Writing Our Spiritual Lives (2024)

Students will read some of the best in spiritual writing and write short reflections on these readings, study theories of essay writing, discuss the meaning of spirituality, and produce several shorter and at least one longer piece of writing with feedback from each other and the instructor. They will learn what makes for good writing, and develop their own voice, moral imagination, and capacity for creativity and self-expression, and learn how to offer valuable feedback. Such qualities allow the student to move through their day with compassion, imagination, empathy and clarity, and deepen their NeoHumanist stance in the world. Experience a completely unique learning journey! Students will:

• Students will learn the nuts and bolts, through study and practice, of effective creative writing.
• Students will learn about the essay, both sentence-level and essay-level craft, and about what carries a good piece of writing forward, through lectures and exercises.
• Students will learn the tools for assessing their classmates’ writing, and for giving valuable feedback and put those into practice in a workshop setting.
• Students will think deeply about their own spiritual lives in class discussion, reading, and exercises, and thus gain on a moral/emotional/aesthetic level, sifting through their experience to find meaning, pondering such questions as ‘What is authenticity’, ‘How do I find the sacred within the ordinary?’ ‘How do I describe an experience which may border on the ineffable?’ ‘What is my relationship to the divine, if any?