Unit 1: What is the Future?

Week 1

Tuesday, August 30

• Richard Taylor, “Temporal Passage”
• Plenary with mini-lectures and small-group discussions: Presentism vs. the Block Universe.

Thursday, September 1 (am)

• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
• Moodle: Questions or Comments about Taylor or Borges (Due by 8am)
• Discussion sections: Students discuss Borges. Sections also come up with questions to ask in the afternoon.

Thursday, September 1 (pm)

• Plenary in Hance with mini-lectures and small-group discussions: Borges debrief.

Week 2

Tuesday, September 6

• Ted Chiang, “What’s Expected of Us” from Nature (2005) 
• Ana Anthropy, Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013)
• Moodle: Video Reaction to Queers in Love at the End of the World
• Discussion Sections: Consider Chiang and Anthropy, including the alternative notions of temporality and futurity they offer

Thursday, September 8 (am)

• Chapters 6-13 of Parable of the Sower, pages 61-150
• Moodle: Lauren Olamina’s Missing Journal Entries
• Discussion Sections: discuss Octavia Butler’s vision of futurity

Thursday, September 8 (pm)

• Plenary: The Technological Imagination

Week 3

Tuesday, September 13

• Watch Heidi Schrek, What the Constitution Means to Me (2020); read the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Click on “Read a Transcript” for each document. Note: the BOR text includes the original 12 amendments proposed, of which only 10 were ratified. Our present-day first amendment was actually the third in this resolution.

• Make sure you have looked through Getting Started with Davidson Domains in the Portfolio tab on the webpage
• Moodle: Respond to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and What the Constitution Means to Me
• Discussion Sections: What is the future (of interpretation)?

Thursday September 15 (am)

• Read “An Ancient Mistranslation is Now Threatening Abortion Rights“
• Brandon J. Murrill, Modes of Constitutional Interpretation (2018)
• Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2 – 3 Reread,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1992), 74-83
• Put Davidson Domains address on the spreadsheet.
• Plenary in Hance with Author/alumna Katey Zeh ’05
• On interpretation, rereading, and letting old readings go

Thursday, September 15 (pm)

• Read Mark Noll, “The ‘Bible Alone’ and a Reformed, Literal Hermeneutic,” in America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (OUP 2002)
• And Stanley Fish, “Working on the Chain Gang,” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal and Literary Studies (Duke 1992) 
• Moodle: The Past, Present, and Future of Interpretation
• Plenary: How to write (and read) (for) the future: Bible & Constitution