Freshman nursing student recognized with Honorable Mention for Honors essay

Freshman Lillian DuFour received "Commendation for Honorable Mention in the Seamus Heaney Award" on April 13 for her essay "Diving into the Minds of Sinners" which was part of her Honors Augustine and Culture Seminar (ACS) in the fall 2017 semester. Lily, a native of Washington, D.C., compared St. Augustine’s spiritual autobiography Confessions and Dante’s Inferno. She is a Presidential Scholar at the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing.

“My paper examined how Dante and Augustine are clearly different in how they present trying to get closer to God, but they both ultimately want the same goal for us to shun the sin and turn towards a path of enlightenment,” Lily explains, further noting, “I was fascinated in how Dante carefully crafted each circle of Hell and aligned the punishment with each particular sinner. All of these punishments appealed to a different audience and echoed Augustine’s issues with God as well.”

“The Augustine and Culture Seminar is a two-semester humanities sequence (ACS 1000: Ancients, and ACS 1001: Moderns) which educates students in Augustinian inquiry through a great-books curriculum and an intensive program of critical reading, writing, and discussion,” according to the program’s webpage.