There has also to be an accompanying unity of conscience, outlook, and belief. A fundamental spiritual reorientation towards unity is necessary if an establishment of a global society is to succeed. The ability to bring peace and tranquility to the troubled world depends on the engendering in the mass of humankind of a profound and all-embracing aspiration towards unity. Without it the renaissance of true humanistic spirit and the subsequent oneness of humanity will be impossible. This course will offer students the opportunity to study religious experience from a multi-cultural and global perspective.
Literature addresses the ways human beings live, individually and in a range of groupings.
One way or another, literature offers answers to ultimate questions about the meaning and value of our activity. Here we will read works like Ibsen's Doll House and Hedda Gabler, Shaw's Candida and Pygmalion, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The seminar will also consider how the individual accommodates to life privately, through sensing and articulating his unique inner feelings, as in the poems of Emily Dickinson, or in the short stories of Anton Chekhov. We will also examine efforts by alert, knowledgeable, morally serious observers to integrate through essay and reportage efforts to make sense of the world. Here I might want us to read and discuss some modern classic writer like Lionel Trilling or Jacques Barzun, or simply peruse with care a journal like The American Scholar, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Commentary, or the like.