Spring concludes the sequence, moving toward the twentieth century and more diverse perspectives as encountered in drama, literature, and philosophy.
Seminar Reading List:
1. Willa Cather. Death...
In this two-year Alumni Sequence we will read some of the greatest works of the Middle Ages, in conversation with texts produced both before and after them. The sequence begins with texts that...
The sequence continues in Winter Quarter with a focus on some aspects of the relationship between Christian and Muslim cultures. In the seminar, we examine efforts on the part of writers of both...
Allegory was a popular mode of representation in the Middle Ages, deployed sometimes even in prose and very frequently in poetry and drama. Its popularity has waned over the centuries but it does...
In the seminar we will read four texts designed to provide guidance to the perplexed. Benedict’s monastic rule lays out the practices and attitudes he considers necessary to governing religious...
The seminar takes us on a tour of some dramatically different conceptions of love. The scandalous affair between the 12th century scholastic Abelard and his brilliant student Heloise is memorialized...
Seminar: This quarter brings us to journey’s end with a selection of travels and tales. In The Arabian Nights, the resourceful Shahrazad tells stories, and stories within stories, to keep the story of...
In the second year of the two-year "Modern Tradition" sequence, we explore themes of the persistence and transformations of religious faith, the nature and limits of scientific inquiry, and the...
We intend to look at science as both a defining cultural force ("scientism") and a source of increasingly unsettling knowledge, with a view to what it might mean, not only to be scientifically...
The idea of individual freedom is one of the hallmarks of the modern period—but the nature, meaning, and conditions of that freedom remain significantly—and perhaps dangerously—obscure. In the seminar...