|
|
 |
 |
November 2005 Spiritual Inquiry Through Lit Class“Good authors are able to hold people up as jewels to the light, turning them around to show all of their facets,” writes Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life at Stanford, of his Business School elective, The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature. “Good authors are also able to describe setting so exquisitely that readers understand fully how characters are shaped and supported.” McLennan’s course, which discusses one novel or play a week, has two goals: to make students think more deeply about their own moral and spiritual lives and to prepare them to do business in a global setting, where the underlying culture is often dominated by its religious perspective. “It’s the last quarter of their last year,” McLennan says. “I get them at the very moment they’re starting to think about the next 30 or 40 years.” Students begin with The Great Gatsby. “Gatsby is all about the American dream in terms of his rags to riches story and his entrepreneurial spirit, his sense of potential and hope. Ultimately, what drives him is his love for Daisy, a goal that probably isn’t deserving. And, like so many business people, he is incapable of analyzing and changing his goal.” After Fitzgerald, the class considers Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and then moves to Judaism (The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth), Hinduism (Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee), Buddhism (Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse), and Islam (Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz). Later they read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which, McLennan writes, “reminds us that the ideal alumni-magazine life is worthless if one can never transcend oneself and give oneself unconditionally to another.” McLennan himself has close ties to a fictional character. His college roommate Garry Trudeau immortalized the lanky, red-haired intellectual as the activist preacher the Rev. Scot Sloan (“the fighting young priest who can talk to the kids”) in his comic strip Doonesbury and provided the cover art for McLennan’s book Finding Your Religion. If his students are aware of his comedic alter ego, Doonesbury’s “Dude of God” hasn’t heard about it. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous
Spreadsheet
