning community.

PAX 250
Introduction to Peace Studies (3)
The twentieth century witnessed both horrendous violence as well as major experiments in peacemaking.  Along the way, our understanding of the causes of war, violence, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts has matured. This course explores the sources of violence and the ways of creating enduring peace in individual as well as social relations.

PAX 325
Twentieth-Century African American Thinkers (3)
From the earliest times the people of African descent in this country have resisted oppression in a myriad of ways. In their relentless struggle for freedom, African Americans have broadened and deepened the meaning of democracy. In pressing the nation to be more open and just, they have contributed richly to the corpus of modern political and social thought. Their contribution to the expansion of democracy is a major piece of U.S. history. This course explores the meaning of African American thought through the primary writings of thinker-activists such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and Andrew Young.

PAX 330
Issues of Global Poverty (3)
This course introduces students to the key theoretical perspectives on development and some of the major themes of world poverty. Causes of poverty are explored in the context of the development models which nations have pursued in the last hundred or more years. An important aim here is to raise consciousness about the extent of poverty globally, including the United States of America. We examine ways of ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Equally, this course explores principled and practical lifestyle alternatives for a just and equitable world economic order.

PAX 335
Nonviolence in and through History (3)
We now have a rich record of creative experiments in the application of the laws of love and self-suffering in personal and societal change. Though not yet a fully developed art-science form, active nonviolence provides us with alternatives to war and violence that merit attention. This course explores the religious and philosophical foundations of nonviolence, and it examines the essential elements of the theory and practice of nonviolence in movements for social change.

PAX 340
Conflict and Peacebuilding (3)
This course examines the multiple and interrelated causes of conflict and approaches to peacebuilding across cultures. The focus varies from semester to semester but may include citizen diplomacy, human rights, humanitarian assistance, the role of the media in peacebuilding and peacebuilding after genocide and mass violence. Students also build practical skills through mediation training.

PAX 345
Dialogue and the Art of Peacemaking (3)
This course explores the theory and practice of dialogue, “the art of thinking together.” We investigate experiments in dialogue at the local, national and international level while paying close attention to the art of inner dialogue and small group dialogue inside and outside of class. We examine assumptions about conflict, the potency of cultural and religious differences in conflict, the complexities of intervention and the possibility of transformation. Students receive training in restorative justice and practical experience in conducting and facilitating dialogue.

PAX 410
Democracy in the United States of America, 1919–1968 (3)
The promise of freedom that lay at the heart of the American Revolution remained essentially unfulfilled for generations. For too long the nation ignored its high ideals thus denying millions of women and men their fundamental citizenship rights. The forgotten millions pressed forward insisting on transforming this nation’s institutions and structures. This course examines the struggles of several significant twentieth-century social change movements that helped to create a more democratic and open nation.

PAX 415
Women, Feminism and Peacemaking (3)
This course investigates the impact of war and violence on women and efforts being made locally and internationally to educate, empower and organize women as peacemakers. Through readings, films, guest presentations and communitybased learning, we explore the challenges and opportunities in building alliances across differences. Topics include feminist perspectives on globalization, gender, race, class, culture, curiosity, partnership and peacemaking.

PAX 430
Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Malcolm X: The Quest for Personal and Social
Transformation (3)
Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Malcolm X recognized that their capacity to bring about social change was tied to their ability to change themselves. Gandhi worked out his vision of a compassionate society through explorations of the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of Tolstoy and Ruskin. For Day the way for the “building of a new world within the shell of the old” opened when she met Peter Maurin. Malcolm X’s vision of racial harmony and reconciliation emerged in his post-Mecca months. This course explores the link each saw between personal and social transformation and how they changed themselves and their worlds.

PAX 482
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Search for the Beloved Community (3)
The 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott brought to the fore a leader of immense distinction in Martin Luther King Jr., and it opened the way for the creation of the massbased Southern Nonviolent Freedom Movement. The new leadership and the new energy that came forth not only quickened the pace for large-scale political change, but also gave birth to the vision of the “Beloved Community.” This course explores the ways in which King and his associates in the South-based, Black-led Freedom Movement sought to make whole the nation’s broken community by transcending barriers of race, religion, class and ethnicity.

Humanities (HUM)

HUM 233
The Socially Engaged Imagination (3)
In this course we explore the role of creative writing in personal and social change. We read and discuss imaginative literature—short stories, novels and plays—and notice what happens in us and through us, individually and collectively. We move back and forth between reading and writing, investigating how texts speak to us and how to “speak back” through writing. Readings range from Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. While turning our attention to the politics of the imagination, at home and far away, we create a collaborative, participatory learning community, engaging our world through imaginative writing.

HUM 330
Democracy, Education and Social Change (3)
This class provides opportunities for students to experiment with theories and practices of democracy, education and social change. In addition to exploring texts that address issues of democracy and education, students engage in participatory democracy by working with a group of students in a local school. The class meets for one hour a week on the Arapahoe Campus and for three hours a week in one of the Lafayette public schools. Students are encouraged to commit to this program for the entire academic year. Students who stay with the program for two semesters are eligible for a $1,000 AmeriCorps award.

Religious Studies (REL)

REL 360
Engaged Buddhism Training I: Contemplative Approaches to Social Action and Peacemaking (3)
This course focuses on setting up students' service-learning program for year one and on giving them the context and skills to maximize the benefit of their service-learning experience. It involves a combination of regular on-campus classroom work and fieldwork including on-site visits to various social agencies, nonprofits, NGOs and other social action projects. It also includes several models for contemplative social action. One of the primary goals of this first-semester training is to create a learning community among the students that becomes the vehicle and context for their journey.

Visual Arts (ART)

ART 380
The Cinema of Exile and Diaspora (3)
An examination of the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World and other displaced subjects living in the West. We explore many of the shared themes, metaphors and symbols of these films, among those: alienation, displacement, journeying, nomadism, borders, migrancy, homelessness, nostalgia and home-seeking. We also examine and discuss certain styles that characterize these films, many of them demonstrating fragmented, multilingual, epistolary, interstitial and self-reflexive characteristics. In most of these films, identity is not fixed but is represented as a process of becoming and transformation.