What are our imaginations for? How can reading works of imaginative literature help us to live in right relationship to God and our fellow human beings? How, as readers of Scripture, do we approach the wide spectrum of texts that make up the Western literary canon?

This course offers an introduction to the history of Western literature and is designed to help students refine and articulate their sense of the role of imaginative texts in the life of a Christian.

Works to be read and discussed (in whole or in part) include Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, Dante’s Divine Comedy,Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.