Religious Questions in the Canon of Albert Camus

3 credits · Divinity School

When Albert Camus received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy proclaimed him the world's foremost literary antagonist of totalitarianism, who with clear-sighted earnestness, illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our time by writing in a common language on the themes of war and resistance, exile, and the death penalty. Participants in this seminar will be invited to engage in an objective investigation of the religious themes that comprise the canon of the French Nobel laureate who argued that all of our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. We shall study Camus as a short story writer, a novelist, a dramatist, an essayist, a journalist, and a social critic. Our discourse will be governed by the recurring questions: What theological problems has Camus located in language? and What wisdom has Camus bequeathed to us as participants in the drama of the human condition? [3] Mr. Judge