Study Group Details

Intellectual and cultural historians generally consider World War I the turning point in modern Western civilization. This disastrous war shattered Enlightenment confidence in human reason, exposed the 19th-century myth of inevitable progress, challenged traditional belief in a divinely ordered universe, and fostered a postwar cosmic pessimism and materialist cosmology. To understand the war’s effect on Western culture, we will compare prewar and postwar philosophy, theology, literature, art, and music, focusing on the evolving Western view of reality. We will end with a discussion of the course’s cultural themes and the continuing postwar science-religion debate. This study group has a high class size capacity.