Course 8: The Symptoms
Diploma Program · Course 8 · 3 Credits
It is 3am. You are awake. Nothing in particular is wrong. You have a job. You have people who love you, or at least who say they do. The bills are paid or are going to be. And yet there is a weight on your chest you cannot quite locate. Not grief. Not anxiety exactly. Not regret. Something older than any of those and underneath all of them. A weight that was there at 3am ten years ago too. Most readers, sitting with that paragraph, recognize it. The recognition is the first thing this course is about.
The list of symptoms the course names is universal. It shows up in every culture, every era, every class, every religion, every political arrangement, every economic system. It shows up in peasants and in kings. The usual explanations — psychological, sociological, biological, economic — each describe part of the list, and none of them adequately accounts for it. The usual remedies treat parts of the list and do not reach the cluster underneath. This course is about reading the cluster as a single chart, naming the condition the chart is pointing at, and looking honestly at what the cluster has been telling readers all along.
How this course is structured. Course 8 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Symptoms first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the diagnostic read the book has been teaching you on a piece of your own inheritance about what the symptoms mean. Assignment 2 asks you to explain what you have been studying to a friend, in the voice a real conversation would take. Assignment 3 asks you to take the same diagnostic read outside of Christianity entirely, find a cluster of symptoms in the wild that has been popularly misattributed to the wrong cause, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to read a cluster as a chart instead of as a list of unrelated complaints.
The Textbook
The Symptoms
Six chapters, one sustained move: the symptoms most adults carry are not a collection of unrelated complaints but a single chart pointing at a specific underlying condition, and the usual surface treatments do not reach the cluster they are coming out of. The book opens with the list, walks through why each of the usual explanations falls short, and lays out the diagnostic read that takes the chart seriously and follows it down to what is actually going on.
The Three Assignments
Each assignment is a complete work package: the reading that precedes it, the structure of the work, and the specification for the paper and videos you produce. The three assignments build on each other. Assignment 1 gives you the move on the page. Assignment 2 gives you the move in conversation. Assignment 3 gives you the move outside of the domain the book worked in.
The Chart You Had Not Been Reading
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios about a cluster of symptoms most adults carry, and perform the diagnostic read that takes the cluster as a single chart pointing at a specific underlying condition rather than a list of unrelated complaints. Produce a paper of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words and a recorded video of ten minutes. Respond to three challenge questions in a second video.
Telling Your Friend What the Symptoms Are Saying
The register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate a move to an instructor. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned — a real friend, not a catechumen and not a skeptic. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words, a ten-minute video, and a challenge response.
The Transfer: Finding a Misread Cluster in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the diagnostic read the book uses across all six of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a cluster of symptoms in the wild that has been popularly misattributed to the wrong cause, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.