JPI 969
Recovering Origins: God’s Eternal Beginning and the Experience of Fatherlessness
The purpose of the course is to approach one of the most significant aspects of our contemporary culture: the rejection of the father, which, ultimately, is a rejection of God. Rather than offering a systematic response to the problem, the seminar intends to examine the question of the rejection of fatherhood from an anthropological and a philosophical point of view. The seminar seeks to grapple with the question of the rejection of fatherhood by means of a careful reading of some key texts of our Western tradition. The seminar is divided into two parts. The first part begins with a retrieval of the meaning of man's and God's fatherhood through John Paul II’s Radiation of Fatherhood. It then seeks to see whether fatherhood is more than a cultural or sociological category (N. Postman, D. Blankenhorn), and what it means that the father rejects his own paternity (A. Root, J. Wallerstein). The seminar examines Kafka’s work as an example of distorted fatherhood and, through one of Camus' plays, it broaches the possibility of a human life without God. The second part of the seminar examines the philosophical rejection of God’s fatherhood (atheism) through some fundamental works of F. Nietzsche and M. Heidegger. The Gay Science and Pathmarks, among others, will be read.
