The God-Shaped Question: Thought, Practice, and the Formation of the Self

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"Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history," Oscar Handlin, 1951. Are we connected to something beyond what we see and touch? What is our relation to the infinite? This course examines how philosophers, poets, and artists have approached these questions as matters of education and self-development. We begin with classical and medieval accounts of transcendence in Plato, Plotinus, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Moses Maimonides, alongside sacred texts and mystical works by Teresa of Avila, Rabia Basri, Yehuda Ha-Levi, and Ibn 'Arabi. The course then turns to modern analyses of the infinite by Rene Descartes, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michel de Certeau. Non-Western perspectives (Davi Kopenawa, the Kyoto School, Adi Shankaracharya, John Mbiti) expand and reframe the question. Pairing practice with theory, the course places conceptual and sacred texts in dialogue with poetry (Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Forugh Farrokhzad), film (Stromboli, The Seventh Seal, The Stone Garden, Pather Panchali), and music (Abida Parveen, John Coltrane, Arvo Part, Hildegard of Bingen, Anoushka Shankar). Throughout the course, students explore how they might incorporate the transcendent into their daily and intellectual life - and what is at stake in its presence or absence.