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Colloquium on Fundamental Questions
Rationale
A central
component of Holy Cross’s mission is expressed in the claim that, "because
the search for meaning and value lies at the heart of the intellectual life,
the examination of fundamental religious and philosophical questions is integral
to liberal arts education." The Colloquium on Fundamental Questions has been
designed by a group of faculty who recognize a need for more sustained opportunities
to learn from one another’s interest in these questions and who seek to create
an intellectual gathering place, outside of any particular discipline, for
pursuing such dialogue. It therefore provides an opportunity for faculty
to explore ways of thinking about basic human questions that are broadly
integrative in nature and that are advanced by transcending disciplinary
boundaries in an intellectually responsible and mutually informative way.
The Colloquium will function as a regular and ongoing component of the Center
for Religion, Ethics and Culture and is envisioned as directly supporting
those elements of the Center’s mission that explore "‘that sense of the whole’
which transcends difference and calls us toward our common humanity." The
Colloquium is organized by a standing committee, consisting of faculty from
departments across the College, that is responsible for coordinating its
activities. Membership on the committee will rotate periodically. For administrative
purposes, the standing committee will have a (faculty) Secretary, who will
report to the Director of the Center. Participation in the Colloquium is
open to all interested faculty.
Structure
Faculty Seminar
The Colloquium’s primary function is served through an ongoing series of
faculty seminars designed to explore fundamental religious and philosophical
questions which may arise within various disciplines, but which cannot be
fully addressed within any one of them. The aim of the seminars is to furnish
an occasion for the kind of reflective engagement such questions invite,
by addressing the interplay of matters of faith and reason as it is realized
in particular areas of human thought and activity. A broadly conceived theme
for each year’s seminar will be announced in the Fall semester, and faculty
from across the College will be invited to participate. Those who are interested
in taking part will meet later in the semester to refine the topic, select
readings, and plan activities. The seminar will be directed by faculty from
different disciplines and will meet regularly during the Spring semester.
To allow for full participation and ample discussion, the size of the group
will be limited to 12. Interested faculty are encouraged to suggest possible
seminar topics at any time in the planning process.
Journal Publication
The Colloquium will organize and sponsor a journal publication each year
consisting of essays written by faculty participants in the seminar. Essays
will be gathered following the conclusion of the seminar in the Spring semester.
Editorial work on the journal, carried out by members of the Colloquium’s
standing committee, will take place during the summer. Ideally, the journal
will be published sometime during the Fall semester and will serve as a bridge
to the work to be pursued in the faculty seminar taking place in the Spring.
In essence, the journal is designed to serve as a vehicle for articulating
and sharing ideas bearing upon the relationship of faith and reason within
the context of liberal arts education. In addition, it will serve to concretize
the work of the faculty seminar and provide an historical record of its activities.
Lecture Series
The Colloquium will organize and sponsor a series of lectures on the place
of fundamental religious and philosophical questions in liberal arts education
as well as in the work we pursue as scholars. Its guiding rubric will be
"Religion and Modernity." As such, this lecture series seeks to extend the
Religion and Modernity lecture series heretofore organized by the Office
of the Dean of the College. In its initial form, the Religion and Modernity
Lecture Series sought to examine "the place of religious and spiritual life
in the context of a world that in many ways is at odds with it." The series
was also meant to provide a much-needed forum for reflection and dialogue
about many of those fundamental religious and philosophical questions that
are at the heart of the College’s mission. More specifically, the series
was designed to explore such issues as the relationship between religion
and science, the challenge of religious authority in relation to the pluralism
of contemporary culture, the nature and value of religious experience, and
the connection between religious and intellectual life. While the aims of
the series currently envisioned remains much the same, special efforts will
be directed toward situating issues of religion and modernity within the
context of the broader dialogue between faith and reason.
Purposes & Goals
The
primary purpose of the Colloquium is to create a transdisciplinary intellectual
space for faculty members interested in pursuing further those dimensions
of the College’s and the Center’s mission that posit the centrality of religious
and philosophical questions in liberal arts education. Indeed, one of the
distinctive features of a Holy Cross education is its insistence on defining
the liberal arts not so much in terms of a fixed body of departments and
disciplines but rather in terms of an inclusive and comprehensive program
of studies designed to demonstrate the essential unity of knowledge. Even
while a significant portion of the contemporary academy becomes ever more
specialized and particularized, our own aim, now as always, is to ensure
that students’ learning is centered and thus connected to those larger foundational
concerns that are the heart and soul of intellectual life in the liberal
arts tradition.
Of special importance in this context is the relationship between faith and
reason. In line with the Jesuit tradition of liberal arts learning, matters
of faith and matters of reason are to be explored in concert, the underlying
presumption being that the life of faith and the life of reason require one
another and are thus to be regarded as necessary moments in what is, finally,
a singular process: the pursuit of truth. Concretely, what this has meant
is that the College is committed to forming a community "that supports the
intellectual growth of all its members while offering them opportunities
for spiritual and moral development." What it also means is an abiding commitment
to reflection and dialogue on the interrelationship of faith and reason,
toward the end of deepening our understanding of each. At base, the Colloquium
offers faculty a creative opportunity to pursue such dialogue and reflection
in a more concerted and intensive fashion than has heretofore been possible.
The Colloquium’s main goals are threefold: to support faculty development
and collaboration through engagement with fundamental questions of faith
and reason, to facilitate students’ reflective encounter with these questions,
and to provide a forum for exploring how such questions are most appropriately
addressed in the Holy Cross curriculum and in liberal arts education more
generally.
Many faculty, working in separate departments, find insufficient opportunity
to speak with and learn from one another about matters that are fundamental
not only to their academic work but to the intellectual life as such. As
suggested earlier, this is in large part due to the compartmentalization
of the modern academy and the barriers erected by technical, discipline-focused
vocabularies. Indeed, our specialized frameworks often restrict not only
the kinds of answers we can give, but the very questions we are able to ask
in our work as scholars and as teachers. Many faculty also find insufficient
opportunity for those sorts of collaborative teaching endeavors that allow
for the sharing of ideas and the exploration of alternative perspectives.
The Colloquium will therefore serve to stimulate the development of new approaches
to teaching, collaborative and otherwise. It will also, of necessity, serve
to stimulate the development of the intellectual life, especially in regard
to its contemplative dimension -- i.e., the kind of reflective personal engagement
with basic human concerns which lies at the intersection of faith and reason.
The Colloquium will also be of considerable value to students at the College.
On one level, the reason is obvious: to nurture faculty development is, at
one and the same time, to nurture student learning. A significant portion
of the Colloquium’s work, however, seeks to be explicitly student-focused.
Of particular interest in this context is the support of student projects
that explore religious and philosophical questions in a transdisciplinary
way. A further, broader interest is to help students acquire new intellectual
resources that will allow them to become more thoughtfully engaged with fundamental
questions of faith and reason. This is a matter of some urgency: many students
at the College struggle to find a language adequate to their intellectual
and spiritual concerns. By addressing these very concerns, the Colloquium
seeks to deepen students’ understanding of, and appreciation for, the challenge
of integrating the life of faith and the life of reason.
Finally, the Colloquium is designed to serve as site for reflection on the
liberal arts curriculum at Holy Cross and beyond. The Colloquium is not,
and does not aspire to be, a curricular body. Official curricular issues
remain the responsibility of the Curriculum Committee, the Academic Affairs
Council, and the Faculty Assembly. Moreover, the Colloquium’s consideration
of curricular issues will most often be "local" in nature, assuming the form
of new courses or programs of study (all of which, of course, will have to
pass through the normal channels). At the same time, the Colloquium, by virtue
of the very issues it is most concerned to address, will surely seek to consider
the nature and meaning of the liberal arts curriculum as such. Indeed, insofar
as its foremost task is to further actualize the College’s commitment to
the exploration of fundamental religious and philosophical questions, the
Colloquium’s own commitment to reflection on the curriculum is nothing short
of a responsibility.
In sum, the Colloquium should have a fruitful bearing on research and scholarship,
student learning, and the broader process of reflection on the liberal arts
curriculum. There is something of a superordinate goal as well, and that
is to provide a forum for thought: about faith and reason, about the relationship
between philosophical and theological reflection, and about the deep challenge
of determining -- as teachers, scholars, and human beings -- how best to
integrate intellectual and spiritual life. The Colloquium should become a
forum, then, in which interaction with fellow faculty members as well as
students will stimulate intellectual creativity and provide a home for dialogue
that is defined not only by allegiance to individual departments but by our
common engagement with basic human questions.
Steering Committee
Further inquiries are invited and can be directed to any member of the committee:
Jeffrey Bloechl, Dept. of Philosophy
Christopher A. Dustin, Dept. of Philosophy (secretary)
Mark Freeman, Dept. of Psychology
William E. Reiser, S.J., Dept. of Religious Studies
William E. Stempsey, S.J., Dept. of Philosophy
Joanna Ziegler, Dept. of Visual Arts
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