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The pursuit and transmission of knowledge in the contemporary academy is highly specialized, secular, and regarded as separable from the social circumstances and beliefs of scientists, scholars, and students. This seminar analyzed the historical and intellectual reasons for the secularization and specialized fragmentation of knowledge characteristic of the contemporary academy. Through reading and discussion of scholarship pertaining to the historical processes through which knowledge was secularized, participants explored ways in which knowledge has been alternatively understood within a unifying philosophical and theological framework, and how such a framework might remain intellectually viable today. In addition to primary sources, this seminar...

In this seminar, students will read, analyze, and discern continuities and discontinuities in Catholic Social Thought from the late 19th century to the present. Lectures, seminar reports, and discussion will focus on original sources (encyclicals and other magisterial documents), beginning with Rerum novarum (1892) and concluding with Caritas in veritate (2009). This intensive course is multi-disciplinary, since this tradition of social thought overlaps several disciplines in the contemporary university including political science, political philosophy, law, economics, theology, and history. This will be the third time Prof. Hittinger has led this seminar. Format: There will be two 2 ½ hour sessions each day. Professor Hittinger will...