Endings, Before and After

In Western society, we're not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or even talking about the end. Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without something else's end. This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings: their philosophical and theological conceptions, the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to them, the sociological implications of current approaches. We also contemplate ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new and potentially more advantageous approach to policy decisions by keeping the end in mind.