REL 308
Nietzche and Religion
Last Offered Fall 2012
Division II
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Few thinkers have been as controversial or as outspoken about religion as the nineteenth century German theorist/philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. His work was not understood during his lifetime, or so he thought, and there are definitely controversies surrounding the way the writings of Nietzsche ought to be applied in the early twenty-first century. We will see Nietzsche as a lonely curmudgeon who hated his rigid, Lutheran upbringing, as well as his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. But we will also see the many fruitful dialogues created by his fractured personality and vitriolic books which, perhaps despite his intentions, speak to religion in both a destructive and constructive way, as well as to later thinkers.