Assigned Essays

Here are the three pairs of polemical essays on the reading list scheduled on the course Syllabus.

1. A.C. Grayling: "The Empty Name of God" —vs— A.N. Wilson: "Why I Believe Again."
2. Edward O. Wilson: "Intelligent Evolution" —vs— G.K. Chesterton: "The Man in the Cave."
3. Richard Dawkins: "Atheists for Jesus" —vs— Terry Eagleton: "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching."

Background articles for "The da Vinci Code"

• Ron Howard: Vatican obstructed 'Angels & Demons'. [yahoo.com] "Director Ron Howard claimed Sunday that the Vatican interfered with efforts to get permits to shoot certain scenes of his "Angels & Demons" religious thriller in Rome — a charge the Vatican said was purely a publicity stunt."
• Catholics attack Dan Brown film Angels and Demons. [Telegraph .co.uk] "Catholic leaders have attacked the film sequel to The Da Vinci Code for its "gratuitously outlandish" portrayal of the Church."
• Christopher Hitchens. "Mommie Dearest: The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud."
• OpusDei.org. The Da Vinci Code, the Catholic Church and Opus Dei. "Many people are intrigued by the claims about Christian history and theology presented in The Da Vinci Code. We would like to remind them that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, and it is not a reliable source of information on these matters. "

Course Years Divider

Posts above this are for English 101W in Summer 2010.

Post below this point are from previous iterations of this course. They may, or may not, be useful to you.

Art -vs- Polemic

Here's a video clip to a song by Canadian musician: Sarah Slean with "Lucky Me." The lyrics address the dialectic set up in our course, but in an artistic, rather than polemical, manner.

Update: here is a link to a discussion on Sarah Slean's homepage about the dialectic in the song. Note how the dialectic in her lyrics is artistic rather than polemic. (My thanks to "Anonymous" for hard work transcribing the lyrics in the comments here.)

Lecture Slides

The course lecture slides are available online, here. They are numbered in sequence that they were delivered: and note that some slide sets span two or three lectures.