THEO44230: Death, Sacrifice, and Prayer

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• To provide an advanced level introduction to the phenomena of Death, Sacrifice and Prayer from an approach grounded in social anthropology and the sociology of religion while entertaining a strong conversational dialogue with Christian and some other theological and secular traditions.

• Death and funerary ritual as expressions of core cultural values and theological doctrines, in a variety of ecclesial, world religious, spiritual, and secular contexts.
• Death rites in contemporary Africa, South Korea, India, and Japan; also Muslim death in several world contexts, including Europe.
• Contemporary British funerary innovations in cremation, woodland burial, life-celebration, and other forms of body disposal, noting the place of ecclesial, secular, and other forms of ritual celebrant, and studying developments in theories of grief.
• To provide an account of theories of sacrifice, using classic ethnographic studies of social anthropology as well as aspects of Eucharistic liturgies (including hymnody) in terms of death and life, and of death-conquest.
• To discuss suicide and assisted dying in European contexts.
• To discuss the behaviour of prayer in terms of meaning-making, life-meaning, engagement with visible and invisible others, interior mono-dialogue, identity and emotions.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Acquisition of knowledge of theories of mortality ritual, grief, and sacrifice, and of prayer in terms of emotion, identity and religion.
• Acquisition of knowledge of practice of certain death rites and British funerary practices.

Subject-specific Skills:

• The ability to interpret rites and changing patterns of human behaviour through abstract concepts, and to acquire a competence in relating such theoretical knowledge to practical funerary and other life-contexts.

Key Skills:

• Advanced research skills in obtaining technical knowledge of ritual processes sustaining funerary and sacrificial contexts.
• Advanced ability in relating some social scientific and theological modes of thought.
• Advanced ability in reflexive analyses of emotional domains associated with mortality, private and public prayer.

• Teaching is through seminars in which the leader will introduce the topic with students expected to participate fully on the basis of prior work on set-reading and thought.
• Tutorials (on a one-to-one basis) will offer an opportunity for feedback on assigned work.
• Essays will require students to investigate particular topics, to present their findings in a clear and concise manner and to cite their sources properly, displaying their subject-specific knowledge, subject-specific skills, and key skills.

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