UNCP 4620 Perspectives on the Best Way to Live

The course will invite students to revisit key themes and texts from Perspectives on Western Culture to reexamine the ways that these ideas may have contributed to their time and development at BC. We will focus on themes of the best way to live, friendship and love, the building of self and a just community, faith and reason, and the transformational power of education. Using William Deresiewiscs Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life and David Brooks The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life as bookends of the course, we will frame our readings and reflections on key texts from Perspectives I, including texts from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, with several short stories by Leo Tolstoy, Alice McDermott, and Claire Keegan.