A Lecture Arc in Three Parts
Genocide, crimes against humanity, and the problem of human evil
The century that gave us the word also gave us the thing it names, again and again. These three lectures begin with the Holocaust, widen to the pattern of mass killing from Armenia to Srebrenica, and end with the question every religious and ethical tradition has had to face since: what are human beings, that we do this to one another?
Seven cases studied across the arc. The list is not exhaustive; the century was not either.
History first, then pattern, then meaning. Each lecture's page holds its slide deck, background essay, narrative script, and further resources.
Night and Fog
From modern antisemitism and the so-called "Jewish Question" through the laws of 1933–1939 to the "Final Solution": how a policy became a genocide, what it cost, and why the words Holocaust and Shoah carry different weight. The lecture opens with a wolf and closes with a film.
Content note: includes archival photographs of atrocities.
A crime without a name
Raphael Lemkin named the crime; this lecture follows it across the century — Armenia, the Holodomor, the Gulag and Pavel Florensky, Nanjing, Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica — and asks who the perpetrators and the victims actually were. The required Pierian Spring extends to crimes against humanity: the Red Terror and Great Terror, the "comfort women," Unit 731, why death tolls differ, and how naming and denial work.
Content note: includes archival photographs of atrocities and descriptions of mass killing and sexual violence.
God, evil, and human choice after the Holocaust
A hanging at Buna opens the question. Jewish and Christian thinkers answer it differently; Jedwabne and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon show what ordinary people chose when the choice was theirs; Kant's radical evil and Arendt's banality of evil give us two ways to name what we have seen. The arc ends not with an answer but with a responsibility.
Content note: describes the hanging of a child at Auschwitz and the burning of a town's Jews in a barn. Images in this deck are AI-generated painted interpretations, not photographs.
The Word, Defined
Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II (1948)
Lemkin coined the word in 1944; the United Nations made it law in 1948. Much of the second lecture turns on what this definition includes, what it leaves out, and why the line matters to the people on either side of it.
The background essay for each lecture is written to be read before class. It carries the scholarship and the notes; the deck carries the argument. They are meant to be taken together.
These materials show and describe what happened. Nothing is included for shock, but nothing has been softened either. If you need to step away from a slide or a passage, do so and return.
This is a World Religions course. The third lecture asks what Judaism, Christianity, and the philosophical tradition have said in the face of this history. Bring the first two lectures with you into that one.