These are the concentrations requirements for students who matriculated in the 2021-2022 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.
- The Concentration Declaration form is available at the bottom of this page.
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.
Required: Black Lives Matter and Black Religious Denver. Additional Course Options: The Ethics of Toni Morrison, G*d & Tupac, Sexualities & Religion in the African Diaspora, The Physics of Womanism, The House that Justice Built (secondary), Health & Healing, Death & Dying (secondary), African American Preaching, Black Church, Administration, Black Church Leadership, African Traditional Religion
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.
Course options: Constructive Theology, Pneumatology as a Doctrine, Being Human in the Modern World, Theology of Paul Tillich, Literature and the Womanist Theological Imagination, Post-Theism in Moral Theology, Sin and Salvation, Pantheism/Doctrine of God, Systematic Theology, Feminist Theologies from the Global South
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