The 2025 Courses
The Courage to Be: Artistic Encounters with Nature
Professor: Jana Mader
In this course, we will explore the theme of courage in artistic encounters with nature. Through the lens of artists like Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Werner Herzog, we will examine how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for environmental activism and cultural transformation. Literary works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring will illustrate the profound impact of courageous writing on ecological consciousness and conservation efforts. The course will delve into the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy, whose creations, formed from natural materials, emphasize the transient beauty of nature and the impermanence of human interventions. We’ll also explore the bold and innovative approaches of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, whose films invite a spiritual contemplation of nature, and composers such as John Luther Adams, whose music evokes the vastness and power of the natural world. Throughout the semester, we will engage with various forms of creative expression, e.g. literature, visual arts, photography, film, music, and poetry, to examine how these artists and thinkers courageously confront the complexities of nature, whether by challenging societal norms, revealing uncomfortable truths about human impact on the environment, or inspiring a deeper, more mindful connection to the Earth. By the end of the course, we’ll have gained a deeper understanding of how art can both reflect and shape our perceptions of the natural world, and how courage in the arts can lead to profound environmental and social change. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.
The Courage to Be: Achilles, Socrates, Antigone, Mother Courage, Barbara Lee
Professor: Thomas Bartscherer
In 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole member of the United States Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force that formed the legal foundation for military action in Afghanistan, and subsequently, many additional deployments of the U.S. military. Her vote was praised by many as courageous, and condemned by many others. Lee was celebrated in a poem by Fred Moten as “the unacknowledged legislator.” What is courage? In this course, we shall approach this question both directly and obliquely. We begin with Homer’s Iliad and with philosophical accounts from 5th century Athens. Should courage be understood the same way in all contexts? Is a warrior’s courage the same as that of a philosopher or a legislator? Who is truly courageous, the one who defends the regime, the one who critiques it, or both? Is the courage of Hektor or Achilles the same as that of Socrates or Antigone? Our discussion will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts and essays, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Tillich, Arendt, Baldwin, Abani) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island, Bergman’s Shame). We will be asking, among other things, whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places; whether and in what sense courage brings people together or sets them apart; and what we may mean today when we characterize people or acts as courageous. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.
The Courage to Be: The Ancient Hebrew Prophets
Professor: Joshua Boettiger
The classical period of Hebrew prophecy (8th century to 5th century BCE) yielded/inspired an extraordinary range of literature. While these prophetic works differ in many respects, much of it is consistent in terms of depicting the prophet as someone who embodies courage – especially in bringing their understanding of God to bear as a social and political critique. This course will explore some of these startling and powerful prophetic accounts – especially the books of Amos, Jeremiah, and the earlier saga of Elijah detailed in 1 Kings – in their historical contexts. Reading the prophets through the lens of courage, we will examine the phenomena of calling and covenant, the theology and philosophy of pathos, and look together at conflicting definitions of justice. Our core text will be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets, though as the semester progresses we will expand outward to think about the prophetic impulse in modern contexts, including in the subsequent development of Judaism and Christianity, and also in the contemporary poetry of Ilya Kaminsky, C. D. Wright, and Chris Abani. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.
The Courage to Be: Courage in the Universities
Professor: Maxim Botstein
What are the responsibilities of educational institutions and their members in times of political or social crisis? What are the forms that spiritual or intellectual courage (and cowardice, opportunism, and human frailty) take in such a context, and what relationships do thought and action, intellectual rigor and moral virtue, have to each other? This course will explore these questions, and others like them, by examining the history of German and American universities from the 1930s to the 1960s. We will look at the response of German academics to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Americans to McCarthyism and the Student Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read the works of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, William F. Buckley Jr. and Sidney Hook with an eye towards the context which shaped their thought and philosophy, as well the writings of less well-known students and scholars who grappled with the same difficult questions, and helped shape modern higher education. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.
Courage To Be: Black Contrarian Voices
Professor: Thomas Williams
Though many racists and anti-racists engage and portray “black” thinking and sensibility as homogenous, for as long as there has been a tradition of black thought in America there has also been a robust and formidable thread of contrarianism and heterodoxy to defy it—even to deny there is such a thing as “blackness” (or whiteness, for that matter) to begin with. It has become a cliché to pay lip service to the notion that "blackness is not a monolith," and yet so many of us continue to speak and act as if it were. In this common course, which will be comprised of shared texts as well as the work of iconoclastic and independent black thinkers—from Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to Barbara Fields, James Baldwin and Adrian Piper—we will examine the question of what it means to create and define the self in a shared world that too often imprisons us all in ready-made categories. We will explore the tension between the courage-to-be-with and the courage-to-be-apart, specifically focusing on the idea of acting in common and the intellectual and moral courage it takes to stand alone and the price of prioritizing self-authenticity over consensus and group cohesion. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.
