James Keating (Theology and Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1542, T/Th 1:00-2:15
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Humanities minors and Catholic Studies majors; satisfies the Oral Communication proficiency of the Core Curriculum.

The Humanities explore what it means to be human through literature, art, philosophy, theology, history, and related disciplines. In this course we will read and discuss philosophical reflections, essays, novels (graphic and otherwise), and poetry about human life. Our purpose will be to uncover what our authors wish to say about how one ought to live and how one oughtn’t. Much of what they say depends on how they view the nature of reality itself. We will read Christians and those who have ceased to be Christians. It’ll be great.

Patrick Macfarlane (Philosophy and Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1541, T/Th 10:00-11:15
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Humanities minors and Catholic Studies majors; satisfies the Oral Communication proficiency of the Core Curriculum.

This introductory course explores the Christian humanistic worldview through major authors including Shakespeare, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and J. R. R. Tolkien.  We will consider topics from sin, redemption, and the Incarnation to adventure, reality as sacramental, and heroism.

Iain Bernhoft (Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1543, M/W 1:00-2:15
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Humanities minors and Catholic Studies majors; satisfies the Oral Communication proficiency of the Core Curriculum.

What does it mean to be human? If humans are political animals (per Aristotle) and “meaning-hungry agents,” that question must be examined on the grounds of culture. To that end this course will consider literature, poetry, art, film, and music that pertains to human making, meaning, and community. In particular we will juxtapose contemporary culture with the medieval and early modern Christian culture that preceded it, so as to recognize more clearly what is distinctive (and misshapen) about the world in which we live. Texts may include works by William Shakespeare, Walker Percy, Zadie Smith, C. S. Lewis, Josef Pieper, Romano Guardini, Caravaggio, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Paul Kingsnorth. 

Robert Gervasini (Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 3847, M/T/WTh 3:30-4:20
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Studies majors. Satisfies the Ethics requirement of the Core Curriculum.

God makes all things well and contemplates the goodness of his creation. The human person, made in God’s image, is called to contemplate the splendor of God’s creation and to make beautiful things. This theme will be our guide for this interdisciplinary study of beauty and human creativity. The course’s philosophy and theology of beauty is drawn from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and contemporary thinkers Chesterton, Pieper, Lewis, and John Paul II. Emphasis is placed on encounter with beauty through texts and artworks.

Matthew Cuddeback (Philosophy and Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1559, T/Th 11:30-12:45
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Studies majors. Satisfies the Ethics requirement of the Core Curriculum.

Working within the Catholic intellectual tradition, this course offers a humanistic, interdisciplinary study of man’s yearning for and pursuit of happiness, and of the possibility of attaining it through openness to divine grace, contemplation, desire for the “one sweet fruit” (Dante), and virtuous habits. The course will use works of philosophy, literature, poetry, and film, including authors such as Thomas Aquinas, Josef Pieper, Leo Tolstoy, and Walker Percy.

Gilbert Donohue (Office of the Chaplaincy)
1 Credit, CRN 1544, T 2:30-3:45
No prerequisites and open to all students.

This Humanities Practicum examines the history and methods of Gregorian chant. We will learn the beginnings of Gregorian chant and its development through the present day, including its notation and performance. We will study and sing the different genres of chant and will examine their place in the liturgy of the Mass and the Divine Office, both throughout their history and in their present form of the liturgy. Our overall purpose will be the acquisition of the basic skills of Gregorian chant and an understanding of the deep importance such skills have for human culture, both past and present.

Jay Pike (Chemistry)
1.5 Credits, CRN 1546, Th 5:30-6:45
Open to all students who are at least 21 years old by the beginning of the semester. Contact the instructor to receive permission to register.

This Humanities Practicum will educate the palate and the mind when it comes to beer and its full and virtuous enjoyment. Each week we will learn about—and drink samples of—different beer traditions (everything from lagers and wheat ales to sours and smoked stouts), with an emphasis on the art of brewing and the crucial role that beer has played in the history and development of Western civilization (especially regarding community and conviviality). Cheers!

Fr. Humbert Kilanowski (Mathematics and Computer Science) 
1 Credit, CRN 3801, Th 7:00-7:50
No prerequisites and open to all students.

This Humanities Practicum is designed to foster wonder and appreciation of the night sky. Students will learn to identify stars, planets, and other luminous objects, as they have been viewed across cultures and epochs throughout human history. The class will involve lectures as well as observation sessions of the sky using binoculars, telescopes, and the unaided eye. While not a scientifically rigorous course, the class does blend some basic astrophysics with humanistic aspects of the study of the stars.

Joseph Ribaudo (Engineering and Physics)
1 Credit, CRN 1545, M 6:30-7:20
No prerequisites and open to all students.

The universe is an incredible place, filled with beauty and wonder everywhere you look. Of course this applies to Earth, our celestial home, but it also applies when we look up, to the heavens where galaxies, clusters, and nebulae all wait in the relative dark to be discovered. In this practicum, we will learn about the myriad objects in the sky, the apparent motion these objects travel across the sky, and the modern hardware and software tools we can use to capture light that has traveled light-years (sometimes billions of them) to photograph members of our cosmic zoo. By the end you will have used a dedicated astrophotography setup to image celestial objects and process the data to produce a professional-quality photograph. No astronomy or photography background is required to thrive in this course (but if you have the background, that’s OK!). 

Gary Culpepper (Theology) and Philip Porter (Theology)
1 Credit, Two Sections: CRN 1547 and 1548
Course held over spring break; registration by permission of instructors only

Christ in the Desert emphasizes leadership development within the spiritual and intellectual context of the Catholic and Dominican tradition. Participants travel to the Moab Desert in Utah where they learn outdoor skills, including kayaking and canyoneering, within the context of Lenten spiritual and intellectual reflection and professional leadership development exercises. Hosted by COR Expeditions. For more information, contact Dr. Gary Culpepper, Associate Professor of Theology.

Eliza Kelly (Humanities)
1 Credit, CRN 3100
Required for first year St. Dominic Fellows; registration by permission of instructor only

This one credit practicum is the required St. Dominic Fellows cohort course for the spring semester of the first year of the fellowship. Focused on the cardinal virtue of courage, this course combines intellectual reflection with practices designed to support the development of courage and related habits.

Francesca Silano (History and Classics)
1 Credit, CRN 3597
Required for second year St. Dominic Fellows; registration by permission of instructor only

This one credit practicum is the required St. Dominic Fellows cohort course for the spring semester of the second year of the fellowship. Focused on the cardinal virtue of justice, this course combines intellectual reflection with practices designed to support the development of justice and related habits.

Jennifer Madden (Theater, Dance and Film)
3 Credits, CRN 3810, T/Th 4:00-5:15
No prerequisites and open to all students.

This course explores the history of theatre practices in the United States through Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latin American, and other perspectives, and examines a diverse selection of theatrical works through historical, political, and socio-cultural lenses. The course includes lectures, research, script analysis, group discussions, film screenings, and creative exercises. 

Jiyoon Im (Humanities)
1 Credit, CRN 3598, F 1:00-1:50
No prerequisites and open to all students.

Why are we attracted to the parties of Eaton Street? Why are festivity and celebration fundamental to our existence as human beings? Drawing on both Catholic and humanistic sources, we will appreciate the need for true celebration and festivity especially in our contemporary culture of consumer-based entertainment and empty pleasure seeking. Selections include writings from Josef Pieper, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Walker Percy.

Suzanne Fournier (English)
1 Credit, CRN 1553, F 1:30-2:20
No prerequisites and open to all students.

Hitchcock’s deeply entertaining films remain popular more than forty years after his death. This course is designed to deepen our appreciation for the artistry of his work, so apparent in his storytelling and visual style. The films we will consider include 39 Steps, Rebecca, Notorious, Psycho, Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, The Wrong Man, and North by Northwest. In the course of the semester, we will also discuss the Catholic dimension of several recurring Hitchcock themes.

Kevin McMahon (Finance)
1 Credit, CRN 3643, W 2:00-2:50
No prerequisites and open to all students.

At first glance, Dorothy Day and Blaise Pascal approached their Catholic beliefs very differently. Dorothy Day lived among the poor with her hands in the soup kitchen bowls as she served outcasts with an awareness of the limitless worth of each person. One movie describing her complex life was titled Affairs of the Heart, a double entendre that also encapsulated her early wayward period of freedom-seeking amongst the likes of Eugene O’Neill and the Greenwich Village literary intelligentsia. Alternatively, Blaise Pascal lived out his faith with a Spock-like rationality. As a scientist and philosopher, his logical mind gave us Pascal’s wager and the Pascal software coding language (centuries before computers were invented). But were they really that different? To solve this question students will immerse themselves in the personality and spirituality of one of these characters, and then head out to grab lunch.

Travis Lacy (Theology)
1 Credit, CRN 1551, Class held over spring break; registration by permission of instructor only
No prerequisites and open to all students. Students will participate in a spring break trip to Oxford, England. Contact Fr. Isaac Morales to arrange for registration.

This Reading Seminar offers an introduction to the life and thought of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis, in the context in which he spent most of his adult life, the University of Oxford. We will read and analyze representative texts from across Lewis’s corpus and from writers who influenced him, as well as visit sites in Oxford that played a significant role in his spiritual and intellectual development or helped shape the Oxford he knew and loved. This course is attached to the Humanities Program’s spring break trip to Oxford, England.

Robert Miner (Philosophy)
3 Credits, CRN 1560, T/Th 1:00-2:15
No prerequisites and open to all students; required for Catholic Studies majors; satisfies the Philosophy requirement of the Core Curriculum.

This course is an interdisciplinary consideration of God and the transcendent. It will begin with the idea of a genuinely transcendent God as it arises within pagan Greek culture. It will proceed to interrogate the relations between this idea and the event of Jewish and Christian revelation. After doing so, it will ask: What accounts for the apparent decline of belief in God as transcendent, or any principle of transcendent meaning? The course will end by considering some contemporary responses to this decline. 

Jiyoon Im (Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1554, T/Th 2:30-3:45
No prerequisites and open to all students; satisfies a core requirement for Catholic Humanities minors and Catholic Studies majors; satisfies the Writing I and Theology 300 requirements of the Core Curriculum.

This interdisciplinary course will deepen our appreciation of the Catholic intellectual tradition. We will focus on faith, the sacraments, our life in Christ, and prayer, especially in light of the challenges we face in fulfilling our human potential in our contemporary culture. We will reflect on encyclicals, philosophical and theological texts, literature, paintings, film, and poetry. Thinkers and artists include Pope John Paul II, Pieper, Wendell Berry, Guardini, Caravaggio, Lubac, and Ratzinger.

James Dever (Theology)
3 Credits, CRN 2623, M/W 8:30-9:45
Prerequisite: Theology 200; not open to freshmen. Satisfies the Theology 300 requirement of the Core Curriculum.

This discussion based course will be a literary and theological reading of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien including “On Fairy-Stories,” The Silmarillion (excerpts), The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, with supplemental secondary sources. We’ll pay special attention to the Catholic dimension of Tolkien’s works (Tolkien was a devout Catholic) and to the way a “Catholic imagination” or a “Catholic vision” is present in Tolkien’s writings. We will seek to understand what Tolkien meant by calling The Lord of the Rings “a fundamentally Catholic work.” At the heart of this Catholic vision are foundational theological notions and principles as well as philosophical notions and principles which often undergird the theological and which remain present and integral to the theological, just as human reason undergirds and remains in harmony with faith. We will bring these notions and principles to light as operative in Tolkien’s writings. We will supplement this with Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings.

Suzanne Fournier (English)
3 Credits, CRN 3596, T 11:30-2:15
No prerequisites and open to all students.

This seminar will explore the remarkable fiction of Flannery O’Connor, her two short story collections and her two novels. A Catholic writer in the Protestant South, she was deeply committed to her faith and to her art throughout her short career. Over the course of the semester, we will also read The Habit of Being, a singular collection of letters which deepen our understanding of O’Connor’s fiction and appreciation for her vision.

Fr. Justin Brophy (Office of Mission and Ministry) and Thomas Smith (Office of Academic Affairs)
3 Credits, CRN 3620, M/W 11:30-12:45 
No prerequisites and open to all students.

In their 1985 hit, “The Power of Love,” Huey Lewis and the News sing, “It’s strong and it’s sudden and it’s cruel sometimes/But it might just save your life/That’s the power of love.” Lewis identifies the truth that love is both the fount of our greatest happiness and also our deepest heartbreak. This course is a study of the power of love in three of its forms: erōs (passionate desire), philia (friendship), and agape(Christian charity). We will consider authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Chekhov, Dinesen, and C. S. Lewis to examine the centrality of love to the human experience—its joys and pains, its aspirations and fears. Why do we often look for love in all the wrong places? What does it mean to call someone a “true friend?” How can the Christian call a symbol of shameful public execution a token of love? The course will also focus on practical steps that can be taken to help pursue flourishing relationships with friends, romantic interests, and God. 

James Keating (Theology and Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN 1556, T 4:00-6:30 (day/time adjustable depending on student schedules)
Prerequisites: HUM 175, HUM 325 or HUM 326; open to seniors only, or with special permission of the Director of the Humanities Program. Satisfies the Writing II Proficiency of the Core Curriculum.

This is the required interdisciplinary capstone seminar for the Catholic Humanities minor. Themes will vary depending on the instructor and topics chosen by the students. Students will complete a substantial writing project designed in consultation with the instructor and requiring integration of prior coursework.

James Keating (Theology and Humanities)
3 Credits, CRN —-, M 4:00-6:30 (day/time adjustable depending on student schedules)
Prerequisites: senior status or permission of the Director required; Catholic Studies majors must have completed at least seven courses towards the major. Satisfies the Writing II Proficiency of the Core Curriculum.

This is the required interdisciplinary capstone seminar for the Catholic Studies major. Themes will vary depending on the instructor and topics chosen by the students. Students will complete a substantial writing project designed in consultation with the instructor and requiring integration of prior coursework.