Honors

The course will focus on the Western Intellectual Tradition (WIT) from the time of the Greeks to the 16th and 17th centuries. We begin with Plato and Aristotle and continue with Augustine, Dante, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Thomas Hobbes. We will examine critically some of the perennial questions of "the human condition," and students will be exposed to some of the foundational texts, ideas, issues, and events that comprise the WIT. Crisis and continuity in the ancient and modern eras will be scrutinized as we evaluate critically the origins and development of the WIT through a close reading of primary texts produced by some of the greatest minds of the WIT. Our purpose, however, is not to worship blindly these texts (which are timely and timeless); rather we seek to subject them to critical analysis befitting the manner in which they were composed.

This course will focus primarily on the Western Intellectual Traditions (WIT) since the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century revolutions in cosmology, science, and philosophy are characterized by a number of important themes, centered around the rise of new epistemologies, methodologies, and sources of authority. In this course, we will look at the following three principal areas of change: the demise of church authority in settling scientific and philosophical questions, the demise of Aristotelian physics, and the revolutionary potential of new scientific and religious thought. We will examine these by looking at major thinkers and events of the period and the impact that each had on the dynamic intellectual evolution of the time. By the late nineteenth century, modern western thought was again in crisis, calling into question the foundations of western political, scientific, and economic power. In the twentieth century, liberal democracy triumphed politically over its competitors, primarily communism and fascism; however, its original philosophical foundations were increasingly untenable. The course will conclude with a critical evaluation of the relationship of faith, philosophy and science in modernity.

This course will explore a small number of works by some of the most significant and challenging writers of science fiction--some we may have heard of, and some who are new to us. Through these explorations, we will experience a diversity of literary landscapes, ideas, cultures, and ethnicities, most of them speculative and fictional. Perhaps most interestingly, we will discuss and learn the scientific concepts behind these stories.

This course will examine what it means to be human from both a theological and a psychological perspective. This is obviously an interdisciplinarian approach to the topic, one that will reap rich benefit for the student. It will show that we are integrated persons and should be considered holistically, not as spiritual beings in opposition to our psychological and social characteristics. Additionally, this course will examine being human from the perspective of spiritual formation.

This course begins the process of creating a quality honors thesis. Students will select their thesis topics, choose their faculty advisers, and develop thesis proposals with their advisers. In this course, students actively begin serious work on their honors theses.

In this course, students will author the Honors Thesis, an independent, creative, faculty-mentored essay or project that is the culmination of academic work in the Honors College. This course is designed to showcase mastery of content, theory, and methodology specific to each student's academic discipline. In majors that require a thesis or final project, the Honors Thesis will supplement the existing major requirement.