Philosophy, Religion and Literature (PRL)

What makes a work of literature "beautiful"? What makes it "ugly"? Is it really in the eye of the beholder or is there an objective dimension to our aesthetic judgements? And what role might theological modes of thinking play in our perception of the beautiful in contemporary society? In this course, we will trace the development of these aesthetic questions, paying particular attention to works that complicate the binary between beauty and ugliness. We will consider various conceptions of beauty, from the classical confluence of form and splendor to the "pleasing terror" of the Romantic sublime, reading authors ranging from John Donne to T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth to James Joyce on our way to developing a nuanced theological aesthetic vocabulary for appreciating both art that attracts and repels.

An in-depth examination of the philosophical themes, ideas, and arguments in Augustine's classic Confessions, with attention to historical, theological, and literary context.

This course examines philosophical perspectives on death and immortality from antiquity to the contemporary era. We begin with Plato’s Phaedo, which presents foundational arguments for the soul’s immortality. We then turn to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Seneca’s Stoic writings, which challenge the fear of death through materialist and rationalist perspectives. In Christian thought, Augustine (Confessions, City of God) integrates Platonic and biblical views on the afterlife. Modern existentialists, including Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Edith Stein, explore death’s role in human existence and its philosophical significance. Throughout the course, students will also be invited to consider this topic through selected works of art, from prehistoric funerary art to modern reflections on (im)mortality. By engaging with both philosophical texts and artistic expressions, this course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of death and the possibility of immortality.

This course will challenge us to take a less impoverished view of devotional poetry, eschewing texts and themes we find familiar or trite, but rather looking for what is weird, uncomfortable, and wonderful in Christian texts. We will find talking trees, shape-shifting, and levitation in our texts, as well as mind-bending plots and doctrines, which shake the soul of the devotee awake, not put it to sleep. We will survey the strange and unusual in English devotional literature from its very beginning with the Christian missions to England in the sixth and seventh centuries, all the way to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the later twentieth. As we move through centuries of devotional poetry, we will consider questions like these: what is strange to us in these texts? What might their original authors have found strange? How does this strangeness increase devotion? How does it change, challenge, or strengthen belief? Texts in Old English and all but the clearest in Middle English will be provided in translation. After the “Reformation” unit, there will be both Catholic and Protestant texts represented in the syllabus. Our timeline, however, will place some emphasis on the “Catholic Literary Revival” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as this movement was itself viewed in its time as quite strange and sometimes unchristian (or at least scandalous) by the Protestant majority in England. Our class sessions will revolve around lectures and seminar-style discussions, except on Fridays, which are reserved solely for discussions and student presentations on the readings.

In contemporary teaching, philosophy has become "technica" presented through the philosophical concepts and the philosophical systems of the great thinkers in a sophisticated philosophical language. Naturally, it has become quite difficult to relate philosophy to life itself. This course introduces the basic philosophical themes in relation to life, without heavily relying on philosophical concepts as well the history of philosophical thoughts. We will present, for instance, philosophical themes such as values, society, the idea of absolute, knowledge, being, truth, the nature of philosophical thinking, philosophy and science in relation to the personal existence of an individual. We will examine these philosophical issues under the guidance of two thinkers: A Polish Dominican logician Josef Maria Bochenski and a German existentialist philosopher Karl Theodor Jaspers. Each offers a different perspective on these issues. Emphasis will be placed on attentive reading and discussion of the important points underlined in the class discussion and an in-depth understanding and evaluation of philosophical problems. We will also try to relate these philosophical problems to some current modern issues.

Celebrated the world over for the unprecedented breadth and depth of his fictional worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien is less frequently praised for the quality of his prose. Decried by many contemporary critics for his anachronistic style, flat characterization, and florid descriptions, it has only really been since the turn of the millennium that Tolkien’s esteem as the ingenious inventor of Middle-earth has begun to be mirrored by an improving reputation as a technically skilled writer. In this course, we will work our way chronologically through Tolkien’s Middle-earth oeuvre—his legendarium—in order of composition, from well-known texts such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to lesser known and posthumously published works ranging from The Silmarillion to the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, paying particular attention to how Tolkien curates his oft-derided yet oft-imitated writerly voice. In studying Tolkien’s writings, we will consider how Tolkien not only became the voice of his generation but continues to speak to audiences today.

This course explores how, from the ancient Greeks to our own time, literature has expressed our relationship with the Other as a way to make sense of and face life's limitations and death. By unsettling our "default" attitudes of individualism, literature's powerfully communitarian nature reconnects us with the search for reality's ultimate meanings--whatever we may call them--a search that is religious by nature. By way of analyzing major figures both from the Italian (including Dante, Petrarch, and Pasolini) and American (O'Connor, Baldwin, and Carver, among others) literary traditions, as well as recent contemporary literary trends, including postcolonial and migration literature (Hosseini), this course will allow the students to think about literature as a laboratory of a unitary, essentially religious, vision of knowledge and as a fundamental tool for sparking one's intellectual, aesthetic, and social interests.

Many places of worship hang a sign of invitation: All Are Welcome! But what happens when an aspect of an individual's identity or beliefs comes into conflict with their religious community? Which differences are tolerated, and which are shunned? Who belongs, and who is cast out? From Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories to Kendrick Lamar's hip hop albums, the American literary imagination has long been interested in examining the conflicts between identity -race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability - and religion. Together we will read a variety of American literature, including poetry, science-fiction, drama, and literary essays, paying attention to religious outcasts, misfits, and minoritized peoples as they search for belonging within established communities, or attempt to forge new spaces for themselves. Readings will include James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, more contemporary writing by Molly McCully Brown and R.O. Kwon, as well as music, film, and podcasts.

This course will examine principal questions in the philosophy of religion relating to the nature and existence of God, religious beliefs, religious experience, divine hiddenness, religious pluralism and exclusivism, immortality, the relationship between God and ethics, and other questions. For details about specific sections in a particular semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

The primary goal of the course is to introduce students to some of the central thinkers and historical controversies animating the French intellectual scene between the Reformation and the height of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Central authors include Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal; topics to be addressed include skepticism, natural philosophy, and rationalism, and the relationship of these to questions of morals, culture, and religious belief, including divine grace and the role of religious institutions.

From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. In this class, we explore to what extent a secular ethical theory is possible. Readings range from antiquity to modernity, including Plato, Kant, Maimonides, Heidegger, and Simone Weil. These authors will help us answering questions, such as, ‘Do I need God’s assistance to become a good person?’, ‘Does the normative power of the moral law require God’s existence?’ ‘Does God need to reveal the moral law in order for me to know it?’

Is there a God—and if there is, how do natural things point to God’s existence? Do humans possess an innate awareness of God’s existence, or must God’s existence be demonstrated by reason? Is human knowledge possible without special assistance from God? This course explores these questions through the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, two of the greatest medieval thinkers. Topics covered include the metaphysics of natural objects, arguments for (and against) God’s existence, the innate knowledge of God, and the theory of divine illumination. We will compare, contrast, and critically assess each thinker’s arguments and consider how their thought remains relevant today.

This course is on the religion, philosophy, and intellectual history of China and introduces the student to the worldview and life experience of Chinese as they have been drawn from local traditions, as well as worship and sacrifice to heroes and the cult of the dead. Through a close reading of primary texts in translation, it also surveys China’s grand philosophical legacy of Daoism, Buddhism, “Confucianism,” and “Neo-Confucianism.”

Why do we tell stories? Myths and legends can help us understand what the people who created them have valued at different places and times. These texts have been interpreted as vessels of national identity, points of access to divine truth, indices of level of civilizational development, and pedagogical tools. They have also inspired some of the most compelling works of art ever produced. Students in this course will learn more about some of the many cultures of Eurasia, the world’s largest continent, spanning West Asia (the Middle East), Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, from these cultures' perspectives. They will read about what role Raven played in the creation of the world, learn the secret of the legendary Simorgh, and watch the tragic love story between a forest spirit and a human. They will consider the links between ancient folklore and contemporary fantasy. They will also have the opportunity to think about the role these stories play in the cultures that produced them and in their own lives. This class is co-taught by two scholars with different backgrounds: a historian of West Asia and the United States and a specialist in the literature of Russia and the former Soviet Union. In this class, students will learn how scholars in different disciplines (including not just literature and history but also folklore and anthropology) might approach the same works very differently and learn how to articulate their own scholarly positions. Assignments include a folklore collection, an in-class presentation on one of the cultures studied, and a creative adaptation of a myth. Students will also be graded on class participation and given weekly online reading quizzes.

The English word “love” encompasses a variety of meanings: love of one’s family, love of one’s country, love for a friend, even God’s love, but the subject of much Western poetry and popular songs for centuries, to say nothing of countless stories, is erotic love—our desire to possess another, to become one with another. In Japan’s classical literature, erotic love is often seen as a kind of “demonic” or spiritual possession, an out-of-body passion so powerful that it transcends even death. In this course we will explore how this view of love compares to our own views, as depicted in Japanese fiction, poetry, and drama. If our view of love has been largely shaped by our Judeo-Christian tradition, the various images of love we find in Japanese literature were shaped by a quite different tradition: the indigenous religion of Shinto (‘the way of the gods’), and Buddhism and Confucianism imported from China. How different are these views from our own? If we believe that erotic love is a universal human attribute, how and why does culture, ours or any other, rein in such basic human impulses and to what end?

During the 19th and 20th centuries many European intellectuals attempted to explain and define “religion” often in an effort to explain it away. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman famously declared that God was dead and Sigmund Freud maintained that religion was nothing more than an illusion. Others assured that religion was soon to disappear and that science and art would occupy the space that it once held. In this course we will examine how several 19th- and 20th-century Spanish writers attempted to represent the changing definitions of religion, challenges to them, and religion’s supposed disappearance. Through an exploration of the fictional worlds these authors create, we will grapple with the questions these writers so desperately tried to answer: Was religion disappearing? Was it being replaced? Was it transforming? If so, what did this mean for Spain during this time? What would it mean for Spain’s future?

This course engages critically and charitably with the discipline of women’s and gender studies from a Catholic theological perspective, examining the tensions and intersections between these two domains. The work of Catholic philosopher Prudence Allen provides the backdrop of the course, namely her framework for categorizing different approaches to conceptualizing the sexes based on the criteria of equal dignity and differentiation. We will use (and modify) this basic schema in considering various historical and contemporary approaches to the nature and relationality of the sexes. We will revisit ancient cosmologies, compare pre-modern approaches (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hildegard), trace the querelle des femmes (“the woman question”) debates of early modernity, and consider modern and contemporary conceptions of sexual difference that arise in the era of feminism. After following this historical arc, we will move into an in-depth, comparative analysis of concurrent 20 th - 21 st century developments in 1) secular gender theories (e.g. Beauvoir, Butler, Bettcher) and 2) Catholic theology of sexual difference (e.g. Stein, von le Fort, von Balthasar, John Paul II, and Catholic “new feminism”). With this substantive foundation in place, the course will culminate by considering “live questions” and controversies about men and women in our current cultural context, both within the Church and across society as a whole. A recurrent theme of this course is that the claims one makes about gender arise from underlying assumptions about the nature of reality as a whole. These foundational assumptions must be teased out and clearly articulated in the process of meaningful dialogue and reaching conclusions on normative questions. This process of “framework articulation” will be an integral part of course lectures, class discussions, and written assignments.

How did the medieval Church’s great women mystics create a space where they could connect with God? Despite enclosure in convents, many medieval nuns held religious authority and contributed to the life and literature of the Catholic tradition. Paradoxically, the convent was a privileged space of female culture, where women authors and mystics flourished. This course will explore the spaces, both architectural and spiritual, where medieval nuns explored their relationship with God and wrote to help the souls of others. Focusing on Germany and on remarkable women such as Hildegard of Bingen, students will contextualize medieval women's mysticism in its historical milieu, including the realities of female enclosure, the daily round of convent life, and liturgical worship. We will compare mysticism in the convent to the writings and social context of women mystics in the city or at noble courts. In Spring 2025, this course will make a class trip to Germany during Spring Break to visit the sites of medieval convents and continuously active communities of nuns. Students must apply to the instructor to participate in this course.

This course serves as an introduction to the ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and examined through literature, from early survivor narratives to second-generation works and the recent culture wars in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Although the course will provide a very brief introduction to the historiography of the Holocaust, our main focus is on close readings of various literary works. That is, we will study how trauma is mediated, transformed, and communicated through written works. Contingent upon funding, the course will include a study tour to Berlin and to Auschwitz, where we will visit memorials and documentation sites, speak to representatives of Jewish organizations, and get a better sense for the continuities of Jewish life in Central Europe throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All expenses for this study tour will be covered by the University, and students must be able to commit to the entirety of the trip.

This course is designed both as the gateway philosophy requirement for the Minor in Philosophy, Religion, and Literature and as a upper-division philosophy course.

In this interdisciplinary course, students will trace the development of Christian theology and culture in Eastern Europe: from the baptism of Rus in 988 to the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and from the liturgical theology of Fr Alexander Schmemman to the arthouse religious cinema of the post-Soviet period. Throughout the course, students will grapple with the "accursed questions" that have long defined Russian religious thought, while also examining the diverse and divergent images of Christ presented by Russia's greatest theologians, artists, philosophers, and writers.

Combining philosophy and literature in a study of romantic love, this seminar will include works by Plato, Shakespeare, and Thomas Mann, as well as exploring more recent movies and Catholic writings.

This course explores how theology and literature can combine to enrich our understanding. Focusing on the work of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Primo Levi, students will address questions such as: ‘How does the way we use language bear upon our notions of truth?'; ‘How are the intellect and the imagination engaged by literary texts?'; ‘How does all this relate to how we think about God, human nature, and the relationship between them?' Such questions will be addressed, in particular, by reflecting on how the texts studied invite us to think about love, forgiveness, vulnerability and creativity.

We will focus on a tragic tradition that challenges philosophy's ideals of dignity, reason, and self-control. Key authors will include Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann. We will also plan to attend a performance of Wagner's opera The Rheingold. This course is the Philosophy and Literature gateway seminar for the Minor in Philosophy, Religion, and Literature, but it is open to other students.

This course has as its essential context the crisis of authority of discourse in the modern period subsequent to literature gaining independence from Christianity. It focuses specifically on the three main postures literature strikes vis-a- vis confessional forms of Christianity no longer thought to have cultural capital. (i) The antithetical posture. Here Christianity is viewed exclusively in negative terms as repressive, authoritarian, and obscurantist, the very opposite of the true humanism that is literature?s vocation. Readings here include Voltaire and Camus. (ii) The retrievalist posture. This posture is fundamentally nostalgic. The loss of Christianity?s cultural authority is mourned, and literature is seen to be an illegitimate substitute. Readings include Dostoyevski and Marilyn Robinson. (iii) The parasitic posture. Here Christianity is criticized but not totally dismissed. Portions of it are savable, especially select elements of the New Testament which emphasizes human being?s capacity for knowledge and freedom. Central here is the work of the Romantic Shelley and American Transcendentalist Emerson. In addition to these, we consider James Joyce. In addition to the figures and texts covered in the class, I will refer in passing to quite literally dozens of authors who illustrate one or other of these positions. Perhaps one of them is a favorite of yours.

In this course we will explore the profound connections between literature, science, and what it means to be human. We will carry out such exploration by reading together the work of Jewish Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi, doing so in the light of one of the central ethical principles governing Levi's work: friendship. Jewish Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi is considered one of the most important authors of the 20th Century. Levi's The Periodic Table (1975) has been referred to as "the best science book ever", and his If This Is A Man (1947/1958) is widely regarded as one of the most thought-provoking accounts of humanity ever to have been written. We will read both of these, together with a number of other works by Levi, including poems, essays, short stories, and a novel. By doing so we will give ourselves the opportunity of diving deeply and fruitfully into reflection on some vital questions: what is a human being? what is the relationship between friendship and truth? what is the relationship between suffering and knowledge? how are the humanities and the sciences connected to each other?

Taught in Italian, this course offers the opportunity for an in-depth study of Italian life, history, art, and religion, through detailed study of one of Italy's best known and most loved cities: Siena. One of Italy's great medieval cities, Siena stands to this day as one of the most interesting, intriguing and fascinating examples of defining dynamics of Italian culture: the inspiring relationship between art and public life; the nourishing importance of food and wine; the fruitful tension between tradition and innovation; the constructive encounter of sacred and secular. Siena is home to some of Italy's most wondrous art (Duccio, Martini, Lorenzetti, Beccafumi) and some of its most breathtaking architecture (its Duomo, its Palazzo pubblico). It also produces some of Italy's most distinctive food and wine products (carne chianinia e di cinta senese, panforte, Chianti). In the late Middle Ages it was the home of Saint Catherine and Saint Bernardino, as well as one of the most powerful political and economic centres in the Italian peninsula. It is home still today to one of Italy's most lively, intense, dynamic, and controversial traditions: the Palio. All of this life, culture, and devotion is brought together in Siena in and through the contrade, a form of communal living originating in the Middle Ages and evolving ever since. It is also all brought together in and through a particularly profound devotion to Mary, to whom the city has been dedicated since 1260. In all of these respects - and more - to study Siena is to give yourself the opportunity of enriching in uniquely profound ways your understanding of Italy. Through its research component, the course will allow you to do so by developing in academically rigorous ways your own specific and particular interest in Italian life and culture.

In this course, we will be reading Dante?s Commedia as well as works by Aristotle and various ancient and medieval philosophers. Our aim will be to understand the way an Aristotelian worldview informs the Commedia. We will look at the cosmology of the work and how it responds to ancient and medieval theories of the cosmos. We will also investigate the ethics of Dante?s famous journey to hell, purgatory, and heaven with a view to identifying its Aristotelian elements. For instance, what is the role of pleasure in the ethical life? What is the highest good of the human being? How should human beings live in such a way as to achieve their highest end? All readings will be in translation.

When European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic, it precipitated American Transcendentalism, this nation's first great literary movement. The Transcendentalists were a loose group of rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers who, inspired by both the American Revolution and the new European philosophies, set about the immodest task of remaking America - and thence, they hoped, the world. Inspired by resistance to their radical ideas, these men and women - including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott -launched a daring movement to renew American religion and philosophy and create a new and genuinely American literature - and, as if that weren't enough, to reform a nation shot through with the contradictions of slavery, economic inequality, social injustice and environmental destruction. Did they succeed? Was their idealism a noble dream destroyed by the violence of the Civil War? Or did their hard work bring real progress to an American society still indebted today to this band of dreamers? That's our dilemma: both answers are correct. How are we still living the consequences of their failures, and their successes? Can their dreams still speak to us today, in our own moment - shot through as it is with so many similar contradictions?

What is religion? What is literature? And why should we study them together? This course (a gateway seminar for the PRL minor) will provide a rigorous introduction to the study of religion and literature. Readings will be drawn primarily from the Western tradition, and authors will include Augustine, Dante, Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor, and Jorge Luis Borges.

The quest for living a life near to and consecrated to God has been a fundamental goal for Christians since the beginning. One of the most important ways of achieving this goal has been through the formation of communities living deliberately through a particular rule and set of customs, sustained by a liturgical practice, and nurtured through artistic processes and the artistic products of members of the community. This course explores these subjects, over time and in many modes of religious life. Students learn how to understand the great varieties of experiments with religious life that have been conducted over the centuries, some of them still active and flourishing today. Why is Christianity a powerfully communal faith? How do Christian communities dialogue with God. How have the arts made by Christian communities sustained them, especially as related to practices of worship? Every week we engage with these questions, but from numerous theological positions. Religious communities who seek to live close to God often emulate the communal life established by Jesus for and with his disciples. Religious orders have reformed and refined the sense of community found in the New Testament, especially as they have tried to recreate the first century in their own times. But they have also constantly revisited the practices established in the first century, and looked at the writings of the saints who developed later communities of prayer. This course studies the classic and most influential documents created to govern ways of life, including the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule of St. Augustine, and comparable documents from the Cistercian, Carthusian, Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite and Bridgettine religious orders. Our study incorporates views of the ways of life still practiced today, including the Benedictine nuns of Regina Laudis (Bethlehem, CT) and the male and female branches of the Congregation of the Holy Cross (CSC). In each case, there will be investigation of the literary, musical, architectural and visual arts of the featured communities, with emphasis on works of both male and female artists.

This course offers an entree to themes at the intersection of liturgy, theology, and aesthetics. The class will introduce students to major questions in theological aesthetics as they relate to liturgy. To what extent is beauty part of divine revelation, and how does "liturgical beauty" reveal? What role does art, drama, and poetry play in liturgical rites? Is there a beautiful way to participate in the liturgy, and if so, what is it? How does one judge the beauty of a prayer, a rite, a church, a sermon, or a piece of music? The course will examine these questions, not simply through an examination of systematic texts but through historic study of specific incarnations of liturgical beauty. These incarnations of beauty will include rituals, prayer texts, sermons, devotional books, mystagogical treatises, liturgical drama, poetry, hymnody, architecture, as well as painting and iconography.

To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with "framing". Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the "frame" through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his / her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, Syl Cheney-Coker, Tsitsi Dangaremga, Nawal El Sadawi, Ferdinand Oyono , and some others. Using these and many authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and religious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/ conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.

This course will focus upon Plato's Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Symposium.

What is love? How is love related to the ideal and how does the attempt to live out love's ideals bring the ideal and the real into collision? Why does love so often seem to fail, or even to open us up to greater kinds of failure than had we never loved? Why is love so often bound together with - death? We will explore these questions by philosophically working through the most prominent philosophical project devoted to understanding the nature and implications of this collision, the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and his psychology of passion and the self. We will read selections from the foundational works in which he develops a variety of perspectives concerning the collision of passion and life (including Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death), paying caring attention to the difference between the three different perspectives he provides on love: the "aesthetic" understanding of love, the "ethical" understanding of love, and the "religious" understanding of love. We will be particularly concerned with how love can be incorporated (or not incorporated) into the structure of the self and the results of so incorporating it. We will therefore also pay careful attention to idea of the self, temporality and anxiety, and the possibility of the self's misrelation, that is, despair - especially focusing on his analysis of the ultimate cause of despair and the possibility of its being overcome.Following Kierkegaard's lead, we will frequently recur to theater and drama in order to bring these ideas to bear upon narratives of love. We will be particularly concerned with classical ballet, the form of art most persistently concerned with just this collision of the ideal of passion and the reality of love lived out in action. We will analyze the basic aesthetic elements of ballet - how it utilizes music, motion, and narrative to develop an idea?and use this knowledge to carefully observe the collision between the ideal and the real, the relation between anxiety, temporality, and love, and the danger posed by despair to the fulfillment of love in Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Adolph Adam's Giselle, Minkus's Don Quixote, Prokofiev's Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. We will also consider Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

In the wake of the Reformation-era's massive upheavals came the greatest flowering of devotional poetry in the English language. This body of literature offers its readers the opportunity to explore questions pertaining broadly to the study of lyric and to the study of the relationships between religion and literature. Early modern devotional poetry oscillates between eros and agape, private and communal modes of expression, shame and pride, doubt and faith, evanescence and transcendence, mutability and permanence, success and failure, and agency and helpless passivity. It experiments with gender, language, form, meter, voice, song, and address. We'll follow devotional poets through their many oscillations and turns by combining careful close reading of the poetry with the study of relevant historical, aesthetic, and theological contexts. You'll learn to read lyric poetry skillfully and sensitively, to think carefully about relationships between lyric and religion, and to write incisively and persuasively about lyric. Authors we'll read may include Thomas Brampton, Richard Maidstone, Francesco Petrarca (in translation), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Mary Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Henry Constable, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and the great hymn writer Isaac Watts.

G. K. Chesterton was a man with many sides, but this course will confine itself to only one, and that is his theological front. About his conversion to Catholicism he wrote to a friend, "As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it or outside it." We will consider his position by reading primary works in theology that led up to and followed his decision, among them "Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man," biographies of St. Thomas and St. Francis, "The Thing," and "What's Wrong with the World." In these we will follow his own advice that "To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move."

In Western cultures, no single volume has inspired as much creative work - and as wide a range of creative responses - as the Bible. The study of the Bible in turn deeply influenced the discipline of literary studies, as ways of reading and interpreting the Bible gave rise to practices of literary interpretation. In this course, you'll have the opportunity to participate in centuries-old traditions of discussing, interpreting, and responding creatively to biblical texts. We will read key narratives from the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament alongside literary adaptations and interpretations by authors including William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, Mary Sidney, George Herbert, John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther King, George Oppen, Marilynne Robinson, Dawn Karima Pettigrew, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Written assessments will include responses to our readings and analytical essays. There will also be a creative option for the course's final written project.

The philosopher Mircea Eliade, in his classic work, The Sacred and the Profane (1957), states: “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” (10). Seemingly oppositional modalities, the sacred and the profane are central to the poetics of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the author of such works as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky, who for a lifetime preoccupied himself with pro and contra states of being and action, complicates the bearing of oppositionality itself. Idiots, madmen, ascetics, holy fools, buffoons, schismatics, zealous monks, self-sacrificing women, and other eccentric personalities make up Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and speak to his enduring interest in a broader understanding of the sacred and the profane, which in this course, we will examine as umbrella categories to better understand the ways in which the author complicates the relationships between them. Could this direction help us elucidate Dostoevsky’s approach not only to ethical issues and life’s “accursed questions” but also to eccentricity and otherness in general? Closely studying the contradictions and instances of symbiosis arising in each of these categories within their historical, religious, socio-cultural, and medical contexts will help us in our endeavor, as well is provide insight into our own fascination with this celebrated writer of human personality for whom perhaps the sacred was also a way of orientation in chaos.

Dostoevsky’s fascination with Shakespeare and his inquiry into the “accursed questions” began when only a teenager. Both authors are interested in the visibility of action as a manifestation of subterranean issues, what seems and what appears, and the psychic drama reflective of political and cultural problems that their characters internalize. In this course, we will explore the complex layering that allows the two authors to explore and comment on the dialectical relationship between human beings, the self’s interaction with the self, and the role of art for the audience. Can the two authors’ works be considered life manuals where they lay out the poetics of existence? We will be looking at some of their works, including Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Hamlet (Shakespeare), and others, as processes where the first step is to identify societal issues as riddles, followed by the acknowledgment that a certain riddle is a worthy pursuit.

In her book Wonderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Sulnit writes, "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts." In this course we will examine notions of journey, pilgrimage, space and subjectivity through the lens of walking. We will look at representations of walking in a variety of genres: essay, graphic novel, fiction, film, prose and poetry and use the practice of walking as a platform to write provocative texts that contemplate the body, architecture, language, philosophy, religion, nature, music and film. Students will engage with course themes and motifs by writing fictions, poems and essays of their own.

This course explores the light that the Book of Job can shed on our understanding of the relationship between literary and theological reflection. An initial reading of the Book of Job itself will open up the questions (concerning, for example, human vulnerability and divine unknowability) that will then provide the conceptual focus for the rest of the course; in which we will examine texts - by Primo Levi, Shakespeare, Dante, Julian of Norwich, Gregory the Great and Catherine of Siena - shaped in different but richly complementary ways by a profoundly compelling engagement with the questions raised by Job. Through such examination, and in conversation with contemporary literary and theological studies, students will be invited to reflect closely on the distinctive contribution that the coming together of literary and theological reflection can make to our thinking about meaning and truth.

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the Inferno and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the Inferno and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

Why did the Middle Ages produce so many legends, so many stories about gods, heroes, and fantastic events? What do the origins of these stories tell us about medieval European culture and the way it used both writing and the fantastic? What do the differences between different versions of the same story reveal about the stories' audience and composition? Why do some of these stories still resonate powerfully today? These are the kinds of questions we will ask as we survey a range of medieval works representing a variety of literary traditions, including Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf), Norse (the Poetic Edda and Hrolf Kraki's Saga), French (the Song of Roland), Italian (the Inferno), Welsh (the Mabinogion), and Finnish (Kalevala).

This class introduces John Milton's poetry in the context of his life and times and with attention to current critical issues. Much of the course will be focused on Milton's major poems: his early masque, Comus, his grand epic, Paradise Lost, his brief epic, Paradise Regained, and his late tragedy, Samson Agonistes. We will also explore Milton's influence on the Romantics and beyond, looking at William Blake's water-color illustrations of Milton's poetry, at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and at the Miltonic influence in classic Frankenstein films and in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has said that the two greatest evangelical tools we have are the Arts and the Saints. This course examines the lives of the saints and the way their stories have been told through the ages. Part of our larger goal, then, will be retrieving this particular art of storytelling. Students will be asked not only to read the lives of the saints, but to write the life of a saint, too. In order to examine these stories most fully, we will spend time thinking about topics such as scriptural exegesis, martyrdom, relics, the communion of saints, medieval legends, art, and modern vitae or novels.

In the medieval play The Castle of Perseverance, a stage direction indicates that the Devil should go to battle against Mankind with gunpowder burning out of his hands, ears, and arse. The spectacle must have been at once terrifying and hilarious. But how on earth was it staged? This course will consider early English dramatic representations of the Father of Lies, pondering whether audiences were meant to laugh at the Devil or with him. In the first half of the semester, we will study demons and the characters who invoke them in traditional sacred drama, from the earliest surviving play written in England through the three major genres of medieval English theater: the cycle play, the saint’s play, and the morality play. We will see the Devil prosecute Adam, Satan tempt Jesus, King Herod slaughter the Innocents, and the Vices lure Mankind to damnation. Combining demonic dissimulation with cunning craft, they make sin appear glamorous, not only to other characters in the play but also, perhaps, to the audience. In the latter half of the course, we will turn to the crafty villains of early modern commercial theater and closet drama. The new genres of history and tragedy confront the audience with diabolical characters that nevertheless seem charismatic or sympathetic. Spanning nearly 300 years of dramatic performance, our readings will push us to consider how medieval and early modern playwrights represent the nature of evil and the bounds of human freedom. Course Readings: Le Jeu d’Adam; The York Corpus Christi Plays; The Digby Mary Magdalene Play; The Castle of Perseverance; Mankind; Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus;William Shakespeare, King Richard III, King Henry IV Part I, Othello; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Miriam; Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass; John Milton, Comus.

This course will cover eight of Shakespeare's plays: All's Well That Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. In each case we will focus on the dramatic representation of intractable ethical problems and ask how the play encourages its audience to reflect on moral conflict. In addition to the plays, readings will include material on classical ethical theories as well as modern moral philosophy.

The course highlights a series of topics, personalities, and ideas of Russian religious thought from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The overview is provided against the background of religious history of Muscovy and Russia, with its wide, and often neglected, variety of denominations and spiritual movements - Orthodox, Old-Believing, Sectarian, Catholic and Protestant. Special attention will be given to the role religious thinkers and theologians from Ukraine played in the intellectual history of the Russian Empire. The course is based on reading and discussion of primary texts in translation. The students will be introduced to the works of Feofan Prokopovich, Hryhory Skovoroda, Piotr Chaadaev, Aleksey Khomyakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Georges Florovsky, and Alexander Schmemann. Thematically, the course material is focused on topics of political theology, theology of history, theology of culture, theology of ritual, and issues of Christian unity.

If you know anything about the Victorians, you probably think of them as uptight and judgmental. That was certainly how the people who became their children and grandchildren saw them. But their preoccupation with correct moral behavior was for them the pursuit of heroic ideals. They dreamed of grand actions undertaken out of commitment to noble principles and the common good. This class will involve the intensive reading of four Victorian works that express Victorian longings for a goodness big and glamorous enough to be almost mythic. We'll read two narrative poems: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, about a woman's formation into a poet and Alfred Lord Tennyson's Victorian adaptation of Arthurian legends Idylls of the King. We'll also read two Victorian novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which associate the romance of doing good with the romance of the marriage plot. We'll also sample from a wide variety of Victorian economic, political and scientific thought that complicated the Victorians' longing for goodness. Along the way we'll confront the same questions the Victorians did: What are your obligations to your community? Should only local injustice matter to you? Does the definition of goodness depend on historical context? When is commitment to ideals a form of integrity and when is it fanaticism? Is the world simply too complex for individual goodness to matter?

To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with “framing”. Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the “frame” through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his / her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nawal El Saadawi. Using these and other authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and religious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/ conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.

This course examines theology and poetry as two forms of attentive living directed toward love of God and neighbor through a comparative consideration of the meaning of work and the experience of time. These issues are examined in each of the four main parts of the course. In the first part, we examine attentiveness as a distinctive intellectual and spiritual problem for our time. In the second part, the focus will be on social scientific theories of work and how these relate to recent studies about subjectivity and the valuation of work in digital spaces (especially workplaces). In the third part of the course, the focus will shift to the construction/disciplining of subjectivity in Christian liturgical and monastic practices, focusing especially on the interplay of communal prayer and manual labor that has traditionally been part of Christian monastic discipline. In the fourth part, we conclude with a consideration of the work of creating and "reading" art (especially poetry and painting) in light of the social changes to work and the theological interpretations of work studied in the preceding parts of the course.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has a strong case for being the greatest Roman Catholic poet after Dante. He is certainly among the greatest among those who have written in English. But Few realize that Hopkins’s theological writings are among the most creative and far-reaching of the late nineteenth century. This class introduces students to Hopkins’s greatest poems and theological essays, his education at Oxford, his formation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and his relationship to theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Bl. John Duns Scotus, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Supplementary readings will include the nineteenth-century Anglican and Catholic divines that influenced Hopkins, such as Henry Liddon, Benjamin Jowett, Brooke Foss Westcott, J.B. Lightfoot, William Bernard Ullathorne, Frederick William Faber, and St. John Henry Newman.

This course has as its central context the crisis of discursive authority in the modern period both subsequent and consequent to literature gaining its independence from Christianity and its central focus on the different attitudes literature takes towards Christianity on a spectrum that at one end is unrelentingly critical as anti-humanist and at the other affirming of Christianity rather than literature as the true humanism. The reading list includes Camus, Dante, Joyce, Dostoyevski, and Shelley.

In the Philosophy, Religion, and Literature Capstone Seminar, students in the PRL minor work one-on-one with a faculty member on a capstone project. The capstone project will typically be an essay of at least 25 pages on a topic of the student's choosing which has the approval of the faculty member directing the project and which brings together themes in philosophy and/or religion with literature. In addition to the main advisor, each student will also work in consultation with another faculty member from a different discipline but one also related to the student's interdisciplinary project. The capstone project will be evaluated by both faculty members.

Advanced survey of Aquinas's philosophical writings on human nature, such as The Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89), his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, and Disputed Questions on the Soul.

A comprehensive consideration of the major themes in Kierkegaard's thought, including: the relation of faith to art, knowledge and morality, the nature of subjectivity, what constitutes effective philosophical communication, etc. Main texts vary, but include the following (in whole or in part): Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness unto Death.

A critical survey of thinkers, ideas, and works in Islamic political philosophy.

This course will focus on the last 120 years in literary history, zeroing in on one particular problem - the writing of religious poetry - in order to probe the philosophical collisions that resulted in what we now call our "post-secular" era of thought. Beginning with Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of the nineteenth-century and major modernists who continued to write powerfully after WWII - T.S. Eliot, David Jones, W. H. Auden - the syllabus will chart a course through the rapidly changing poetic forms of two further generations of poets working devotedly, if differently, out of various religious systems of belief. The many dilemmas of postmodernity include redefining the very notion of "belief" itself after the secular revelations of science and modernity; we will explore the theoretical issues involved in order to better understand what's at stake for each writer we encounter, among them Brian Coffey, Wendy Mulford, Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer. We will ask, among other things, why ancient mystical frameworks seemed newly hospitable, for some, in the face of postmodern suspicions about language and institutions, while for others embracing the sciences renewed faith; we will consider the crucial input of Judaism in Christianity's rethinkings of language and religious experience as well as consider how issues of race and gender inflect changing relationships between poetry and religion. Students will emerge conversant with major debates in contemporary literary theory as well as with developments in poetry since Hopkins; perhaps even more importantly, they will each have had the chance to research some particular aspect of our subject(s) that arouses passionate interest and results in an article-length term paper developed slowly over the course of the semester. In other words, this course offers students the exciting (and measured, not frantic) experience of writing toward publication, just as their professors do. In addition to the term-paper, seminar-level participation is expected, as well as two days of leading class discussion (partnered by a classmate or two). No prior expertise in reading poetry is necessary for this course. (Note: if you have taken my University Seminar, The Death and Return of God in Radical Poetry, you may not take this course; it shares too many of the same materials.)

A close examination of several philosophical themes and arguments within the first thirteen questions of the first part of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, as well as texts elsewhere in his work on faith, and related discussions in other authors as the occasion arises. The course will focus upon certain topics to the exclusion of others. Topics of particular interest in the thirteen questions are the relationship between what Aquinas calls Sacra Doctrina and the exercise of reason apart from Sacra Doctrina in relationship to the nature of philosophy; the nature of faith, the demonstration of the existence of a god, the simplicity of a god, the perfections that pertain to a god, our knowledge of God, and how we speak about God.

A directed reading is the equivalent of a regular PRL course in terms of assigned reading and writing. The student and faculty advisor determine the reading list and writing assignments. It may not duplicate an existing course. Students must complete the required forms in order to receive permission to take the course.