Suffering and Compassion

Catalog description

One might say that to be human is to suffer, but what is suffering? Is it to be avoided or embraced? To what ends? The answers to these questions are not just personal or psychological. Rather, they are deeply sociocultural and historical. Orientations toward suffering shape major aspects of life, such as religion, politics, humanitarianism, and medicine. This course explores different ways that society and culture create suffering, and ways that suffering shapes society and culture. This happens not just in suffering itself but also in ways that people try to overcome suffering. Therefore, we also consider the relationship of compassion, empathy and sympathy, and other forms of care to suffering, always paying close attention to questions of the unequal distributions of both suffering and compassion to different groups of people.