Flourishing Through a Pandemic: What we Can Learn from World Religions

The COVID-19 pandemic has many people feeling lost and afraid. World religions can provide us with ways to make sense of this experience and provide paths to transcend it. Our local “shelter-in-place” order came towards the end of our Winter term at De Anza College, so I thought it would be useful to both my current and former Comparative Religion students to have a lecture that reviewed the major spiritual traditions from class in light of the current pandemic, both as a way to better understand these traditions and to discuss how they can help us overcome the fear, anger, anxiety, and chaos that the pandemic has brought into many people’s lives.