2024-2025 Graduate Concentrations

These are the concentration requirements for students who matriculated in the

2024-2025 school year. Requirements for other years can be found in their appropriate sections. Iliff offers Graduate Concentrations to persons admitted either as MDiv or MTS students.

• Iliff’s Graduate Concentrations recognize the successful completion of a set of courses totaling a minimum of 16 quarter hours beyond the required courses in the core areas of the MDiv and MTS degree programs.
• Courses taken either for a letter grade or on a pass/fail basis may be counted toward the Concentration.
• Since the MASJE and MAPSC are specialized degrees already, concentrations are only available to students in the MDiv or MTS degree programs.
• Students must submit the Concentration Declaration Form to their advisor upon applying for graduation.
• Only one concentration per student is allowed.

Areas

Biblical Studies

The Biblical Studies Concentration is for students seeking specialization in the study of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, early Christianity and ancient Judaism, including optional language courses in Greek and Hebrew. Students will explore critical methods of biblical interpretation and exegesis, literary analysis, and current issues in biblical research.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits of Bible courses, not including courses already required for the student's degree program.

Biblical language courses (Greek and Hebrew) may count toward these additional sixteen hours. No more than four of these sixteen may be taken as independent study courses.

 

Black Religious Studies

A concentration focused on developing students’ knowledge about the particularities of Black religion as well as their capacities to engage as practitioners within and/or partners with Black religious institutions. This concentration especially focuses on Black churches, Afro-diasporic Religious traditions, and womanist and liberation theoethics.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits.

Congregational Practices

This concentration is for students who intend to serve in congregational settings as pastors, youth/young adult ministers, religious educators, spiritual formation, ministries to families, and ministers of discipleship. The concentration provides students an avenue to strengthen their pastoral management, develop their organizational skills, and learn to engage more effectively in the ministries of their churches, faith groups and local communities.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits

Courses Options: Preaching, Congregations, Preaching in Christian Communities, Teaching & Learning in Communities of Faith, Worship in Multicultural Contexts, African American Preaching, Ministry Praxis (i.e Wedding, Funerals), Parish Leadership and Congregational Development, Youth Ministries, Children in Communities of Faith, Life of Prayer, Women and Spirituality, Engaged Spirituality for Social Justice, Ministry and Human Sexuality, Introduction to Pastoral Theology and Care, Congregational Education and Spiritual Formation, Process Theology and Spiritual Care

Gender and Sexuality

This concentration promotes critical thinking about and social justice praxis with issues of gender and sexuality. The concentration prepares students to recognize and respond to social justice issues of equality and equity having to do with sexual orientation, gender identity, reproductive choice, and other related matters especially in terms of their religious, spiritual, professional, political, social, and personal significance.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 Credits

Historical Studies Concentration

The Historical Studies Concentration is for students seeking specialization or additional coursework in the areas of historical development and/or historical expressions of religious traditions. Students need not concentrate only on the history of Christianity, but may consult Iliff’s history faculty for advice and guidance on how to focus on the historical context of other religious traditions covered in the school’s curriculum.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits

Leadership in Emerging Contexts

This concentration develops sophisticated leaders who are capable of leading in a complex world. The concentration provides students with both a theoretical and practical orientation towards leadership. The area draws on the best thinking from the fields of management, leadership, congregational studies, and social movement studies to provide an array of viewpoints and ways of acting in leadership.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits

 

Social Justice and Ethics

Through this concentration, students develop the capacity to critically and comparatively evaluate theories of social justice. Students develop an understanding of ethical analysis from a religious and philosophical perspective while they are trained in identifying, evaluating, and conscientiously participating in forms of advocacy. Students will examine symbolic systems, power structures, ideologies, values, and religious meanings at play in micro and macro level events and interactions, institutional structures, ethical judgments, organizational and living communities, and other formal and informal political arrangements.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits

Spiritual Care and Chaplaincy

This concentration is for students interested in pastoral and spiritual care within religious communities or other organizations like hospitals, hospice, and military institutions.

Students will be exposed to Iliff’s courses for chaplaincy in interreligious settings that implement both an intercultural and evidence-based approach to spiritual care.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits, not including courses already required for the student's degree program.

Course Options:

IST 2012 Pastoral Theology and Care

IST 2021 Spiritual Care in Death and Dying

IST 2XXX Justice and Spiritual Care

IST 2061 Ministry Praxis: Funerals 

IST 2081 Authentic Engagement

IST 2107 Ministry Praxis: Pre-Marital Counseling and Weddings 

IST 2182 Women and Spirituality

IST 2210 Research Literacy for Chaplains

IST 3034 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Pastoral, Psychological, and Theological Responses

IST 3093 Moral Stress

With petition, these courses may count towards Pastoral and Spiritual Care courses:

IST 2157 Christian Bioethics Debate

IST 3089 The Body and Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible

IST 3132 Remapping American Religion: Black and Asian Traditions

IST 3241 Pandemics and healing in history

Systematic/Constructive Theology

By taking courses in specific theological doctrines or in courses that take up the interconnection of doctrines, students will develop: 1. familiarity with the range of possible theological decisions that can be made; 2. a sense of the importance of thinking through individual doctrines in concert with a theological system as a whole; 3. a sense of the connection of systematic theology to changing historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts, and a sense of responsibility for formulating theology carefully in awareness of the effects it has on the lives of people; and 4. an ability to articulate their own theological positions in conversation with historical traditions.

Concentration Area Requirements: 16 credits, not including courses already required for the student's degree program.

Concentration Declaration Form