Course description
This is an experimental course taught from the perspectives of anthropology and religious studies that is intended to be transformative for students and teachers alike. Our goal is to develop, in collaboration with students, a pedagogy for fostering students personal quests for wisdom, through lectures and readings, through extensive conversation, and also through other experiences inside and outside of class, including dramaturgical experiences with film or theater, caregiving, and meditation. As teachers we are inspired by William Jamess conception of knowledge in the university as a strategy needed to live a life of purpose and significance that also contributes to improving the world. In the words of Albert Camus, Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. Together, we engage with the problems of danger, uncertainty, failure, and suffering that led the founders of the social sciences and humanities to ask fundamental questions about meaning, imagination, aesthetics, social life, and subjective experience. These are the same existential questions that bring ordinary people all over the world, and throughout history, to question common sense reality in the face of catastrophes and the violence of everyday life. The many answers to these questionswisdom that is found in religious, ethical, and aesthetic questsare intended to furnish individuals with strategies to respond to potential and hope, pain and suffering; to promote healing; and to address concerns about salvation, redemption, or other kinds of moral-emotional transformation.
