Personal Choice and Global Transformation
I have a small collection of lecture videos from a friend-of-a-friend who attends Harvard and I’d like to start sharing them here. The videos are from the course Religion 1529: Personal Choice and Global Transformation, taught by Brian Palmer. Despite being offered from Harvard’s religion department, topics are consistently secular (although one wouldn’t be surprised to find overlaps with the Unitarian Universalist church).
The format of the course is unique; guest speakers of a certain liberal flavor—Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, among others—are interviewed by the class of approximately 300. Students take turns asking questions based on assigned readings from each speaker. This isn’t a post-lecture Q&A session, the whole 60-minute class period is devoted to questions.
The questions posed by students are often mundane, badly worded and sometimes unintentionally profound. But the speakers, for the most part, manage to keep things interesting and do their best to make an impression on the country’s future élite. You might say it’s a course about how to live a good life, when ‘good’ is defined in terms of a progressive social awareness. This first one I’ve uploaded isn’t the first from the course, but I think it does a good job of introducing the overall thrust of the course.
Religion 1529: Dan Matthews, animal rights activist (96 MB Real video)
Yes, I know, Real media sucks. Maybe sometime I’ll get around to converting it to something unproprietary. Also: this lecture isn’t actually featuring Dan Matthews—he couldn’t appear due to being jailed for his activism. One other thing: the video takes a little time to get going at first and I think the audio doesn’t cut in for a few minutes.