HUM 2001:  GOD
Dr. Jesse Couenhoven
MW 1:30-2:45

To talk about God is to talk about human beings and vice versa. Even atheism is a large statement about what it means to be human. This course will begin with some contemporary theological questions. What is religion, anyway? Do we need it anymore? What is the place of religion in the contemporary world? We will then investigate how revelation illuminates God and creation in a way that transforms the world.
Course Attributes: Writing Enriched and Theology

HUM 2003:  WORLD
Dr. David Schindler
MW 3:00-4:15

How we think about the natural world affects how we live and vice versa. Modern science is a dominant way of interpreting the world, and so human life. How does modern science interpret the world? What are the effects of this interpretation on the way we view human beings? What are the problems and possibilities in this interpretation? Are there any limits to modern science’s reductionism? How might these be overcome in order to disclose the full range of human experience? What is the relationship of science to philosophy and theology?
Course Attributes:  Writing Enriched and Philosophy

HUM 29001-001:  TOP:  MODERN MYTHS: FAUSTS AND FRANKENSTEINS
Dr. Helena Tomko
TR 11:30-12:45

The legend of Faust—the scholar turned necromancer who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for preternatural knowledge—is often invoked to describe the dark human urges that have led to some of modernity’s greatest accomplishments and most despicable atrocities, from space travel to the atom bomb.  The modern myth of Faust emerged in early modern Europe as an echo of the ancient question of how far created beings will go in their quest to surpass the limits of knowledge.  In this course we will journey with Faust and the devil Mephistopheles from the Garden of Eden and into our own twenty-first-century capitalist world:  Is the setting of one's own limits the ultimate freedom or the ultimate violation of freedom?  What happens when humanity becomes estranged from God?  Is all knowledge to be known?  Is enough ever enough?  The abiding philosophical and theological questions that are at the heart of the modern myth of Faust will be treated in the context of major literary and philosophical works.  These texts include the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s monumental German Faust, the British Romantic Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the decadent Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as texts by Josef Pieper, Charles Taylor, and Wendell Berry.
Course Attributes:  Writing Enriched and Advanced Literature

HUM 2900-002 TOP: RETURN TO THE REAL
Dr. James Wilson
MW 4:30-5:45

The modern age, including our own present moment, is characterized by a tendency of exclusion in the name of “being realistic.”  By means of such epithets as “superstition,” “primitive,” “epiphenomena,” “psychological,” and “subjective,” we purge the depths of human experience until the nature and meaning of the world begins to appear, to say the least, “impoverished.”  If we sometimes resist these trends by, for instance, celebrating the imaginative and the irrational, we also often indulge and further them when it is to our particular advantage.

In the early Twentieth Century, however, some of its most distinguished thinkers mounted a true resistance, arguing that the great weakness of modern “realism” was that it was not nearly realistic enough.  In excluding the traditional transcendental properties of Being—unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—the modern age has not come to a more accurate, but a radically distorted, sense of the world and our place within it.

In this course, we shall study the works of poet-critic T.S. Eliot and neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain in order to explore the grounds of reality in hopes of recovering a sense of its true depths.  We shall follow these two authors in the search for Unity, or Order, in reality; for the Beautiful, in art and poetry, as a way of knowing as much as of “feeling” and in terms of the human person’s capacity to make and discover meaning in things; for the Good in terms of human identity as a political, intellectual, and religious person; and for the True, the foundations of the intelligibility of things in metaphysics and mysticism.  These two most wide-ranging and perceptive intellects of the last century, will thus guide us in a return to the Real.
Course Attributes:  Writing Enriched and Advanced Literature

HUM 2900-003 TOP: ART & SOCIAL REFORM: The Arts and Crafts Movement
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
TR 2:30-3:45

In this interdisciplinary Humanities seminar, we will examine the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe and the United States as a way to understand social reform through the arts.  The Arts and Crafts movement was a transformative artistic, literary, and political event of the 19th and early 20th centuries in England, Europe, and the United States.  Set against the unfolding Industrial Revolution, the Arts and Crafts movement articulated a critique of modernization and the machine.  Its themes of simplicity and handcraft united artistic expression with moral and social values.  Although we often think of the Arts and Crafts movement as being associated with a particular “mission” style, scholars have persuasively argued that the Arts and Crafts movement was in fact astylistic.  Rather, what united this diverse movement was the underlying reconsideration of the relationship between man and machine and the value of human work.  In emphasizing handcraft and simplicity, the movement sought to reassert the primacy of the individual and return an emphasis on the spiritual life.  This course will study how architecture, decorative arts, and literature provided a critique of industrialization and the machine.  We will also study how the Arts and Crafts movement has continued throughout the 20^th century to today in the so-called “maker” movement.
Course Attributes: Writing Enriched, Fine Arts and AAH

HUM 2900-004:  TOP:  INTRODUCTION TO AQUINAS
Dr. Anna Moreland
TR 10:00-11:15

This course will introduce students to the medieval world’s most profound and synthetic thinker, Thomas Aquinas.  Students will learn to see the world and its relation to God as Thomas saw it and to recognize the historical context that gave birth to such a vision.  Topics covered include: faith and reason, knowing and naming God, the pursuit of happiness, and the good life.
Course Attributes:  Writing Enriched and Theology 

HUM 3001-001 ENG: LEWIS TOLKIEN & INKLINGS
Dr. Michael Tomko
1:30-2:45

"Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"

"Sometimes fairy-stories may say best what needs to be said."

--C.S. Lewis, On Stories

In this class we will explore the "otherworldly" fiction as well as the theological, critical, and philosophical writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings. These works have often been dismissed as either escapist nostalgia or mere entertainment, but the Inklings saw their writings as offering alternative ethical, social, and even ecological visions. Tolkien set out specifically to write a mythology for England. We will investigate why these writers turned to the aesthetic, especially a mythological or fantastic aesthetic, at this time. Why did they employ a literature that was either mythologically, theologically, historically, or perspectivally "otherworldly"? How do these works, so often viewed simply as fantastic or supernatural, relate to the worldly and the natural? In what ways did these writers wrestle with literary traditions, such as Romanticism, and engage with the major intellectual questions of the day including issues in science, gender relations, and political power? In an interdisciplinary approach that engages both literary and theoretical texts, we will ultimately ask if this group formed a coherent cultural movement and consider their place in accounts of twentieth-century religion and culture in Great Britain.
Course Attributes: Writing Enriched and Advanced Literature

HUM 5110:  UTOPIA
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
TR 11:30-12:45

     "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at," Oscar Wilde once wrote.  In this course, we'll be looking at maps that did include Utopia, and determine whether or to what extent they are worth glancing at.  From Atlantis, the land of Cockaigne, and El Dorado to the technological utopias of modernity, people have imagined ideal societies throughout the ages, communities in which justice, dignity, and love have triumphed -- once and for all.  While utopias have been invaluable in spurring reform or revolution, they have also been sources of disappointment and bloodshed.  Because of the horrors, we're often warned not to engage in utopian speculation.  But this course assumes that the longing for a perfect world is a profound and indelible part of human identity -- in short, we are inescapably utopian.  This is a course in the history of human desire. We will trace the utopian imagination in a number of genres and disciplines, from literature, philosophy, and theology to science fiction and advertising.  As well as excerpts from poets, travellers, and other assorted dreamers, texts will include Plato's Republic; More's Utopia; Butler's Erewhon; Bellamy's Looking Backward; Morris' News from Nowhere; Le Guin's The Dispossessed.  Short essays and a final exam.
Course Attributes: Writing Enriched. 

HUM 6500-100:  SENIOR SYMPOSIUM
Dr. Michael Tomko
Tuesday evening 7:30-9:30

The Department’s capstone is a seminar, meeting once a week, whose goal is to provide a culminating reflection on the intellectual questions and insights from students’ studies in the Humanities, their time at Villanova, and their vocation beyond it.  In a symposium-style approach, we will read a series of short essays centered on the themes of each Humanities Gateway: Person, Society, God, and World.  That discussion will contribute to the major task of the course and the central, extended activity of the semester—developing and crafting a 20 page essay that will address an aspect of the human condition that has been significant for their thought.  Students will have the freedom to pursue their own lines of inquiry in this reflective piece, will work personally with a faculty advisor for guidance and mentorship, and integrate at least one text from a Humanities Gateway and elective into this culminating intellectual endeavour.  The seminar will thus emphasize both individual exploration and provide a valedictory experience of intellectual conviviality.

Restricted to Majors Only. Offered spring semester.
Course Attributes: Writing Intensive