Monday, January 07, 2013

Course Offerings Spring 2013

This semester I teach two seminars and a course -

1) A seminar on St. John of the Cross where seminarians, my colleague Dr. Joel Barstad and I will argue over the meaning and significance of the poems and commentary of the Doctor of the Church as it pertains to the mystery of faith -- a kind of celebration of the Year of Faith in seminar form.   Our texts, besides the Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, include Iain Matthew's Impact of God and Karol Wojtyla's The Nature of Faith according to the writings of St. John of the Cross.

2) The Synthetic Seminar that has customarily been used to prepare the seminarians, after six years of former study, for comprehensive oral exams.   The seminar will continue to have an eye to this comprehensive preparation but will also seek a synthesis, a vision of the whole, of the form -- at least to the extent to which the state of scientific theology allows us to see this whole.  How do we bring the meaning we discover in theology to bear on the great human, moral, social and personal questions that live in our culture and in our hearts today, and how do we do this in a compelling way, in a way that attends to both the beauty of man's difficult questions and the ineffable glory of God's response? To achieve this, I have introduced essays by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Pope Benedict as well as a document by the International Theological Commission, Theology Today.  I will show these contemporary sources as part of a conversation about the nature of theology and how it advances by argument as proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica I, 1, 1-10.  Against this background my colleagues together with the seminarians will present and defend individual theses to model how a disciplined theological conversation is to be presented.

3) A course called Spiritual Classics for men in the Spirituality Year, a year of prayerful reading of the Bible, the Catechism and of the Saints and Mystics before the beginning of formal studies.  Readings for my course will include St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity,  St. Bernard of Clairvaux among other selections.   

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have much appreciated Iain Matthew's book and go back to it often. I did not realize JPII wrote on John of the Cross. Would you consider that a dense work or could the average lay person glean from his writings?