Big Questions, Great Reads

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

All Georgetown students take The Problem of God. The Cura Personalis seminar complements The Problem of God by, grappling with the problems of humanity through a series of close readings of transformative literary texts that pose and help us to answer, if only provisionally, key questions about being human: What does it mean to be or have a self? How do we become the people we want to be? What does the awareness of death do to the way we live? What is love? How do we know what we know? How does the past inform the present? Thus, we will use the experiences of reading in community as a form of cura personalis, care for the whole person, in all of our confounding humanity. Transformative texts enchant us and shock us, and invite us to travel in time; they allow us to try on the emotional states of others, to live vicariously for a while in the shoes of people living in historical, geographical, and social contexts that were perhaps invisible to us before stepping into the world of the text. In this way they are conduits of knowledge. Transformative texts also offer us the pleasure of recognition when we see that what goes on in other minds is akin to our own emotional landscapes. Our reading list of transformative texts was curated by Georgetown Faculty from many different humanities departments who shared their expertise and creativity in order to design The Problem of the Human. This seminar will fulfill the HALC requirement.