Samples of recent senior honors seminars
Architecture of Happiness: Tracing Virtue and Vice from Homer to Robinson (3 credits)
Class time: Monday evenings, 6:15-9:15 p.m. Course description: This course will explore the ways humans have viewed and sought to construct the good life—often failing and sometimes succeeding. Beginning with Homer, we will examine the ideals of virtue and their accompanying vices embodied in the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey. Our pilgrimage will follow these stories from Homer to Virgil to Dante and other thinkers who have worked to net this slippery fish, happiness. We will arrive by reading Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy Gilead, Home and Lila. Throughout we will be asking what we might expect of our own endeavors to find blessedness. We will aim to apply the insights we gain to our own lives as we consider the odyssey of the last four years and the years ahead.
God, Humanity, & Nature (3 credits)
Class time: Monday evenings, 6:15-9:15 p.m. Course description: Seminar on the history of ideas, focusing on ideas of God, humanity, and nature. The primary method of instruction is discussion of texts.