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Catholic Studies

ERIC E. HALL, PH.D.
HANNAH HEMPHILL, PH.D

WILLIAM MARK SMILLIE, PH.D., DEPT CHAIR

Mission

Catholic Studies studies the interplay between the Catholic faith, the culture it engenders, and the lives of real people living out that faith in the concrete circumstances of their lives. Armed with this understanding, students learn how to incorporate the Catholic faith into their own lives, especially their lives as intellectuals and as professionals.  The program will provide students with a working understanding of the Catholic faith, understood in the sense of the contents of Catholic beliefs.  The program requires specially designed Catholic Studies courses, and the remaining course of study is organized around the themes of truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Program Objectives

  • To offer an organized study of Catholic Christian culture, which examines the relationship between faith and reason, faith and culture, and faith and life, and to initiate students into this study
  • To seek ways that the specialized disciplines contribute to a unified and integrated vision of reality, and to foster this search in faculty and students of Carroll College
  • To “incarnate” in Carroll College, its faculty and students, a Catholic way of understanding and being, that is, to bring Catholic intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition into living form
  • To provide a curricular space where Carroll College’s dual goals of vocation and enlightenment can meet, mutually serve and inform each other

 

Student Learning Outcomes

Students majoring in Catholic Studies will:

  1. Examine the role played by the Catholic faith intellectually, culturally, spiritually, and socially in the lives of specific individuals.
  2. Assess the effect of the Catholic faith as a body of thought and culture on  intellectual, cultural, spiritual, moral, individual and social developments throughout history
  3. Integrate knowledge from different disciplines, and synthesize this with the ongoing dialogue between faith and reason
  4. Articulate how the harmony of faith and reason applies to a student’s major and/or future profession