MY NEW UPCOMING COURSES ON ETHICS, CLOSE READING AND BECKETT

This spring and summer I will be teaching three new courses, available to everyone and delivered online.

The first two are starting in April and are being run through a brand-new venture: Keystone Inspires.

I’ll be teaching How to Live: An Introduction to Ethics. This eight-week course looks at four very different approaches to ethics: the character-based ethics of Aristotle, the moral phenomenology of the Buddha, the duty-based ethic of Immanuel Kant, and the consequent-based ethics of the Utilitarians. We will then look at challenges to morality and moral truth from Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and the rise of logical positivism in the early twentieth century.

I’m also teaching The Art of Reading Closely. This is another eight-week course focused on learning how to get more out of reading literature by close reading: paying attention to the choices that a writer makes on the page and how they affect us as readers. This practice is hugely rewarding not just in terms of what it unlocks in the text but also what it tells us about the process of reading and about ourselves as reader.

Finally, I’ll be teaching a course on The Plays of Samuel Beckett, running in July 2021 through the Insitute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. Booking for this is not yet open.

All three courses are very close to my heart and have run in different iterations in previous years. I am delighted to be able to bring them to a wider audience.

Find out more on the courses page.

The Atheist Paradox

Detail from "The Sermon On the Mount" by Carl Heinrich Bloch

Adam Roberts at Aeon magazine:

“Christianity is not about [...] what you have but what you should give up; not about power but about the disempowered — this is the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount.

In fact, that’s the whole point of the Gospels. To reread these primary Christian documents is to remind yourself how radically concerned the Gospels are with the excluded, the non-chosen people, the scum, the chavs. And from this insight, I hew and plane a major plank of my own argument. Now that Christianity has gone from being a small-time sect to being the dominant religion on the planet, the key category of excluded has become precisely the unbelievers.”