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In this deep, elegant reflection and confession, Annie Dillard offers a spiritual memoir in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo or the Pensées of Pascal.

Exploring the source of human spirit, narrative, power, existence, community, love, and purpose, Dillard writes profoundly in ordinary speech, delivering the deepest philosophy in a form of personal reflection that seems almost casual. Yet it is not. She opens our eyes, hearts, and minds to the obvious truths we have somehow missed. Reading Dillard sends you journeying on a way you suddenly realize is yours.

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“O brave new world/ That has such people in't!” After enchanting and transforming his audiences with stage magic for two and a half decades, William Shakespeare begins to close the curtain on his writing career with The Tempest, performed in King James’s court in 1611. We find ourselves on Prospero’s magical island where a few of the most intense themes of humanity are at stake, including justice, power, love, and forgiveness. Despite the fairytale setting, this play raises pertinent, intriguing, and complex questions concerning the role of education in society, the responsibilities of political leaders, and the importance of love. We engage with some of these questions, realizing that they will continue to puzzle us long after our discussions are over.

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Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is one of the foundational texts of sociology. Controversial from the time of its publication, it argued that Protestant theological teachings drove the development and embrace of capitalism in the West—particularly in England and the United States. Weber's text receives the lion’s share of our attention, but we also look briefly at some of the writings—by John Calvin, Richard Baxter, and Benjamin Franklin—on which Weber grounded his book’s argument. A classic response to Weber by the historian RH Tawney is included in the readings if time and interest permits. These vivid, beautifully written texts press on us fundamental questions about the power of religion to shape the economic organization of society and, indeed, to shape an entirely new sort of person: one committed to ascetic rationalism in all things, but preeminently in the economic dealings of everyday life, dealings now saturated with consequence for the world beyond. In so far as that form of society and that form of person is still very much with us, the book may help us see modern commercial life, and our vocations within it, anew.

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Manual of additional reading selections provided.

“All works and virtues rest upon this narrative … nobody endures without living off its food.” So the �Ѳ��������������ٲ�, India’s magnificent Sanskrit epic, proudly says of itself. Its colossal 18 books center upon the rivalry between five heroic brothers, close allies of human/divine Krishna, and their covetous cousins who seize the kingdom in a deceitful game of dice. We read the entirety of the relatively short second book, “The Book of the Assembly Hall,” which includes that fateful dicing match. The �Ѳ��������������ٲ�’s third book, “The Book of the Forest,” is rich in adventures and tales told during the brothers’ subsequent 12 years of exile. We read a few of the most important episodes. A summary of Book 1, “The Book of the Beginning,” is provided. Books 2 and 3 are included in one volume.

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The sharp distinction that Descartes drew between mind and body allowed for an independent investigation of each, giving rise thereby to the focused exploration of consciousness and to mathematical physics respectively. However, the very sharpness of this distinction raised the question of how mind and body are related. Various attempts at a solution were advanced, first by Descartes himself, then by Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, and others. Arguably, the most radical solution was advanced by Georges Berkeley: There is no matter at all; there are only minds and objects that exist solely by being correlated with minds. We consider two texts in which Berkeley argues for this paradoxical claim with an ingenuity and rigor that even his opponents found impressive.

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The Red and the Black is arguably the most engrossing classic novel of all time, yet it manages to evoke the deepest quandaries of human existence, from the problem of living a passionate life in a morally barren society, to the confusions of love, ambition, vanity, and divided allegiances. As Julien Sorel strives for recognition within the hypocritical social echelon he both loathes and covets, will he achieve a greatness aligned with his feeling, or is he fated to succumb to the dismal ethos around him? We examine Stendhal’s themes of deception, exploited beauty, desire, and modern despair, and discuss Stendhal’s magnificent storytelling to investigate the connection between our readerly enjoyment and the forms of life this novel may reveal to us.

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Aeschylus’ Oresteia—the only surviving staged trilogy from classical Athens—offers a gripping and complex story of murder, revenge, and the struggle to escape cycles of bloodshed. Across Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, we witness the House of Atreus torn apart by betrayal and violence, and a society searching for a new order to replace the old law of vengeance. Together, we navigate through the trilogy’s drama while exploring its enduring questions: Can justice be achieved without endless retaliation? What role do the gods, fate, and human responsibility play in our choices? How does the birth of trial by jury reshape both Athens and our understanding of law today?

Text: Aeschylus, Aeschylus II, The Oresteia. (tr. Richard Lattimore), University of Chicago Press, ISBN: 978-0226311470

Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between what can be known about God through natural reason and ordinary human experience alone and what can be assented to only in an act of faith. The Summa Contra Gentiles treats both. The “Gentiles” against whom it is directed are the philosophers of classical antiquity and their medieval followers. The disputation between them turns less on the existence of God—understood as an uncaused cause of the world—than on whether God, so understood, is freely responsible for the existence of the world, including its very matter, at one extreme, and its intelligent inhabitants at the other. The classical philosophers tend to deny that the world is freely created by God. Thomas argues for the opposite.

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Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God. (tr. Anton Pegis), University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN: 978-0268016760

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Two: Creation. (tr. James Anderson), University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN: 978-0268016760

Charles Darwin rightly thought his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, his masterpiece. In this work, Darwin presents a thorough array of evidence and reasoning to make a sustained and powerful argument for the evolution of species. We consider his sections on variation under domestication and nature, the struggle for existence, natural selection, instinct, hybridism, comparative morphology, and embryology.

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We read two classics by masters of Japanese prose: Kamo no Chōmei’s (c. 1155-1216) ��ō��ō�쾱 (Record of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut) and Yoshida Kenkō’s (c. 1283-1352) Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness). The former addresses the impermanence of all things in the world in an essay that culminates in a puzzling critical appraisal of his retirement to a hermitage at age 50. The latter consists of 243 insightful mini essays, anecdotes, and poetic reflections. Despite coming across as Buddhist in some respects, both Chōmei and Kenkō took up their seeking outside of schools and beyond strict adherence to religious dogmas.

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What is religion? This question is itself a primary sign of the shifts in our understanding of ourselves and the world that constitute modernity. Philosopher and psychologist William James approaches this question in a quintessentially modern and American way, through a focus on individual experience: “The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, insofar as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine.” In the resulting set of lectures, the core of which this seminar concentrates on, James gives an account of the nature and truth of religion, which is at the same time, as its subtitle declares, “a study of human nature.”

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Jane Austen’s novels can be a bit like the Mona Lisa: constantly looked at, but unseen. Austen uses the marriage plot and the comedy of manners as an effective stalking horse for subtler ends, such as thinking seriously about what we mean to each other, how we cause each other pain, what binds us together, and—perhaps her favorite preoccupation—how blind we can be to ourselves. Emma, whose titular heroine is an impressive amalgam of likeable and unlikeable, was the fourth and last of Austen’s works to be published in her lifetime. The novel shows Austen at the peak of her powers—possessing a keen eye for the hidden aspects of human nature and an often overlooked comedic genius.

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