Academe has trained us all to think of learning as a competitive affair. One scholar is right, another wrong; students compete against each other for the highest grade. In truth, though, all learning takes place in the context of intellectual communities--written, virtual, or face-to-face. Institutions of higher education like this afford us the privilege and pleasure of reading together and learning from each other. Our job in this seminar is to create an intellectual community, one in which we are all enriched by each others' readings of difficult material. And this is difficult material, without a doubt, which is why we need each other's help to read it well and try to understand how it can (or fails to) speak to our situation in the world. This imposes on each of us the responsibility of reading carefully, speaking up about our insights and questions, and listening respectfully to each other (which is not to say always agreeing).