NEH Enduring Questions Course on "What is Forgiveness?"
FAIN: AQ-50217-10
SUNY Research Foundation, College at Brockport (Brockport, NY 14420-2997)
J. Roger Kurtz (Project Director: September 2009 to present)
The development of a junior-level undergraduate seminar that explores the concept of forgiveness through literature, philosophy, religion, criminal justice, and international relations.
This course examines texts from antiquity to the present to explore the human experience of Forgiveness from five disciplinary angles: literature, philosophy, religious studies, criminal justice and international relations. Using Shakespeare's The Tempest, as a touchstone text, the first part of the course features major literary representations of forgiveness. We then survey how forgiveness has been debated in Western philosophy, from Plato on, before looking at teachings on forgiveness in the three Abrahamic faith traditions. Finally, students will complete a term project on a forgiveness related issue of contemporary interest. By the end of the course, students will possess a rich understanding of the concept of forgiveness and its history, they will appreciate the complexities and contradictions that characterize it, and they will apply it in a sophisticated way to historical and real-life instances of personal and social conflict.