Living Deliberately through Existential Despair (Video)

One of the single best book-related conversations Justin McDaniel, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Religious Studies, has ever had was with two of his students. On his request, they’d spent seven hours reading all 480 pages, no cell phones, no distractions, just reading pure and simple. “This was a book that had nothing to do with them,” McDaniel recalls, yet their analysis of the text was “brilliant.”

The success of that exercise prompted McDaniel to scale up the idea to what has since become the course Existential Despair, which he’s been teaching since 2017. Once a week, students take from 5 p.m. to midnight to read a whole book, sometimes without knowing anything about it or the author. There are class discussions—conducted in pitch black usually—and every time McDaniel runs the course, it’s different. What doesn’t change is how his students, when unplugged from other distractions and singularly focused, blossom.

For a Knowledge by the Slice in late January, McDaniel spoke about this class, another he created and has taught at Penn since 2009 called Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life, and how the “monastic” challenges he asks of his students—for instance, spending a month in silence—can lead to unexpected breakthroughs and moments of clarity.

The point of all it, he told a packed room in Irvine Auditorium, is to give students a chance to learn that education isn’t about accumulation and performance, that it’s about more than preparing for a career. The intent, he says, is to allow students the opportunity to engage with texts that are “simply worth talking about. They love it—and it has nothing to do with the teacher. This is just good material. Give them the time and space to delve into it.”