COURSES

HUM 2001–001
Dr. Jesse Couenhoven
T/Th 11:30–12:45 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/Andrew Lynn
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. Kevin Hughes
M/W 3:20-4:35 pm

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 1975-001
Dr. Michael Tomko
T/Th 8:30-9:45 am

Core: Literature & Writing Seminar

HUM 2900-001
Dr. Jahdiel Perez
T/Th 10:00—11:15 am

Core: Advanced Theology

If God exists, why is there so much suffering? If God does not exist, does suffering have any ultimate meaning? The Problem of Suffering is one of the most enduring and unsettling questions in philosophy, theology, literature, and psychology. This course explores how different traditions and disciplines wrestle with the nature of evil, justice, and the human condition.

We begin by examining how the Problem of Evil has been framed historically, engaging with primary texts from thinkers such as Epicurus, Augustine, Leibniz, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, and MacLeish. We then survey major theistic responses (theodicies), including free will defenses, soul-making theodicies, and skeptical theism. Next, we turn to critiques of these theodicies, particularly from atheistic perspectives that challenge the coherence or moral adequacy of such responses. Finally, we explore psychological research on meaning-making, religious coping, and resilience in the face of suffering, considering how belief (or disbelief) in God influences human responses to trauma and loss. This course invites students to think deeply, read widely, and engage in critical discussion about one of the most difficult and universal aspects of human existence. In the face of suffering, do we seek answers, or do we learn to live with the questions? Should we do both?

HUM 2900–002
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
M/W/F 11:45-12:35 pm

Core: History

Should Americans think of the United States as an empire? Our economy, our conception of “freedom,” and our everyday lives have all depended on empire, but there has also been a long current of anti-imperialism in American culture. With readings ranging from Locke, William Penn, Chief Powhatan, Emerson, and Melville to Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fukuyama, and Friedman, this course considers the historical role of empire in our personal and social lives.

HUM 2900–003
Dr. Chris Daly
M/W 4:45-6:00 pm

Core: Advance Theology

How did the early followers of Jesus wrestle with persecution, injustice, and empire? How did their understanding of the divine shape their communal practices, rituals, and beliefs? How did their sense of beauty and service drive their art, architecture, music, education, and health care? This course follows these difficult questions in the early, formative centuries of the Christian Church.

HUM 2900–004
Dr. Helena Tomko
T/Th 11:30 - 12:45 pm

Core: Diversity 2
Cross List: English

Catholic novels flourished as some of the best-loved and most read mid-twentieth-century European fiction. This course examines how the highs and lows of human life appear when seen with the Catholic novelist’s sacramental vision of reality. Six celebrated novels, by three women and two men, explore overlapping literary and theological questions, including the depiction of the natural and supernatural in fiction; women's live, marriage, sexuality, and relationships; problems of love and identity; the intertwining of historical events and redemption history; and the workings of grace in the written word. Novels include François Mauriac’s Vipers’ Tangle, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.

HUM 3400–001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
T/Th 4:00–5:15 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 3600–001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
T/Th 2:30–3:45 pm

Core: Fine Arts

This survey considers American architecture as a vibrant expression of American history and culture. We explore the work of famed architects like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frank Gehry and movements like the American Renaissance and Modernism.