Story of the Bible
(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)

Taught by Luke Timothy Johnson

In The Story of the Bible, renowned scholar Luke Timothy Johnson can illuminate for you the remarkable and complicated process by which this great book came into being. Tracing the development of biblical texts across millennia, Professor Johnson takes you on a journey from the farthest reaches of ancient history through antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present. You'll learn about the many forms the Bible has taken and the ways history, scholarship, and technology have helped shape this great tradition, as well as the Bible's powerful influence on human history and culture.

Any lover of Shakespeare, or of the Romantic poets, can concede that poetry is pleasurable. But is it good for us, and can it teach us anything?

These questions may seem odd, but they have beguiled and engaged eminent critics for millennia. What we call literary criticism is really a debate over a few key questions: What is poetry's wellspring? God? Nature? The human self? Is poetry superfluous to human progress? Are the literary arts a vehicle to higher truths or a pack of lies? Is the author a divinely inspired rhapsode or a mere artisan, "manufacturing" meaning?

(10 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 675

Why do some people commit crimes, use the wrong fork, or speak out of turn? How does a society determine when a crime has been committed, which fork to use, and who should speak when?
How have we tried to explain deviance and create categories of deviants? What has been the role of race and class in these definitions?
How do deviants reconcile their behavior with society's norms? What have been the contributions of Freud, Durkheim, Lombroso, and modern literary criticism to our understanding of deviance and conformity?
How is the practice of science itself an example of deviance and conformity?

Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process
(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
 Taught by Francis B. Colavita
University of Pittsburgh
Ph.D., University of Indiana

Why is it that we react to the world the way we do, not only in similar ways—turning our heads in the direction of a tap on the shoulder or a sudden movement in our peripheral vision, for example—but often in dramatically different ways as well?
What causes us to gasp in startled fear at a sharp sound that our spouse, even though blessed with excellent hearing, appears to barely notice? Why do children twist their faces in disgust when asked to sample the smallest bite of their parents' most recent culinary addiction? How is it that the physically adventurous young person you remember being—the one whose greatest passion was riding the scariest roller coaster imaginable—somehow grew into an adult whose stomach begins to churn nervously at even the thought of such a ride?
The answer, of course, is that each of us—whether a different person or a more recent model of ourselves—isn't reacting to the same world at all.

Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature
TTC

(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Susan Sage Heinzelman
The University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D., University of Western Ontario

Great literature can be the means of understanding as well as creating our world - by teaching and reinforcing society's laws, articulating its values, and enforcing the social contracts that unite us as a culture. What if literature itself generated our ideas and feelings about justice, marriage and family, property, authority, race, or gender? What if it enflamed our determination to pursue justice - or, conversely, undermined our ability to detect injustice?
___What if law in all its variations - from religious commandments to oral tradition to codified statute - embraced its own narrative assumptions to the point of absorbing purely literary conventions as a means of more forcefully arguing its points in the legal arena?
___And what if this dynamic relationship between written and unwritten laws and literature is constantly evolving? How do law and literature influence or reflect one other? And what lessons might we draw from their symbiotic relationship?