This course is the second half of the Freshmen Honors program protocol of HONR 101, where students receive 6 credit hours for intensive reading, lectures, and discussion groups with professors.

This course is restricted to Catholic Studies Minors enrolled in the Honors Program. This foundational course in the history of Western culture from antiquity to the Middle Ages discusses such writers ranging from Homer all the way to Augustine. Students will pose questions and comments about some of the ideas and texts that helped shaped Western culture, including many that come out of the western Christian tradition.

How does Christian Theology inform how Christians act in the world? This is the central question that we will seek to answer throughout this course. Examining the intersection between theoretical and practical theology, we will explore the Church's engagement in the world at large, both in global cultures and political movements. Each class will focus on the sources of Christian doctrine, Biblical and Traditional, with an emphasis on Catholic teaching since Vatican II and on the lived reality of these teachings in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. Using contemporary examples of global issues, we will explore the practicality and potential benefits and drawbacks of doing theology in the public sphere.

This course studies the realities of Christian faith life as expressed in the concrete rituals of Christian communities. Sacraments are more than just mechanical ways in which to experience God in Christian liturgy - defined traditionally as "visible signs of invisible realities." Certainly, the seven sacraments of the Catholic tradition perform the central mysteries of God's gracious self communication; however, as importantly, they also introduce and articulate a way of interpreting reality. This course will not only examine the historical development, central beliefs and communal practices of the sacraments, but will also explore the "sacramental principle" as a way to illuminate the theological dynamics that are such an essential component of Catholic liturgy and Christian spirituality. Students will investigate the nature of the sacramental system in Catholic worship, identify the key concepts of "sacramentality" and explore the religious practices that are part of the living tradition of sacramental theology. Finally, students will explore how, in the end, the sacramental principle affects everything and cannot be contained. Sacramentality is a way of being, an "eventing" that reminds us how dynamic and transcendent (as opposed to static and insulated) life is. So, we will follow the clues where they lead and assess current relationships among sacramental theology, liturgy, artistic reflection, cross-cultural expression, and daily life.

James Joyce famously called Roman Catholicism the "Here comes everybody" tradition, offering an apt description for a faith community made up of both sinners and saints, martyrs and missionaries, defenders and detractors all. This course on Roman Catholicism begins from the assumption that it is fundamentally a tradition of paradox, which establishes constancy through change and firmness through fluidity. Students will explore Roman Catholicism less as a set of definite beliefs and moral precepts, and more as a world-shaping perspective that forms Catholics to see and to be in distinctive ways. Finally, the course will address head-on a range of serious challenges confronting Roman Catholicism today, including widespread disaffiliation, clergy abuse, Magisterial teaching on gender and sexuality, women's ordination, and racism and anti-Judaism in the tradition.

This course will introduce you to the history and missionary movements of the Christian religion, from the early church to the present day. While the course is set up thematically in chronological order, you will read case studies based on primary sources, social history, and material culture that will give you an overview of Christian revelation, theological differences, community and controversies, circulation of ideas and counter-ideas, missionary tactics, power struggles, and people's experiences in ecclesial (liturgy and sacrament), para ecclesial, and personal ways. You will also visit the Art Institute of Chicago and the Newberry Library to see objects and manuscripts from the Christian tradition. The story this course seeks to reveal is how the Christian religion has defined the relationship between the divine and the human world.

Europe in the Early Middle Ages was an unstable world, with its collapsing imperial framework, migrating peoples, contrary cultures, insecure economic structures and clashing political strategies. From that a new balance was struck, through the blending of Roman, Germanic, Celtic and Christian orders, and a Medieval Synthesis was forged. The readings emphasize primary sources and their interpretation while modern secondary sources will further inform our exploration into the phenomenon of cultural synthesis and its place in history.

This course uses canonization, the process by which the Catholic Church recognizes saints, to explore change over time in the history of both the Catholic Church and the United States. Drawing upon a cast of characters that includes saints and sinners, martyrs and missionaries, patriot priests and unruly women, we will explore how conceptions of sanctity and holiness have been shaped by popular devotion, papal power, gender, race, sexuality, nationalism, and commercialization.

In this course, we will explore how religion is lived by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life through various popular culture forms and genres. We will consider how religion animates popular culture, how popular culture itself does religious work, and how religious and non-religious groups and individuals approach popular culture at various times and in certain circumstances as both sacred and profane.

This course deals with selected works from such authors as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham. The course may be on a particular author, or on a theme or issue characteristic of medieval thought.

Modern thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries, including at least some of the following: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Dun Scotus, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon. This course will focus on Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. In doing so we will try to get a sense of how they carried out the practice of philosophy, especially given the fact that each of them was a theologian by profession. Thus, the main theme of the course will be the relation of philosophy to theology - more broadly, faith and reason - as it was understood in this period. We will also look at a range of other issues that were of concern to the scholastics-- chiefly questions of metaphysics and epistemology.

Refashioning the conventions of poetry, Dante (1265-1321) used the account of his presumed journey through the three realms of the Christian afterlife - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - to explore the world at the close of the Middle Ages. The poem is both an adventure story and an exhaustive, assessment of the state of politics, society, religion, literature, philosophy, and theology at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This course examines a selection of cantos Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso in its cultural, theological, social and political context. In particular we will explore how the underground world imagined by the poet relates to late medieval urban life and culture. A guiding concern of the discussion is to assess the ways in which Dante changed our understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine, justice and love, will and reason, happiness and knowledge, literature and the Bible. Political turmoil, philosophical and theological paradigms social and religious conflict all converge in the making of the Comedy and will thus form crucial elements of our investigation.

The course is structured as a chronological sweep through the history of ideas on Mary and her importance for understanding the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We will examine Mary's place throughout the seven major ages of Christianity with particular attention to the Early Church Age. After exploring the Mariologies of the Early Church Age, we will explore the continued development of Mariology, spending significant time thinking about Mariology in the Post-Modern Age through your papers and presentations.

Early and medieval Christian Thought focuses upon the development of Christian thinking from the apostolic times to the eve of the Protestant Reformation. It centers on those individuals of the period who influenced thinking and practice in their as well as subsequent times. It also focuses upon important historical, social and political events that interacted with Christian doctrines throughout the centuries.

This course provides a survey of Old and Middle English Literature, studied partly in translation and partly in the original. Students will receive training in the understanding, appreciation, and criticism of works of medieval culture.

This course introduces students to the life and writings of Chaucer through the reading of a representative selection (but not necessarily all) of The Canterbury Tales and through considering a variety of critical perspectives on them. Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of Chaucer's poetry, the ability to read Middle English, and familiarity with some critical perspectives on Chaucer's works.

An introduction to the social documents of the Catholic Church in the modern era. This course presents a synthesis of the methodology, the anthropology, and the principles used by the Church in its moral reflection on the various social problems of our day.

This course examines social, political, and religious developments in the Americas from the colonial era with a particular focus on the years following the Second Vatican Council through the present day in order to explore a range of issues regarding the nature of religion, politics, and the role of the Catholic Church.

This course will examine the Church in the modern world-- with an emphasis on the relationship between Catholicism and democracy, placing particular stress on their relevance to contemporary American public life. In this context, Catholicism will be understood not only as a religious institution, but as the source of a tradition of communitarian social and political thought, while democracy will be understood not only as a form of government, but also as an ethos shaping American society. Authors and texts will include Alexis de Toucqueville, Orestes Brownson, Dorothy Day, John Courtney Murray, and relevant documents from Vatican II and the American hierarchy. The historic tension between Catholicism and democracy will be the subject of our conversation as will the possibilities for greater harmony between them. In particular, we will explore the possibility that Catholicism's communitarian orientation might serve as a corrective to American individualism and consumerism, while democratic institutions and practices might have something to offer Catholicism.

This is a synthesis course in which the student, in consultation with a faculty member, will independently research and develop a project that integrates subject-mastery and skills that they have developed over the course of their studies.