Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

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for self exploration and self development for both men and women

Conference Facility in Santa Rosa, California with accommodations

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How Proust Might Read the Gospels

For centuries the Gospels have been read as historical documents containing data about the life and death of Jesus. In modern times the science of biblical criticism confronted what appeared to be discrepancies in the Gospel data and eventually concluded the Gospels are not historical in intent but glorifications of Jesus created out of the faith and imagination of early believers.

Biblical critics then proceeded to separate threads of fact from fantasy in an attempt to arrive at a truly historical residue of Jesus and his actual sayings.

This course will assess the Gospels from a somewhat different angle. Guided by Marcel Proust's analysis of our experiences of "involuntary memory" and its capacity to lift us beyond our usual corridor of selective, self-serving memory and anticipation of the future, we shall look at the Gospels as a product of Proustian recall. We shall approach them as a poetic recollection of the fuller, deeper reality of Jesus which the disciples failed to retain as long as they chose to confine him within their utilitarian consciousness.

The Gospels are the product of experiences such as the disciples had on the road to Emmaus. After lamenting the death of Jesus and his failure to achieve the ends they had in mind, suddenly they remembered him instinctually, aesthetically and more profoundly in the breaking of the bread.

Led by Geoffrey E. Wood, S.S.L., S.T.D.
Dr. Wood has a Ph.D. in Sacred Theology from Catholic University, Washington, D.C., and a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from Rome's Pontifical Bible Institute. He has taught at Catholic University, Swarthmore and Bucknell University.

Cost: $48 (Bring a friend free) Please make reservations.

2000

Four Wednesday evenings

March 22
March 29
April 5
April 12

7:30 - 9:15 p.m.