COURSES

HUM 2001–001
Dr. Anna Moreland
M/W 1:55–3:10 pm

Core: Advanced Theology

How can humans make claims about God?  What do they imply, and are they well founded? We will also consider what the questions and potential answers about God reveal about human life, society, and nature. The course begins by considering modern critiques of religion that help us understand our own uses and abuses of religion. We then inquire whether it is responsible to love and believe in a Christian God. In doing so, we must consider the possibility that God reveals Himself precisely to help us know and love God. After investigating claims about revelation, we turn to theological questions that arise out of the experience of having a relationship with God. We conclude with a dramatic investigation of the major themes of the course.

HUM 2002–001
Dr. Helena Tomko
T/Th 1:00-2:15 pm

Cross List: Peace & Justice, Public Service Administration

It has been said that a crisis in humanism—an insufficient understanding of the human person—underlay the manifold political, social, and historical tragedies of the twentieth century and their ongoing repercussions. In this course, we will attempt to engage the major questions confronting us in the twentieth-first century by examining fundamental aspects of the human experience, from birth through death, and considering how to pursue the good in the dramatic unfolding of human life. We will consider together the manifold strange wonders that make us human, including food, family, friendship, education, work, and love.

HUM 2003–001
Dr. Paul Camacho
T/Th 2:30-3:45 pm

Cross List: Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Sustainability Minor

The way we look at and understand the natural world affects the way we think about ourselves, and vice versa. In this class, we will consider the conceptions of the world most common today, discuss their origins, examine their presuppositions, and think through their implications both for our relationship toward the world and also for our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Among the topics we will cover are: how we experience, observe and conceptualize the world; what it means to give a causal explanation; what it means to speak of God as creator and why one would do so; the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion; and the meaning of the human person and social order in relation to the world.

HUM 2004–001
Dr. Andrew Lynn
T/Th 11:30-12:45 pm

Core: Social Sciene
Cross List: Peace & Justice, Political Science, Public Service & Administration

HUM 1975-001
Dr. Mitchell Kooh
M/W 4:45-6:00 pm

Core: Literature & Writing Seminar

HUM 2900–001
Dr. . Elizabeth-Jane McGuire
M/W/F 10:40-11:30 am 

Core: Fine Arts

Music is often called “the universal language” because it has the ability to appeal to listeners outside of its cultural context. However, how exactly does music function as a language? Does music communicate precise ideas, or only abstract concepts, or perhaps nothing at all? If it does communicate meaning, how does it do so—through specific intervals and harmonies, or by its overall timbre and mood? How do we judge whether music is good? As we explore these questions, we will consider who we are as music makers and music listeners, and what role music plays in the human endeavor.

In this course, music itself will be a primary text as we listen to Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Mahler, Gershwin, Simon and Garfunkel, U2, Pärt, and many others. Music listening will be supplemented by readings from Augustine’s De musica, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, and modern essays, including a series on music making by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The course will conclude with a “Soundtrack of My Life” project.

HUM 2900-002
Dr. Jesse Couenhoven
T/Th 10:00-11:15 am

Core: Theology 

We all want to be free—but we seem to disagree about what that means. Freedom, my son says, is summer break. Yet doesn’t school make him free, too? Drawing on legal, theological, philosophical, and psychological texts, this class explores what makes freedom so important and so perplexing, and how our ideas about it shape our everyday lives.

We’ll consider legal puzzles, such as why we punish (and if we should), whether it makes sense to consider people culpable for evil acts they performed while mentally ill, and whether we should have compassion on those who do wrong in situations where they lack choice. We’ll consider theological puzzles, such as how God can be free yet unable to sin, whether divine foreknowledge makes humans less free, and whether humans are free-er in heaven than on earth. Finally, we will consider political and philosophical puzzles about whether having too many choices could be a burden, and whether social policies can enhance freedom. We’ll also ask who has free will (or something like it): do other mammals, like dogs and dolphins, have significant agency (and if not, why do we punish them)? What about young children? What about AI?

HUM 2900–003
Dr. Terence Sweeney
T/Th 8:30–9:45 am
Core: Theology
Cross List: Irish Studies

Is God still an option in contemporary life? Should we leave the divine or return to it? This course engages contemporary Irish artists—such as James Joyce, Sally Rooney, and Patrick Kavanaug—and Irish philosophers—like Iris Murdoch, Richard Kearney, and William Desmond—as they reflect on leaving and returning to God. We will do so in the context of an Irish and Augustinian sense of life as a journey. The Irish have long had a sense of journey and exile in the context of a diaspora people with a deep desire for home in Ireland. The Augustinian tradition is shaped by its own account of living in a foreign land as one is on pilgrimage to one’s true home. The course offers an intellectual pilgrimage following those who are wayward and those who are homebound. It will challenge you to ask about the place of God in contemporary Ireland and in your own lives offer a chance to set off on your own itinerary to and from God.

HUM 2900–004
Dr. Mitchell Kooh
M/W 3:20-4:35 pm

In a review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumously published collection of myths and legends titled The Silmarillion (1977), an editor for The Guardian newspaper wrote, “How, given little over half a century of work, did one man become the creative equivalent of a people?” This course takes seriously that question. How did an eccentric linguist and Oxford professor, a WWI veteran and devoted father of four, emerge at the age of 62 to publish the bestselling novel of the twentieth century, a work that not only told a riveting adventure story but also contained an imagined depth rivalling that of real-world mythologies?

The Lord of the Rings established Tolkien’s reputation, but it is only part of tale that would ultimately consume the life of the man who invented it. In tracing the incredible true story of how Tolkien became Tolkien, this course begins with his earliest works, conceived in the trenches of the First World War. From out of these original “fairy stories,” many of them far stranger and darker than anything he published in his lifetime, Tolkien would shape his epic Legendarium, “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.” This course follows the evolution of that Legendarium, which Tolkien slowly and strategically unveiled to the public, first in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954) and later through more obscure works including The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and the posthumously published Silmarillion. Ultimately, the aim of this class is to explore the contours of Tolkien’s mythmaking: its sources, rhetorical strategies, mysteries, and enduring meaning. In the process, students will improve their reading and writing skills, mastering techniques once practiced in the making of Middle-earth.

HUM 2900-005
Dr. Ian Clausen
T/Th 11:30-12:45 pm

Core: Div 1
Cross List: Peace & Justice

Villanova University officially aspires to cultivate “rooted and restless” students—two “virtues” it associates with St. Augustine himself. But what kind of virtues are these, and are we confident they can coexist? What do we desire when we seek to be “rooted and restless”? Finally, if it’s true that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” (Simone Weil), why and how is it so neglected today? Drawing on a diverse range of disciplines, genres, backgrounds and experiences, this course explores its topic in three basic dimensions: self, society, and beyond self/society. Among its unique attributes is an opportunity to engage in written and in-person conversations with students taking this course in Villanova’s undergraduate program at SCI Phoenix, a state prison located 25 miles north of main campus. Together we will develop ways of posing and addressing this twofold question: can the metaphor of rootedness, despite its limitations and dangers, still ground and elevate our common humanity; and can our struggle with restlessness, despite its unsettling sources and consequences, still orient us to a future in which all of us can find joy, truth, goodness, peace, and even some kind of rest? .

HUM 2900–006
Dr. Veronica Ogle
T/Th 1:00-2:15 pm

Cross List: Political Science

The separation of Church and State a hallmark of American democracy, yet what should we think of it? This class explores this question in dialogue with an Augustinian-Catholic perspective. We will spend the first half of the semester seeking to understand separation of Church and State in America. In the second half of the semester, we will turn to Augustine and those influenced by him to think about the Church as a pilgrim city. What is its role vis à vis the modern state? How do pilgrims live in and serve their earthly societies? What is the mission of the pilgrim city in today’s world?

HUM 2900-007
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
M/W 3:20-4:35 pm

Core: History

Oscar Wilde once wrote that any map of the world that doesn't include Utopia isn't worth even glancing at.  In this course, we'll be glancing at a wide range of maps that include Utopia, from ancient Greece and China to today's techno-paradises, each of them with a different destination, lay of the land, and directions on how to get there.

HUM 2901-001
Drs. Paul Camacho/Kevin Hughes
M 4:45-6:00 pm 

1-credit

The Divine Comedy opens on a man in a midlife crisis: "Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost" (Inf. I.1–  3, trans. Hollander). Soon, Dante the pilgrim learns that the sunlit hill he means to climb is barred to him, and that his way out runs down through hell. Why should the road home go that way? In this one-credit course, we will give ourselves to a slow, close reading of the Inferno, a few cantos each week, following Dante as he journeys into the nine-circle abyss, down through incontinence, violence, and fraud, all the way to the frozen center of the earth. Along the way, we will explore the meaning and limits of evil, how sin looks from the inside, and why the poem keeps drawing out our pity for the damned and then putting that pity in question. We will ask what courage it takes to face such things honestly, and what Dante means to show us by making us walk the whole road. We will end where Dante ends, with the hope that comes when we emerge again to see the stars.

HUM 3400-001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
T/Th 4:00-5:15 pm

Core: History  Cross List: Environmental 
Studies, Sustainability Minor

In 1964, historian Leo Marx published the book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America in which he coined the phrase “the machine in the garden” to explain the persistent ideal—and some say myth—of the pastoral and wild in the American landscape and how such an idea clashes with our modern life, one often ruled by technology and the machine.  Marx’s “machine in the garden” idea proved influential, used by historians of culture, architecture, and art in wide-ranging scholarship. What Marx did was to name a paradoxical concept that emerges when we put into conversation different eras of history and look for trends over time and even across cultures. Marx seemed to capture something in the American ethos that attempted to explain our relationship between two seemingly opposing ideas:  nature and the machine. In short, Marx did the historian’s work of looking to evidence to draw out larger meaning, to construct an argument, and to help bring into greater clarity American identity and our relationship with modernity.

This class takes Marx’s idea of “the machine in the garden” and examines it critically. We will think through what it means for historians to construct meta narratives about different historical periods, and whether Marx’s concept of the “machine in the garden” is a convincing concept within American history. We will also examine the success and the power of his historiographic method, often grounded in “Great Books” and canonical artworks. The second half of the course pivots to consider the limitations of this method and the opportunities for discovery opened up by alternative historiographic methodologies. Subsequent units will examine histories that 1) take seriously the study of the built environment, with the American Arts and Craft movement as its central case study; 2) incorporate voices and evidence from the margins of U.S. history, with case studies drawn from Native American and African American experiences and the National Parks; and 3) question the assumptions of the secularization thesis by re-examining case studies of modern “sacred spaces” such as Central Park and Arts and Crafts chapels. These will reveal just how complex, varied, and contested is the idea of the “machine in the garden” within U.S. cultural history, social history, material culture history, and art history.

HUM 3600-001
Dr. Margaret Grubiak
T/Th 2:30-3:45 pm

Core: Fine Arts

This course is a survey of architecture and urban planning in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Themes of crafting of a specifically American identity, the emergence of modern design via foreign influences, and the continuity of traditional architecture shape this overview. We will pay particular attention to social and cultural interpretations of the American landscape. Architects Frank Furness, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry are some of the major figures we will study this semester.  

HUM 4350-001
Dr. Paul Camacho
T/Th 4:00-5:15 pm

Cross List: Philosophy

We all know that love is—or can be—a problem, but we do not often think of it as a philosophical problem. There are few words in the English language that are more often used, and abused, than the word “love.” It often seems that “love” can mean anything, and therefore ends up meaning nothing in particular. The purpose of this course is to acquire insight into the nature of love through a careful reflection on texts in the history of philosophy and the Christian tradition.

The basic philosophical problem of love is expressed by the French philosopher, Pierre Rousselot: “Is a love that is not egoistic possible? And if it is possible, what is the relation between this pure love of the other and the love of self?” As we reflect on this basic question, we will also ask: What is the relationship between love and rational self-interest? What exactly do we love when we love another person, or when we love God? Is it even possible to love God or for God to love us? What, if anything, does Christianity add to our conception of love?

HIS 11650004
Dr. Eugene McCarraher
M/W 4:45-6:00 pm

Core: History
Cross List: Humanities

Should Americans think of the United States as an empire? Our economy, our conception of “freedom,” and our everyday lives have all depended on empire, but there has also been a long current of anti-imperialism in American culture. With readings ranging from Locke, William Penn, Chief Powhatan, Emerson, and Melville to Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fukuyama, and Friedman, this course considers the historical role of empire in our personal and social lives. 

PSC 4475-001
Dr. Daniel Mark
T/Th 11:30-12:45 pm

Cross List: Humanities

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” -Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Plato’s Republic is one of the enduring works of Western political philosophy and, indeed, of Western literature altogether. In his masterwork, Plato explores the concept of justice. What is it? How do we know? How do we get it? In the course of the investigation, Plato offers profound lessons on virtue, government, education, family life, and much else besides. Through his provocative suggestions and arguments, Plato forces us to consider the deepest questions of human life and meaning, especially as they relate to how we organize our lives together through government and laws, namely the very stuff of political “science.” Thus, careful readers of the Republic learn that Plato still has much to say to us about our current state of affairs—the personal and the political

HUM 6500-001/002
Drs. Michael Tomko/Andrew Lynn
T 6:15-8:55 pm