"In Dark Times"

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

We can only live good lives, the philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed, if we can make reasonable guesses as to what the future will bring. (Will your major connect you to an important career? Will your family thrive as the years advance? Will Notre Dame beat Michigan next time?) But what happens when our expectations are upended? How can we live good lives if we have no clear sense of how to deal with the challenges of today - no clear sense of what tomorrow will bring? In this class, we will look at how Christians responded to the end of the world. This does not mean an imminent apocalypse (though sometimes that was expected), but the collapse of a civilization, a cultural order, or a set of shared expectations that shaped how people made sense of the world and made choices within it. We will focus on two periods of social disintegration: the early Middle Ages, when the age-old Roman Empire (which had seemed to Christians like a providential gift for the spread of the Gospel) collapsed, and the 20th century, when the globe was shaken by world wars, genocides, atomic bombs, and a moral and metaphysical confusion that, some argue, persists to this day. Thereby, we will attend to three issues. First, the theology of history or of providence. How do Christians make sense of God's activity in history, with its moments of disaster and prosperity? Second, the choices people make about how to live a good life within history, which together constitute a morality. Third, and most importantly for our purposes, how do we understand the world we live in and the choices we make within it? Is the world improving, laboriously but steadily? Do we live in a world that trembles on the surface but remains solid at its foundation? Is the world on the verge of collapse? Whatever the case may be, how should we live within it?