Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life

[01] Meaning: a question and a commitment [02] Hero and saint: mapping the cultural genome [03] Heroic age: the Greek worldview [04] Heroism and the tragic view of life [05] Plato: politics, justice, and philosophy [06] Plato's Republic: the hero's reward [07] Heroic ideal in late Stoicism [08] "In the beginning": the Hebrew worldview [09] Father Abraham, the first saint [10] Saintly types in the Hebrew Bible [11] Jesus as saintly innovator: forgiving love [12] Hero or saint? Saul of Tarsus [13] Hero or saint? Augustine of Hippo [14] Mohammed: the prophet as saintly innovator [15] Saint Francis and Dante: saintly troubadours [16] Agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo [17] Enlightenment patterns of cultural mutation [18] Mt. Myrah revisited: saintly transgression [19] A history of suspicion: Marx, Darwin, Freud [20] Nietzsche: the return of the tragic hero [21] Dostoevsky: the return of the saint [22] A century of trauma [23] Quantum leap [24] Existentialism: Sartre and de Beauvoir [25] Camus and the absurd hero [26] Flannery O'Connor and the mystery of grace [27] Holocaust and the crisis of forgiveness [28] Faulkner and Beckett: images of the forlorn [29] Viktor Frankl: freedom's search for meaning [30] Simone Weil: imagining the secular saint [31] Simone Weil: a new Augustine? [32] Identifying the secular saint [33] Secular saint at the movies [34] Ernest Becker: the denial of death [35] Terror and hope in a planetary age [36] Secular saint: learning to walk upright