Religion in the News - Dharma East and West: Teaching Philosophies of Fulfillment at Harvard Law School

March 5, 2015
Religion in the News - Dharma East and West: Teaching Philosophies of Fulfillment at Harvard Law School

On Thursday, March 5, at noon, Professor Scott Brewer, Harvard Law School, was a guest at the Center. In his short lunchtime presentation in a crowded conference room, Brewer spoke on “Dharma East and West: Teaching Philosophies of Fulfillment,” telling us about a course he has taught several times at the Law School, “The Fulfilled Life and the Life of the Law.” He surveyed a range of materials, from the Greeks (Plato and Aristotle and the Pyrrhonian skeptics) to the Germans (Nietzsche), to John Rawls and Pierre Hadot — and then on to several tellings of the Buddhist way of a life of equanimity and awareness in the Theravada and Mahayana traditions.

By the time his presentation was done, we all had questions and ideas — about other texts that could be brought into such a course, ranging from the Bhagavad Gita to Christian monastic traditions, about how such a course had come to be and was accepted at the Law School; about how such a course might work differently in Arts and Sciences or here at the Divinity School; and about how thinking through such philosophies amid a legal education would in the short and long run affect the lives of students and their professors.

Professor Brewer’s visit was therefore in some ways an ideal conversation for us to host at the Center: interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and interreligious, argued with insight and at the high level of erudition, while yet still attuned to the practices of teaching, human interaction, and the delicate points at which thinking and spiritual reflection, the work of the classroom and the work of life interact. All of this is what the Center is about on a daily basis, in our programming, and in the community that has grown up within and around us. We look forward to other opportunities to talk with Brewer and others on issues related to the life well-lived, worth living, amid the many religions around us in today’s university.

—By Francis X. Clooney, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions