Aldersgate Honors College

Ancient Beginnings is a study of the historical origins of Western civilization. Our survey will follow the foundational texts of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the early Christian church. The sources this semester span a wide range of genres, including epic, history, philosophy, theology, and ecclesiastical polemics.

The Middle Ages is study of Europe and the broader Mediterranean world following the fall of Rome, culminating in a survey of the development of humanism during the Renaissance. The course will follow foundational texts, ideas, art works, people, and cultural movements of the period.

This course will cover the transformations wrought by theological, cultural, and social movements that swept over Europe during the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The broader aim is to see the intellectual origins of the modern era.

Late Modernity is a study of thought and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. Attention will be paid to existentialism, high modernism, the World Wars and the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, and postmodernity.

A study of the thought and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students will explore enlightenment, idealist, and existentialist philosophy, and developments in art and literature like Romanticism and realism. Readings will include figures such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Dostoevsky.

An exploration of visual and literary art associated with major cities, including works that depict a particular city or were created in it. The cities studied will be destinations of the Honors study abroad trip the following summer.

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.

A study of the foundational texts of natural philosophy and the sciences from the ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution to modernity. Readings may include Aristotle, Lucretius, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Faraday, and Einstein. May include contemporary science writing and science fiction.

A study of foundational texts of the non-Western world, including Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia. Attention will be paid to both Christians and writers of other faith traditions.

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 Aldersgate 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.