COURSE TITLE: The Wild and the Sacred
COURSE NUMBER: THST 398
SECTION TIMES/DAYS: 02 M/W 4:30-7:00
INSTRUCTOR: Douglas Burton-Christie
COURSE DESCRIPTION/PRINCIPAL TOPICS
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” So claimed the great American writer Henry David Thoreau. This
idea has continued to resonate in the contemporary imagination and reflects a sense shared by many people that
wildness and wilderness are fundamental to our well-being as persons and communities. Yet, as patterns of
ecological degradation continue to deepen, our very capacity to encounter or know the wild has become rapidly
diminished. For many contemporary observers, this diminishment has come to be seen not simply as an
environmental concern, but also as a religious and spiritual one: to lose the wild is also in some sense to lose the
sacred. Yet there are also signs in the contemporary world of a vibrant and hopeful effort to “reenchant” the
natural world, to rekindle our sense of relationship with the wild and through this work to retrieve a sense of the
sacred. This course will consider the meaning of this renewed attention to the wild and the sacred and ask how it
can help to inform a more thoughtful and ethical engagement with the natural world. Students will be invited to
reflect on the idea of the wild (and wilderness) as it arises in literature, poetry, film, art, spirituality and theology.
The idea of wildness has played a particularly important role in the ancient Christian monastic tradition and we
will give close attention to the way the ancient monks conceived of wildness as integral to the experience of God.
There will also be an important practical dimension to our consideration of these questions, expressed through
extended trips into the wild and through time spent with monastic communities.
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. To gain a critical understanding of the meaning of the wild as it appears in its classic literary, poetic,
spiritual and theological forms.
2. To frame and interpret the idea of wildness through critical engagement with the discipline of spirituality.
3. To develop an understanding of the fundamental moral and spiritual dimensions of the human
relationship to the natural world, in particular the wild world.
4. To develop a basic, practical orientation to and experience of wilderness travel, through hands-on,
guided class trips into wilderness areas in California and to living monastic communities.
PREREQUISITES/RECOMMENDED BACKGROUND
REQUIRED TEXTS
Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996). ISBN: 0816516995
Michael Lewis, American Wilderness: A New History (New York: Oxford, 2007). ISBN: 0195174143
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Anchor, 2007). ISBN: 0307387178
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (New York: Penguin, 1997) ISBN: 0140249192
Selected Xeroxed Readings.
COURSE WORK/EXPECTATIONS
1. Participation (including wilderness trips). (20%)
2. Three response papers (30%)
3. Final Paper (50%)