date last updated: 17 December 2002
Online Courses, 2002-2003
Each online course involves studies basic to the subject. In addition, each learner pursues studies related to her or his own interests in the broader subject area and brings that learning back to the whole group.
For an in-depth description of a course, click on its name.
Track: Spirit of Place
We have the power to rethink our existence, our time in earth’s embrace, and step forward with compassionate intelligence. If we align ourselves with the spirit of place, we will find humility infused with joy.
Terry Tempest Williams, from
Pieces of White Shell
Place underscores our relationship with our environment. We are never nowhere. From our first environment in our mother’s wombs to the last breath we take, we continually interact with the world around us. How do we understand our relationship with our world, with each other? During the course of the Spirit of Place online courses, we will look to illuminate the interconnected relationships between place, story, time, and spirit. Our terrain will cover the exterior landscape and our own creative interior landscapes to see how they interconnect and how we might find a deeper sense of harmony and resonance with our natural world.
People, Place, and Story (Fall 2002)
When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the latter may lead is anybody’s guess.
Keith Basso, from Wisdom Sits in Places
Our sense of place is often so infused into our lives that we do not always have the vocabulary to tease out the ways in which our relationship with place impacts our lives. This course looks at the ways in which place affects our biological makeup, language and social development, and our sense of self and community. It explores the ways in which cultures who value place create structures of meaning through story, and so leads us to consider anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff’s hypothesis that humans are Homo narrans, the storying species. If we are, what impact might assuming the role of the storying species have on the world?
Ecospiritual Literature
(Winter 2002-2003)
I think that the spirit which informs the landscape is more important than the rise of civilization. The spirit is really what matters. We certainly have the power to kill ourselves, but we do not, in my opinion, have the power to kill the universe. I find great consolation in that. I like the idea that my star sisters will be there long after I’m gone, and very likely long after any human existence on earth…I think that if I can meld my spirit with the spirit of the mountain, that’s as much of eternity as I can know. It’s enough to satisfy me.
N. Scott Momaday, from Ancestral Voice
Scientific inquiry often begins with a personal sense of wonder found in the natural world. John Muir found everything in nature hitched to everything else. Henry David Thoreau found his faith in a seed. This course we examines the ways in which we dwell in the world to see how that affects both our sense of spirituality and our connection with the natural world. We look at our emotional landscapes of faith, love, death and home to see from how those concepts interact with our relationship with the natural world. Then we look at the ways in which naturalists have found the language for expressing the connection between their environments and the landscapes of their souls.
Creative Spirit and the Wild (Spring 2003)
It is that except by the measure of wildness, we shall never really know the nature of a place, and without a sense of place we shall never really make a poem, and without a poem we shall never be fully human.
Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity
of Empty Places
One of the great misquotes of the environmental movement comes from Henry David Thoreau’s essay 'Walking' where some claim he wrote, 'In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World.' Thoreau did not write wilderness, he wrote wildness. Is there an essential difference? Why is wildness the preservation of the world? In this course we explore the intersection between our external landscapes and our creative inscape to see how the wildness of the natural world functions both outside and within us.
Track: Spirituality and the Sciences
Stephen Hawking’s explanations of physics are best selling books. Time Magazine is filled with pictures of protesters marching in the streets against genetically modified foods. Politicians are elected based on their stances regarding the legislation of stem cell research, cloning, and the use of reproductive technologies. Storefronts advertise ways to find inner peace, happiness, and love. The beginning of the 21st Century is very much a time of the merging of questions about our relationship with science and our relationship with spirituality. These courses examine the current questions in the fields of biology, human sciences and physical sciences to encourage learners to look at the ways in which theses fields interact with concepts of spirituality, religion, morality, and ethics. Are the fields the polarized opposites that they are often portrayed or is there room for the two approaches to find a middle ground which will help them both adapt and evolve in the future?
Spirituality and the Biological Sciences (Fall 2002)
Each day the news seems filled more and more with stories relating to genetic
engineering, biomedical technologies, celebrations of new scientific
breakthroughs and fears of abuses of the scientific research. Many of those
questions bring together the biological sciences and the realms of ethics,
religious tradition, spirituality and faith. This course examines some of the
leading questions and issues in current biology such as cloning, genomes,
paleobiology, neuroscience, and human development to looks at ways in which
spirituality informs and engages them.
Spirituality and the Human Sciences
(Winter 2002-2003)
What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of love, happiness or purpose? For centuries theologians have wrestled with these questions. More recently, neuroscientists and social psychologists have studied the ways in which we experience the phenomena of what it means to be human. Consciousness, language, social psychology, and different ways of knowing become the centerpoint of a discussion on the ways in which spirituality interconnects with the question of what it means to be human.
Spirituality and the Physical Sciences
(Spring 2003)
If Darwin’s theory of Evolution shaped the late 19th Century, then discoveries and explanations found in relativity and quantum physics shaped the 20th Century. How does the way in which physics describes the creation of the universe interface with the ways in which religion has traditionally explained the creation of the world? Does religion find its explanations in science? Are the physicists doing this research informed by their spiritual beliefs? This course examines the cutting edge questions in contemporary physics and looks to see ways in which the growing dialogue between science and spirit centers on questions of ways of knowing the universe.
Click for a special note for current or prospective Union and Vermont learners