Professor Knepper’s Spring 2105 Philosophy of Religion course looked at discourses of ineffability in Jewish mysticism and Muslim mysticism (as well as a little Zen Buddhism). In their final papers students were asked to describe and compare several of these discourses, then both to explain their commonalities and differences and to evaluate the general claim that ultimate beings and/or experiences are ineffable. Below are some of their final papers:
Student Comparisons (Fall 2014 Comparative Religions Course)
Professor Knepper’s Fall 2104 Comparative Religions course studied discourses of ineffability in Zen Buddhism (especially Dogen) and the Hindu theological tradition of Advaita Vedanta. Below are some of the students’ final papers:
Student Comparisons and Evaluations (Spring 2014 Philosophy of Religion Course)
Professor Knepper’s Spring 2104 Philosophy of Religion course looked at discourses of ineffability in Chinese Daoism, West African Religion (of the dozos), Sikhism, and Christian mysticism. In their final papers they were asked to describe and compare several of these discourses, then both to explain their commonalities and differences and to evaluate the general claim that ultimate beings and/or experiences are ineffable. Below are some of their final papers:
Student Comparisons (Fall 2013 Comparative Religions Course)
Professor Knepper’s Fall 2103 Comparative Religions course studied discourses of ineffability in Indian Buddhism (especially the Vimalakirti Sutra) and Christian Mysticism (especially Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite). Below are some of the final papers in which they compare these different discourses of ineffability and use them to assess the claims of perennial psychologists (such as Robert Forman) or philosophers (such as John Hick) that all religions possess a common ineffable experiential core or point to the same ineffable transcendent reality:
Cassie Doody’s comparative paper
Erin Mercurio’s comparative paper
Weston Pickhinke’s comparative paper