Aiming to shed critical and constructive light on a contemporary world facing both the threat of ecological disaster and the failure of democratic norms and institutions, this course focuses on a range of American writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Galway Kinnell—for whom our human relations with nature and the relations of democratic political life are intimately tied to one another—and according to whom those relations must be understood first not in terms of scientific reason or technical expertise but in terms of moral and religious sensibilities whose cultivation would require education and creative practice in the philosophical, literary, and artistic domains.
Tom Carlson
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