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Your life is going along on its relatively uneventful Tuesday-morning way when,
BANG, you are face to face with an angry, demanding, inquisitive, or otherwise
inconvenient deity.
Great. Now what do you do? Why are gods and spirits so difficult to get
along with, and so nearly impossible to get along without?
This course will select from some of the most famous texts in the literature
of the Western (and Eastern) world, focusing on the human struggle
with/for/against the divine. Among the questions we will explore are: What does
it mean to struggle with God(s)? What do the strugglers gain and/or lose in the
struggle? What do our images and depictions of divinity tell us about ourselves?
What do our struggles with these images of our own creation tell us about our
relationships to concepts of authority, justice, mercy, law, punishment,
forgiveness, order, and questions of life and death? Why do we need God(s) to
struggle with at all?
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