Six-week seminars led by world-class scholars exploring how ancient faith meets the pressing questions of our time. Take a course for personal enrichment or earn ICS credit toward a Master’s degree.
Fall 2026
Jacob Benjamins · Starting June 2, 2026
How might we live a “contemplative life” in an age of digital distraction? This course examines both the difficulty and promise of cultivating a broadly defined contemplative life today, as a resource for navigating political chaos, the crisis of truth, rapidly changing technology, and spiritual exhaustion. Alongside weekly readings, students engage practices such as digital fasting, slow reading, spiritual writing, time in nature, and silence. The course does not portray contemplative life in opposition to the active or practical life, but seeks an integrative spirituality that complicates binaries such as theory and praxis, philosophy and spirituality, activity and passivity.
About the Instructor
Jacob Benjamins is a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Christian Studies. He is the author of The Play of Goodness: Creation, Phenomenology, and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2025), and co-editor of two forthcoming collections on contemplation and philosophy: The Act of Contemplation: Metaphysics, Phenomenology and the Religious Life (University of Toronto Press) and From Contemplation to Critique: Key Figures of Social Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Studies in Spirituality).
Course Fees
How It Works
Free to be Faithful courses involve a dynamic blend of expert lectures and in-class discussions, all delivered online via Zoom. Each course runs for six consecutive weeks, meeting once a week for two hours.
Take individual courses as a non-credit participant for your own interest and enrichment. Take them for credit as you can fit them into your schedule. Or complete the program and earn a Master of Worldview Studies (MWS) degree.
Course Catalogue
F2BF courses rotate each term. Here are some of the courses we've offered and plan to offer again.
Sylvia Keesmaat
Exploring how the Bible has been interpreted with regard to questions of sexuality and gender.
Bruce Berglund
Exploring resistance and complicity through 20th-century European history.
Karen Swallow Prior
Reading literature to restore the soul — classic and contemporary fiction and poetry.
Angela Reitsma Bick
Canadian writers explore the quiet deconstruction of faith through narrative and story.
Matthew D. Taylor
Antisemitism, Christian Zionism, and Israel — situating today's tensions in historical and theological context.
Karen Swallow Prior
How stories, images, and metaphors created a culture in crisis — centred on Prior's book of the same name.