Philosophy, religion, and the meaning of life

pt. 1: Lecture 1. Meaning : a question and a commitment

Lecture 2. Hero and saint : mapping the cultural genome

Lecture 3. The heroic age : the Greek worldview

Lecture 4. Heroism and the tragic view of life

Lecture 5. Plato : politics, justice, and philosophy

Lecture 6. Plato's Republic : the hero's reward

Lecture 7. The heroic ideal in late stoicism

Lecture 8. "In the beginning" : the Hebrew worldview

Lecture 9. Father Abraham, the first saint

Lecture 10. Saintly types in the Hebrew Bible

Lecture 11. Jesus as saintly innovator : forgiving love

Lecture 12. Hero or saint? Saul of Tarsus.

pt. 2: Lecture 13. Hero or saint? Augustine of Hippo

Lecture 14. Mohammed : the prophet as saintly innovator

Lecture 15. Saint Francis and Dante : saintly troubadours

Lecture 16. The agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo

Lecture 17. Enlightenment patterns of cultural mutation

Lecture 18. Mt. Myrah revisited : saintly transgression

Lecture 19. A history of suspicion : Marx, Darwin, Freud

Lecture 20. Nietzsche : the return of the tragic hero

Lecture 21. Dostoevsky : the return of the saint

Lecture 22. A century of trauma

Lecture 23. The quantum leap

Lecture 24. Existentialism : Sartre and de Beauvoir.

pt. 3: Lecture 25. Camus and the absurd hero

Lecture 26. Flannery O'Connor and the mystery of grace

Lecture 27. The Holocaust and the crisis of forgiveness

Lecture 28. Faulkner and Beckett : images of the forlorn

Lecture 29. Viktor Frankl : freedom's search for meaning

Lecture 30. Simone Weil : imagining the secular saint

Lecture 31. Simone Weil : a new Augustine?

Lecture 32. Identifying the secular saint

Lecture 33. The secular saint at the movies

Lecture 34. Ernest Becker : the denial of death

Lecture 35. Terror and hope in a planetary age

Lecture 36. The secular saint : learning to walk upright.