This course is intended to improve students’ abilities understand, analyze and critique scholarship across disciplinary boundaries. This course seeks to provide students with the ability to engage in both theoretical and empirical conversations with colleagues and peers using the notion of sacred space as the conceptual vehicle for thinking about the relationships between the material, the social and the spiritual in cross-cultural and diachronic contexts.

It is also a high priority for this course to provide students with the opportunity to continue to develop their skills in oral presentation, critique of scholarly work, written argumentation and interpretive reasoning. The assignments for this course are designed to engage the students in the various aspects of scholarship: exploring relevant literature, making empirical observations, experimenting with different forms of representation, and producing well reasoned arguments by exploring connections between diverse fields of knowledge.