Honors Courses for 2006-2007
Fall 2006
HONO 2000: The Scholar: Learners and Laureates (3 units)
The Scholar: Learners and Laureates is an honors seminar that asks students to think (read, speak, listen, write) about scholars and scholarship. Students reflect on their own reasons for attending the university and then study Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” They reflect on their own ideas about what the purpose of a university is and then study Newman’s The Idea of a University as well as examples of 20th and 21st Century commentary on this work. To further consider scholars and scholarship students participate in Shield Day and the fall Convocation, which initiate them into the academic community of scholars. Next students learn about Alfred Nobel, The Nobel Foundation and Prizes, and Nobel laureates. Focusing on a diverse selection of Nobel laureates/scholars in literature, students study works on women and men laureates from such countries as Egypt, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States. Finally, drawing on the discussions, readings, and activities of the seminar and academic semester, students describe themselves and their experiences as scholars at Dominican university through their own critical and creative compositions.
HONO 2050: The World: Issues and Interdependence (3 units)
This seminar is designed to introduce students to the complex and diverse issues confronting humanity in different regions of the world. It will help increase students' understanding of global issues which influence different world regions and how these regions interact with each other. Since each region is characterized by distinct cultural traits emphasis will be on historical contextualization of the region, identifying relevant issues pertaining to the region, and how they impact at national, regional, and international scale. Throughout the course emphasis will be placed on world regions such as North America, Middle and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East and thus help students to be globally informed.
HONO 3500: Self, Community, and Service: Ethical Theory and Practice (3 units)
A rigorous examination of contemporary movement in ethical theory, focusing on the essential need for moral meaning and its modern implications. Themes include questions of identity, responsibility, and perception of and relation to the "other." Critical analysis of texts and key issues will be performed and understanding of key issues will be deepened through a service component that allows for active cultivation and expression of core values in the local community.
HONO 3191: The Varieties of World Religious Experience: Worldviews and practices of the Great Religions (3 units)
A World's Religions course with a twist: all the work required in the regular course but only half the semester's hours in class. The other half will be spent visiting religious sites in order to participate in their practices- a Native American sweat lodge, Hindu ritual and yoga, Buddhist meditation exercises, Jewish Sabbath worship, Christian contemplative prayer, Islamic daily prayer, Sufi invocation (and more). As these adventures will require extra and unusual hours of availability, subscribers must be highly flexible and strongly committed.
CQHO 4060: Philosophy of Social Initiative (3 units)
Moral protest serves as a catalyst for change, a corrective to apathy, to numbness, and as a counter to the ever-increasing corporate agenda- it reminds us all of our shared human needs and the unifying power of working towards the greater good. This course will offer a dynamic examination of the philosophical dimensions of social movements. We will delve into the scholarship of moral, political, and social philosophies that describe protest and activism, on both personal and collective levels, as ethical cultural critiques that act as catalysts for transformation. Addressing questions of motivation, leadership, shared values and common causes, this course will ponder the “oppositional consciousness,” the creativity and the human power to react against injustice and to imagine a better, moral existence.
CQHO 4040: A Culture of Their Own: Human Rights Activists (3 units)
Around the world, in many cultures and eras, outstanding people have risen up to fight injustice and tyranny. Who are these people who are willing to stand against their governments and advocate for human rights? While they hail from different time periods and different cultures, are these individuals a subculture of their own? If so, what differentiates them from the norm of their greater culture? In this course we will examine the speeches, essays, biographies and poetry of brave people from around the globe while we explore the norms of their individual cultures. In doing so, we will try to understand what motivated these individuals and what connects them across time and distance.
CQHO 4030: Religion: Revolution and Cultural and Economic Transformation (3 units)
Throughout history religious movements or political movements with religious values have contributed to broad-based social and cultural changes that have transformed our human landscape for generations. This course will focus on a wide range of examples of this type of change as it has occurred in different countries and within different religious traditions. The premise of this course is that only when religious symbols have changed do we have the most revolutionary change. Change of power from one elite to the next, even if backed by social protest, is not radical change. We will grapple with the possibilities of “destructive” and constructive transformation. The work of Max Weber and Robert Bellah will form the theoretical grounding for the course in order to understand such unintended consequences of these movements, as exhibited in how the “left wing” of the Reformation helped “seed” modern secular capitalism.
