COURSES
Humanities classes often fulfill Core Requirements for students in all majors. Learn more about our courses.
SPRING 2025 COURSES
HUM 2001–001
Dr. Anna Moreland
T/Th 2:30-3:45 pm
Core: Advanced Theology
How can humans make claims about God? What do they imply, and are they well founded? We will also consider what the questions and potential answers about God reveal about human life, society, and nature. The course begins by considering modern critiques of religion that help us understand our own uses and abuses of religion. We then inquire whether it is responsible to love and believe in a Christian God. In doing so, we must consider the possibility that God reveals Himself precisely to help us know and love God. After investigating claims about revelation, we turn to theological questions that arise out of the experience of having a relationship with God. We conclude with a dramatic investigation of the major themes of the course.
HUM 2002–001
Dr. Paul Camacho
T/Th 1:00-2:15 pm
Cross List: Peace & Justice, Public Service Administration
It has been said that a crisis in humanism—an insufficient understanding of the human person—underlay the manifold political, social, and historical tragedies of the twentieth century and their ongoing repercussions. In this course, we will attempt to engage the major questions confronting us in the twentieth-first century by examining fundamental aspects of the human experience, from birth through death, and considering how to pursue the good in the dramatic unfolding of human life. We will consider together the manifold strange wonders that make us human, including food, family, friendship, education, work, and love.
HUM 2003–001
Dr. Jesse Couenhoven/Dr. Jahdiel Perez
T/Th 10:00 am–11:155 am
Cross List: Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Sustainability Minor
The way we look at and understand the natural world affects the way we think about ourselves, and vice versa. In this class, we will consider the conceptions of the world most common today, discuss their origins, examine their presuppositions, and think through their implications both for our relationship toward the world and also for our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Among the topics we will cover are: how we experience, observe and conceptualize the world; what it means to give a causal explanation; what it means to speak of God as creator and why one would do so; the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion; and the meaning of the human person and social order in relation to the world.
HUM 2004–001
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
T/Th 11:30 am -12:45 pm
Cross List: Peace & Justice, Political Science, Public Service & Administration
We live in a time when political, economic, and family life compete to occupy our horizon of concerns. Our culture is often cynical about the possibility of finding meaning in these fundamental aspects of human society. But is that right? How well does the modern view of society as a contract amongst consenting individuals really work? What insights can we glean from a more ancient understanding of society as a fulfillment of human nature? Does society help or impede our quest to find truth or to become our best selves? To truly understand the human person, it is essential to think hard about our relationship to society. To do so we will take up Hobbes, Locke, DuBois, Aristotle, Rousseau, Lewis Mumford, Nietzsche, John Ruskin, and William Morris. |
HUM 1975-001
Dr. Helena Tomko
T/Th 2:30-3:45 pm
Core: Literature & Writing Seminar
An “epiphany” is a moment of recognition that sheds light on the human condition and the mystery of creation. Pope John Paul II, himself a poet and avant-garde playwright, spoke of how a deep engagement with literary art can realize new moments of recognition, which he called "epiphanies of beauty." But how can the wonder of such an “ah ha” moment change our lives? Can it ever mislead us? These literary, social, theological, and ethical questions animate this core literature and writing seminar. We will engage in close reading of many genres, including novel, drama, poetry, short story, non-fiction, and film. Our authors include Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Zadie Smith, Franz Kafka, Karen Blixen, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Using a multi-faceted humanistic methodology, we will work on developing interpretative skills for both poetry and prose and writing thesis-driven critical essays about how literary art can illuminate what is good and what is beautiful. |
HUM 2100-001
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
T/Th 4:00—5:15 pm
Cross List: Peace & Justice
Whatever we think about the spiritual world, the fact remains that we inhabit a material world in which we must work and make things to survive, and even to flourish. What are the meanings of work, and how is it distinguished from toil? What does the production and consumption of goods--as well as the care we provide for people and things--tell us about the human person, the world, and God? What role do goods play in the good life? In this course, we explore economic life through texts in theology, philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, literature, and the arts.
HUM 2900–001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
M/W 1:55-3:10 pm
Cross List: Fine Arts
Religion and the sacred have taken on many forms in the American landscape, from traditional churches on the town green to more ethereal constructions of spirituality in parks and cities. Shifts in architectural expressions of religion reveal changes in the practice of religion in the United States, which has been and remains a foundational component of American culture. This course examines architecture and religion in the United States within its context as a public expression of belief and its connection to place and landscape. Our charge in this seminar is to explore the many ways in which Americans have constructed religion and the sacred in the American landscape.
HUM 2900–002
Dr. Ryan Brown
M/W 4:45-6:00 pm
Core: Diversity 1
Cross List: P&J, Political Science, Africana Studies
This course seeks to understand contemporary concerns about race in America amid the dignity that American democracy promises to uphold and respect. Through constructive dialogue between political philosophers and African American authors, we will deepen our understanding of the puzzling and challenging interplay of race, democracy, and dignity.
HUM 2900–004
Dr. Michael Tomko
M/W/F 10:40–11:30 am
“The child is the father of the man” wrote the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. The claim is that childhood experience crafts our adult selves, an insight that helps to explain the intensity of our contemporary debates about reforming education or improving parenting. But do we know what type of adults we want our children to raise? Exploring assumptions about the human person that frame our current approach to children, we will consider developments that either reduce the child’s intellect to a marketable utility or neglect to envision any form of the good life. We will also gain a clearer understanding of what goods we seek in children and in ourselves and how best to pursue those goods, drawing on the philosophical insights of Josef Pieper and Abraham Heschel, the theologically-informed teaching theories of Sofia Cavelleti and Maria Montessori, and the classic work of children’s literature, The Secret Garden.
HUM 3400–001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
M/W 3:20–4:35 pm
Core: History
Cross List: Environ. Studies, Sustainability Minor
In 1964, historian Leo Marx published the book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America in which he coined the phrase “the machine in the garden” to explain the persistent ideal—and some say myth—of the pastoral and wild in the American landscape and how such an idea clashes with our modern life, one often ruled by technology and the machine. Marx’s “machine in the garden” idea proved influential, used by historians of culture, architecture, and art in wide-ranging scholarship. What Marx did was to name a paradoxical concept that emerges when we put into conversation different eras of history and look for trends over time and even across cultures. Marx seemed to capture something in the American ethos that attempted to explain our relationship between two seemingly opposing ideas: nature and the machine. In short, Marx did the historian’s work of looking to evidence to draw out larger meaning, to construct an argument, and to help bring into greater clarity American identity and our relationship with modernity.
This class takes Marx’s idea of “the machine in the garden” and examines it critically. We will think through what it means for historians to construct meta narratives about different historical periods, and whether Marx’s concept of the “machine in the garden” is a convincing concept within American history. We will also examine the success and the power of his historiographic method, often grounded in “Great Books” and canonical artworks. The second half of the course pivots to consider the limitations of this method and the opportunities for discovery opened up by alternative historiographic methodologies. Subsequent units will examine histories that 1) take seriously the study of the built environment, with the American Arts and Craft movement as its central case study; 2) incorporate voices and evidence from the margins of U.S. history, with case studies drawn from Native American and African American experiences and the National Parks; and 3) question the assumptions of the secularization thesis by re-examining case studies of modern “sacred spaces” such as Central Park and Arts and Crafts chapels. These will reveal just how complex, varied, and contested is the idea of the “machine in the garden” within U.S. cultural history, social history, material culture history, and art history.
HUM 4200–001
Dr. Jesse Couenhoven
T/Th 8:30–9:45 am
Core: Advanced Theology, Diversity 3
Cross list: P&J
Despite its importance for our own everyday lives there is still much disagreement about both the nature of forgiveness and the circumstances under which it is appropriate to forgive. Our discussion in this seminar will center on a handful of basic but difficult questions: On what basis can we forgive? Does forgiveness abrogate justice? Does forgiveness mean we should always resist anger? Can a person who has not repented be forgiven? What is the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation? Do differing religions think about forgiveness differently? And finally, can forgiveness be a duty? Answers to these questions are significant in part for personal reasons; we need to know how to relate to other persons who have wronged us. It is no surprise, then, that forgiveness has become a topic of increasing importance for psychologists, theologians, and philosophers. Questions about forgiveness are also significant because of their implications for political choices in troubled times, as we will see in discussing the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa, and in comparing the ways different religions approach forgiveness.
HUM 6500–100
Dr. Michael Tomko
T 6:15–8:55 pm
One of the primary aims of the Humanities Department is to help you achieve a human and integrated perspective on your learning. As the “capstone” to your undergraduate career, the senior symposium is an opportunity for you to reflect, with your classmates, on what you have learned in the major, to tie together the various ideas to which you have been introduced, and to explore a particular question that has especially struck you over the course of your studies. There are two major components of the course.
First, we will engage in the type of intellectual conviviality that characterizes Humanities in discussions of short writings from the themes of each of the Seminars. This will enable us to review and consolidate those central courses and will reinforce your intellectual habits and vocation to the intellectual life for the world beyond ÄĚĚÇÖ±˛Ą.
Second, you will take on a major writing project, the senior essay, that will allow you to explore a topic in depth and synthesize a particular theme, question, or issue from your time at ÄĚĚÇÖ±˛Ą. This meaningful project, drawing on both the Seminars and Electives, should deepen your relationship with yourself and your world.