Great Christian Thinkers Syllabus

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for my Great Christian Thinkers course. It’s taken me a lot of work to figure out how to balance all the different elements I needed to incorporate: how to make it interesting to philosophers and theologians, how to balance introducing Augustine with introducing key concepts and problematics in Christian theology with taking my students through some basic study and essay writing skills. But I think I’ve cracked it, and am really excited to teach the course. I’ve decided to frame the course as a whole around Phillip Goodchild’s claim that that if, pace Plotinus, philosophy is ‘what matters most’, then what matters most is suffering. The course as a whole, then, is designed to take the students through key primary and secondary texts that will help them to write a formative essay on the topic: ‘Why and how does suffering matter in the work of Augustine?’ and because those essays will be due before the final class of the semester, we’ll spend that last class on a class debate which will give us a chance to talk about whether or not Augustine can help us in answering the question ‘what matters most?’ for ourselves. Then in Semester 2 we’ll spend time going through a range of key Christian thinkers (I’m still figuring out how to construct that canon) with an eye to how they deal with the question of suffering and what matters most.

I’m hoping that the focus on suffering will give us an interesting and focused way into the major themes of both Augustine’s work and Christian thought more broadly, so the course is structured as follows:

WEEK 1: What Matters Most
WEEK 2: Augustine, Theology, and the Problem of Suffering
WEEK 3: God, Evil and the Nature of Suffering
WEEK 4: The Fall
WEEK 5: Free to Suffer?
WEEK 6: The Devil
WEEK 7: ENRICHMENT WEEK
WEEK 8: Suffering Desire, Desiring Suffering
WEEK 9: Suffering and the Ethics of Sacrifice
WEEK 10: Political Suffering: A Tale of Two Cities
WEEK 11: Political Suffering: War
WEEK 12: What Matters Most?

Here’s the complete module handbook, with weekly readings and overviews of what ground I hope to cover in each class.