Urban Transforation and Renewal Masters Certificates
Requirement - 4 Classes for Each Certificate
Certificate in Social Justice
* any combination of four courses, i.e., one allowed from each of the following … (including the seminary’s introductory ethics course, Ethics: Church & Society)
Certificate in Environmental Justice
The Certificate in Environmental Justice is designed to interpret climate change as the most comprehensive crisis addressing humanity today, requiring reimagining our species’ place on the planet. The selection of courses will work from the widest horizon of awareness towards more place- and population-specific concerns, ranging from what we know about globalized indices of climate emergency and the attempt to perceive such (various theories of apocalypse, Anthropocene geology, IPCC reports, etc.) to much more localized questions regarding food security and water accessibility in cities like Detroit and Flint. The classes will sharpen understandings of our collective history leading to the current emergency and analytical approaches to addressing/remedying such to more practical questions of the policy changes needed, indigenous approaches and creative models embodying alternative ways of engaging eco-systemic health, and the social movements and political challenges necessary to accomplish these.
1. Ecological Crisis and Apocalyptic Theology
2. Modern Cosmology and Indigenous Wisdom
3. Environmental Racism and Front-Line Communities
4. Gift Economy and Urban Food Security
Certificate in African American Religion
1. Introduction to African American Religion
2. Womanist Theology
3. Justice and Liberation through an African American Lens
4. Theology and Ethics in the African American Church
Certificate in Racism, and Diversity
The Certificate in Race, Racism, and Diversity seeks to respond to the emergence of both BLM in the streets and COVID-19 in our bodies today as part of the five-century long crisis of settler colonialism and white supremacy that has shaped Southeast Michigan as well as the rest of the country and the globe in ways that continue to do grave damage to the planet and its varied peoples. Race will be traced out as the modern rationale for extractive plunder and differential access to life opportunities and collective “goods” such as employment, housing, education, health care, and freedom from interdiction (policing, incarceration, forced displacement, etc.) across the globe and with particular focus in the formation of “Detroit.”
The courses for this Certificate will elaborate the complex ways that notions of skin color have been coercively embedded in our institutional life and social interaction with each other with grave ramifications especially for the health and resilience of POC and the humanity of white-identified folk, as well as profile the deep histories of BIPOC-led resistance to such.
1. Racial Formation and the Big History of Supremacy
2. Race, Colonialism, and Resistance
3. Race Today: Economics, Sexuality, Technology
4. The Racial History of Detroit: 1650 to the Present
Certificate in Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation
1. World Religions
2. Interfaith Dialogue
3. Indigenous History & Wisdom
4. Judaism, Christianity & Islam