Parents, Children, and the Life Worth Living

In this course we will reflect on leading a life worth living by thinking seriously about parents and children. The course will begin by looking at the Bible. We will begin at the beginning with Genesis, a book about (among many other things!) parents, children, and sibling rivalry. We will then explore these same themes in the Ancient Greek world, reading Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy and psychoanalytic commentaries on this work. We will then turn to the Gospel of Matthew, exploring the birth and parents of Jesus (along with the idea of an adult becoming a child), putting the Gospel into conversation with Hannah Arendt’s thinking on natality and James Baldwin’s thinking on love. We will then turn to Confucian and Daoist perspectives on parenting before ending with contemporary parenting advice. Finally, we will think about the social implications of our thinking. What policies do we owe parents and children, and does a society have an obligation to promote a life worth living for every child born into the society? The course has no prerequisites. Students will be expected to read challenging texts and be open to exploring the continuing significance of these texts, especially when we may find them most confusing or difficult.