Description
This course will draw upon the instructor’s book, The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, to tell the story of how the West (and with it eventually the East) became desecrated (or secularized) with the rise of humanism.
Long after the Great Division, a condition of anthropological pessimism drove many away from Western heterodoxy in its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms to a conviction that man’s purpose is fulfilled in a spiritually untransformed world. Such a world, known to St. Augustine as the saeculum, exchanged the paradisical culture of early Christendom for utopia. For four centuries, humanism inspired some of the West’s greatest achievements in art and science, but it could not sustain Christendom’s primordial need for a transcendent anchor in heaven.
Course Details
Dates/Times: Tuesdays at 5:00 PM PST, beginning September 15th. Recordings will be provided to all students.
Length of Course: 5 weeks
Class Format: Each class is two hours long and combines lecture with guided discussion, giving participants opportunities to ask questions and interact directly with the instructor.
Instructor
Father John Strickland is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America and serves as the rector of
Saint Elizabeth Orthodox Church in Poulsbo, Washington. He is the author of The Making of
Holy Russia and the four-volume Paradise and Utopia: Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. He holds a
doctorate in history and for more than two decades has taught in a variety of college settings. He
is married with five children and in his free time enjoys woodworking and listening to classical
music.