Beyond Belief: Interrogating Belief through Literary and Media Arts

What do you believe in terms of your own spirituality, your identity, your family, your community, your car, your cat? Why do you believe what you believe? What has informed your beliefs? What might be the ramifications of your beliefs? What might you choose not to believe, relying on logic or what you consider incontrovertible fact?

And how might we enter into an exploration of these questions as writers and media artists?

In this program students will be introduced to and experiment with various methods of interrogating their own beliefs. As faculty we aim to cultivate the self-awareness in students to discern their individual beliefs and to foster in students an ability to make conscious choices about what to do with their beliefs.

We will examine--through nonfiction and fiction film and literature, and both personal and academic writing--Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, atheist, and other belief/non-belief rationales. Each student will be guided to narrow his or her individual interrogations to one theme and will be expected to generate a significant creative project along with a research paper. Students will document their interrogation processes and experiences through writing and using media arts tools such as blogs, photography, and audio recording.

Our focus is to explore artistic and ideological discussion/construction of belief. There’s a lot of talk about changing the world. Unless we know ourselves more fully, more authentically, real change is arguably delusional. In one quarter perhaps we can at least begin to gain enough perspective on our own beliefs and inchoate self-knowledge to proceed intelligently with our human journey.

This is a rigorous full-time spring program designed for students who are eager to read, write, research, collaborate, create, and most importantly, interrogate their own beliefs through myriad methods. Students are expected to participate fully in all program activities and to work about 40 hours per week including class time.