Course Objectives
Holy Communion is a spiritual metaphor
for a wholesome and nurturing relationship; it is a life-giving act
of participating in a spiritual community, a community founded upon trust
and love, a community brought together through a shared belief in the grace
extended to humanity through the torture, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Pain is a universal human experience, and Holy Communion is able to bring
together millions of people through its implicit message of hope and reconciliation,
a reconciliation only possible through the pain of Christ, and which helps
each Christian make sense of her own personal pain. Torture, which
also binds together its participants and its witnesses through the universal
experience of pain, inverts this sense of community, just as it inverts
the intimacy of sexual relationships. Torture is a life-taking and
destructive power which forces the bonds of its communion upon a helpless
and unwilling victim at the whim of the torturer. Through this UnHoly
Communion there may be no grace, no reconciliation, and its purpose is
to inflict senseless pain, to destroy meaning, to invert community.
This course is reading and writing
intensive, involves a great deal of oral discussion and intellectual
analysis, and promises to develop personal confidence and leadership skills.
This seminar will begin with a
discussion about the history of torture, and theoretical concepts which
will help us to understand the cultural and psychological functions of
physical abuse; we then will move on to discuss torture in many different
kinds of contexts, some distant from us, some closer to home. We
will end with a study of how young men and women are tortured through rape
and through hazing on American college campuses. In between we will read
and discuss a great number of works which will help to illuminate for us
the horribly intimate nature of torture. The course provides an introduction
to fundamental intellectual concepts of gender, race, the body, and identity;
furthermore this seminar will require practical experience with a number
of Human Rights organizations which deal with the realities of torture.
Thus this course serves as an introduction both to important theoretical
and literary concerns, and also to practical approaches for combating contemporary
social injustice.
