Image for Love and Death: <br/> Thinking with Plato and the Bible

Love is central to human life and human meaning. There are many loves to which we can devote our lives—love of family, love of country, love of pleasure, love of honor, love of God. At times, these loves are mutually supportive and at times they come into tension with one another. To think about who we are, and how we should live, we would do well to reflect on how we come to love and long for certain things, and on how the Jewish tradition views and guides these natural longings. This course will use two great texts—one Jewish (the story of Eden) and one Greek (Plato’s Symposium)—to help us think through these issues. We will consider how these two treatments of human love challenge and illuminate one another.