THEOL 220 - Belief in Today’s World

Credits: (3)
The first theology course, Belief in Today’s World, will introduce students to the challenges of thinking about questions of belief in the context of today’s secular and pluralist world, especially in the American context. At a fundamental level, the course seeks to help students grasp the relationship of faith and reason, perhaps the central task of a Catholic university. It builds directly on the challenges of modern epistemology that are explored in the modern philosophy course, but it approaches those questions more existentially and socio-culturally. Topics to be addressed include how we come to be able to speak about God, what it means to have faith, how to deal with the problem of evil, and how to connect questions of personal belief to the Church, the sacraments, and social issues. The course connects vertically to America and the World especially by helping students understand how Catholic theology differs from the dominant cultural forms of religious belief: privatized individualism and fundamentalism. (Spring and Summer)