In this course, we will reflect on the power and role of the arts as responses to the claims of human suffering, by engaging the Book of Job as a template for performance of the problem. The Book of Job, often seen as the biblical traditions’ answer to the problems of evil and suffering, challenges facile pieties in ways cherished by believers and skeptics alike, and adapted by artists in a wide range of times and contexts. Ritual, dramatic, and other narrative enactments will be considered, including ancient liturgies, medieval morality plays, William Blake’s cycle of “Illustrations of the Book of Job,” Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.: A Play in Verse,” songs by Joni Mitchell, Anna Ruth Henriques’ “The Book of Mechtilde,” the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man,” Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” and the community performances of Outside the Wire.