Lancaster Region

A troubling gap has opened in the social and political fabric of the United States, and people of faith and spirituality now find themselves on one side or the other—often alienated from family, friends, and brothers and sisters in the community and the church. In this course, we'll try to understand what caused the great divide and think together about how we can communicate in love despite our differences. We'll focus our conversation around Arlie Russell Hochschild's 2016 book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

The lecture describes the evolution of the Holocaust from early Christian European anti-Judaism to the emergence of a pseudo-scientific justification for anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The lecture also examines the response of the United States to the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and its decision to murder every man, woman, and child in Nazi-occupied Europe.