The Intersection of Biology and Health (NEW)

Whether we think of ourselves as spiritual or religious or something else, there are some realities all of us share. We were born. We’ll die. We’ll do some living in between. We all do these things, but how we do them is shaped by such a wide variety of factors and forces that none of us lives or dies in the same way. Humans have long turned to the transcendent, mysterious, or invisible as one way of marking this human life cycle and making meaning in human history, but this turn has also been one of the ways we sort each other into insiders and outsiders, enlightened elites and plebs, righteous and damned. In this course, we’ll be asking how we can learn to move from the simple fact that religious and other differences exist to, as Diana Eck put it, ways of “living, connecting, relating, arguing, and disagreeing” in an often fractious world.