This course is required for students pursuing either concentration in Well-Being and Religious Leadership (Food and Faith or Faith and Health). It seeks to develop leadership skills applicable to either congregational or not-for-profit ministries. It utilizes interdisciplinary conceptual lenses and methods to introduce participants to food systems and health systems as overlapping “loci” for understanding brokenness and cultivating shalom in community. Students will interact with community leaders, local data, and faith-based initiatives working at these intersections.
Participants will:
- Explore and describe health as a community phenomenon.
- Locate, analyze, and interpret data on community food security and public health for their (this) community
- Identify key elements of health systems and food systems as elements of complex adaptive systems.
- Explore and analyze the “moral gaps” of food and health disparities in communities.
- Explore various social determinants of health status and food security.
- Utilize conceptual frameworks from several theological frameworks (such as integral ecology) to think critically about food, faith, and health.
- Imagine ways local faith communities or NFPs can engage communities to improve health and community food security consistent with their mission/vision (through creating a proposal, curriculum, or project for an actual or imagined faith community or NFP)
- Explore how leaders in faith communities can facilitate engagement, reflection, practice, and collaboration around issues of food and health in their communities.
Texts
Required:
Wirzba, Norman, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).
Hotz, Kendra, and Matthew T. Mathews, Dust and Breath: Faith, Health and Why the
Church Should Care About Both.(Eerdmans, 2012).
Bruckner, James. Healthy Human Life (Cascade, 2012).
Gunderson, Gary, and James Cochrane, Religion and the Health of the Public (McMillan, 2012), and Mobilizing Religious Health Assets for Transformation: The Barefoot Guide
Schut, Michael(editor), Food and Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread (Earth Ministry, 2006).
“Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common Home (official English language text of encyclical).”
Articles, both printed and online, as assigned (see course schedule)
Recommended:
Alkon, Alison Hope and Julian Agyeman (editors), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (MIT Press, 2011).
Chase-Ziolek, Mary, Health, Healing, and Wholeness (Pilgrim, 2005).
Holman, Susan R. Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights (Oxford, 2015).
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. (Univ. of Calif. Press, 2005).
This syllabus pertains to when the course was offered in 2015