The Art of Living Together

ROM-STD 10 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course introduces students to a wide range of cultural ideas, practices, and aesthetic artifacts emerging from the Romance tradition – the cultures of the French-, Portuguese-, Spanish-, and Italian-speaking parts of the world.  Featuring sessions with diverse faculty, we represent all four Romance languages with a global reach.  The course invites students to engage slowly and deeply with alternative possibilities to the assumptions and practices of a too-fast world that often reduces education to instrumentalized knowledge.  The invitation is to a personal discovery of Romance traditions and cultures in their diversity and along paths that can broaden experiences of thinking, feeling, and engaging with the world.  In short, this course puts the human back into the humanities, and is designed to reconnect students with the “vocational” nature of education in the original sense of vocation as a calling.  Students will consider and discern who, what, and how they are called to be, by learning about and from the cultures and histories of the Romance world, with shares in common a calling to the art of living.