JS 370-002: Top In Jewish Relig & Culture: Suffering, Healing, Redemption (Spring 2010)

Note: Students who took REL/JS 190: Freshman Seminar: "Suffering, Healing, Redemption" are not eligible to receive credit for this course.

Content: This seminar explores the nature of suffering that underlies the human condition and the different responses to suffering or evil that religious and cultural traditions have tried to offer. We will start by comparing classical Greek, Jewish and Buddhist texts that outline radically different approaches to a problem they all recognize, and then move on to consider literature from the Holocaust, ethnographic accounts of illness, suffering and healing in different cultures, and first-hand accounts of contemporary man-made and natural disasters, like the genocide in Rwanda, or the AIDS pandemic. How do human beings find healing or transcendence in the face of implacable fate, and how does our response to suffering stand at the very heart of different choices in contemporary politics, morality and religion? Should suffering be described as sickness or as evil, especially when it is man-made? We will be asking these and other "big questions" while also gaining familiarity with different research disciplines as well as different religious and cultural traditions. Students are requested to bring minds and hearts.