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.