lecture 1. Meaning : a question and a commitment --
lecture 2. Hero and saint : mapping the cultural genome --
lecture 3. The heroic age : the Greek worldview --
lecture 4. Heroism and the tragic view of life --
lecture 5. Plato : politics, justice, and philosophy --
lecture 6. Plato's Republic : the hero's reward --
lecture 7. The heroic ideal in late Stoicism --
lecture 8. "In the beginning" : the Hebrew worldview --
lecture 9. Father Abraham, the first saint --
lecture 10. Saintly types in the Hebrew Bible --
lecture 11. Jesus as saintly innovator : forgiving love --
lecture 12. Hero or saint? Saul of Tarsus.
lecture 13. Hero or saint? Augustine of Hippo --
lecture 14. Mohammed : the prophet as saintly innovator --
lecture 15. Saint Francis and Dante : saintly troubadours --
lecture 16. The agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo --
lecture 17. Enlightenment patterns of cultural mutation --
lecture 18. Mt. Myrah revisited : saintly transgression --
lecture 19. A history of suspicion : Marx, Darwin, Freud --
lecture 20. Nietzsche : the return of the tragic hero --
lecture 21. Dostoevsky : the return of the saint --
lecture 22. A century of trauma --
lecture 23. The quantum leap --
lecture 24. Existentialism : Sartre and de Beauvoir.
lecture 25. Camus and the absurd hero --
lecture 26. Flannery O'Connor and the mystery of grace --
lecture 27. The Holocaust and the crisis of forgiveness --
lecture 28. Faulkner and Beckett : images of the forlorn --
lecture 29. Viktor Frankl : freedom's search for meaning --
lecture 30. Simone Weil : imagining the secular saint --
lecture 31. Simone Weil : a new Augustine? --
lecture 32. Identifying the secular saint --
lecture 33. The secular saint at the movies --
lecture 34. Ernest Becker : the denial of death --
lecture 35. Terror and hope in a planetary age --
lecture 36. The secular saint : learning to walk upright.