Course Syllabus

Instructors:

Zachary Moon, zmoon@iliff.edu, (510) 928-8276. Office hours available upon request

Laura Rossbert, lrossbert@iliff.edu, (303) 941-9382. Office hours available upon request.

Welcome

We are excited to spend this quarter with you, walking together as a community as we have conversations about identify, power, and difference, and how that interacts with religion/spirituality and personal vocation. The conversations we will have, and the learning that will take place will be significant. IPD demands not only academic work, but emotional and spiritual work as well. Please remember to practice self care and find ways to process the materials from this class. The various ways to contact us are above and we promise to respond to you within 48 hours, so please don’t leave a question until the last minute.

We find the words of Kathleen Talvacchia from her book Critical Minds and Discerning Hearts: A Spirituality of Multicultural Teaching particularly helpful: I often remind myself (and others at the seminary) of an important reality: It is not that there is a solution already in existence that will assist us in negotiating the necessary conflicts that social structural difference and diversity impose, one that we are refusing to implement. Rather, we are creating in our struggles a blueprint that we can bring to our work in the world. It is the profound work of co-creation with God and prophetic reimagining forming new models of community (3).