Why This Text Matters | Pascal's Pensées | Russell P. Johnson

Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

About the Text:
Blaise Pascal's seventeenth-century book Pensées ("Thoughts") is a classic of philosophy, theology, and French literature. Pascal insists that the human condition is inherently contradictory: we want happiness but know we cannot sustain it, we want truth but are too anxious and distracted to believe it. In a series of posthumously collected fragments, Pascal argues that only an embodied, enacted Christian faith can reconcile these contradictions. In this video, Dr. Russell Johnson explains Pascal's reasoning, the context and rhetoric of the book, and why readers as diverse as T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche have been inspired by Pascal's thoughts.