Rlg & Lit: In the light of Job

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores the light that the Book of Job can shed on our understanding of the relationship between literary and theological reflection. An initial reading of the Book of Job itself will open up the questions (concerning, for example, human vulnerability and divine unknowability) that will then provide the conceptual focus for the rest of the course; in which we will examine texts - by Primo Levi, Shakespeare, Dante, Julian of Norwich, Gregory the Great and Catherine of Siena - shaped in different but richly complementary ways by a profoundly compelling engagement with the questions raised by Job. Through such examination, and in conversation with contemporary literary and theological studies, students will be invited to reflect closely on the distinctive contribution that the coming together of literary and theological reflection can make to our thinking about meaning and truth.