Abstract
When St. Bonaventure University decided to redesign its core curriculum, we turned to Bonaventure’s account of the mind’s journey to God in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum as a paradigm by which to give coherence to the undergraduate experience consistent with our mission and tradition. Bonaventure was himself an Augustinian philosopher and thus Augustine’s Confessions holds a place of great significance in our first year seminar where it is studied in conjunction with Bonaventure’s inward turn to find God imprinted on his soul. This paper is an account of the original rationale for including Augustine’s Confessions in our curriculum and a report of continuing faculty and student attitudes towards that text nearly two decades later.
Highlights
When I learned that the conference theme was “Augustine Across the Curriculum”, I saw an opportunity to contribute to this discussion from my experience developing, teaching, and administering our university’s core curriculum
I want to use the opportunity to discuss the importance of curriculum development in institutions whose mission includes teaching the Christian intellectual tradition and, Paper presented at Teaching the Christian Intellectual Tradition Conference held at Samford University, 2–4 October 2014
We adopted Bonaventure’s account of the mind’s six-step journey to God as a paradigm by which to give coherence to the undergraduate experience at an institution with our specific mission and tradition. Using this Bonaventurean framework to shape our entire core curriculum was never seen as a feasible option, but we adopted this model to create a syllabus and textbook for a required freshman seminar entitled “The Intellectual Journey” [1]
Summary
In order to compare what had originally inspired our choice of the Confessions with the understanding of the faculty who currently teach in the core, I conducted an informal inquiry into the reasoning behind the selection. We adopted Bonaventure’s account of the mind’s six-step journey to God as a paradigm by which to give coherence to the undergraduate experience at an institution with our specific mission and tradition.
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