Village University

Genesis: The Book of Beginnings with Dale Landis

Genesis ranks highly among Biblical books, and all of our literature, “not only because of the burning importance of the material of antiquity with which it deals, but also because of the rich array of modern issues it raises.” [Commentator J. Sibley Towner] We may add its its sheer literary greatness, and its reception life in writing and art. This course will be a walk through Genesis, chapter by chapter. Some things we will consider on this walk are: Ancient Near East background, context within the Bible, narrative and figurative writing, original language and translation, spiritual and moral meanings for all time.
6 Tu, Jan 18-Feb 22, 10 -11:45 am

Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy with Diane Proctor

In July, 1917, Siegfried Sassoon wrote: “I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are sacrificed.” Against this seditious declaration stands Dr. Jonathan Rivers, the psychiatrist charged with “rehabilitating” the famous poet’s “sanity”; in consort with this sentiment, is Sassoon’s fellow poet, Wilfred Owen, who also faces the ghosts of war. All three real life characters meet in Craiglockhart Castle, Scotland, where soldiers are being treated for shell shock and where fictional characters join them, as Pat Barker weaves her absorbing trilogy.

In the course of our discussions we will examine the courage, madness, class divisions, and  insanity of war and look at the ways Regeneration, Eye in the Door, and the Booker Prize winning The Ghost Road take the reader from the interior lives of the characters to the external realities of war. We will spend three weeks discussing each book and finally, we will examine the trilogy as a whole, including the criteria by which  The Ghost Road was awarded the Booker Prize.

Readings over 10 weeks: around 80-99 pages each week. Diane will be teaching from the Plume/Penguin Edition of each book: Regeneration, Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, Pat Barker. No class 2/21.
10 Mo, Jan 24-Apr 4, 11 am-12:30 pm

The Peopling of the Americas with Greg Paris

The American continents have been home to a vast number of Native cultures and civilizations for at least 15,000 years. Their origins have been a continuing puzzle for anthropologists, archaeologists, and geneticists. Questions surrounding the peopling of the Americas include: who were the ancestors of American Indigenous populations, where might they have come from, when, in how many waves, and where did they go?

In this two-session course, we will first provide an overview of past climatic events, introduce the debate between several past and present proposals for migrations, and discuss the kinds of evidence that bear on these arguments. Then we will review some unusual hypotheses, recent findings, some extremely early dates, and discuss the evidence pro and con.

A diverse reading list will be distributed in advance, mostly from accessible research reports and reviews.
We, Feb 2 & 9, 10-11:30 am