There are two principal aims in this course, one theoretical and the other practical. The theoretical aim is to understand the major options in the history of philosophical ethics, especially utilitarianism, Kantianism (or deontology), and virtue ethics. The practical aim of the course is both to apply these theories to various ethical problems and to see how these theories emerge out of these problems.
Prerequisite: 2500
UCOR 2900 Ethical Reasoning
These courses introduce students to major traditions of moral theory and ethical reasoning, engage students in critically examining ethical problems, and challenge students to develop rigorous personal systems of ethical reasoning. The central goals of the course are to develop students' skills in reasoning about ethical problems and encourage deep, habitual reflection on the ethical dimensions of life. This course requires a major case study analysis of some sort. Individual sections may focus on different ethical arenas or problems.
This course will address the issue of global climate change. We will discuss the science behind how humans can affect the global climate--covering the major greenhouse gasses, how they impact the climate, and how the current and projected changes compare to previous climactic and atmospheric shifts. Students will dig into the science behind the "climate controversies," and explain the various lines of evidence for how we know the global shift is already underway.
UCOR 3800 Natural Science & Global Challenge
Courses in the natural sciences that explore important global issues through the lens of a specific discipline in the natural sciences. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of a natural science as it relates to global issues, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying knowledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as some kind of reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning and/or field or laboratory research is encouraged but not required.
By reading Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Euripides, and others, students will examine the complex and sometimes contradictory role of gender in Ancient Greece. The methods and values of philosophy will guide our examination and will help situate these issues in the context not only of history and culture but also in the context of perennial questions about justice and the good life.
UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in Humanities
Courses that introduce students to the subjects and methods of inquiry of the humanities by engaging in focused study of one or more particularly important historical or literature-based questions arising from a humanities discipline. These courses introduce students to key concepts, knowledge, and principles of the relevant discipline as they relate to the questions being studied in the individual section. They are not intended to be survey courses or broad introductions to the discipline, but should be content-rich, with the content revolving around and connected to the central questions being studied. Each section incorporates the interpretation of primary texts (prose fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction essays and books, historical documents, works of art, film, digital media, speeches, etc.) in relation to their cultural and historical contexts; explores the relationships between language, narratives, thought, and culture; and examines the ways in which important texts and events relate to each other across time. Essential goals include: Introducing students to an important question in the humanities, the relevant content necessary to study that question, and the ways in which the humanities pursue and generate knowledge; preparing students to read and evaluate primary texts in relationship to their contexts, and the use of those texts and interpretations as evidence to construct theses or arguments. In addition, these courses teach the following skills: academic writing, argument construction/critical thinking, library research, critical reading, and oral presentation.
This course introduces students to the discipline of philosophy in a manner that traces historically the idea that the practice of philosophy can inform a life lived in accord with fundamental truths and intrinsic values. Beginning with the forms of "spiritual exercise" embodied by the ancient philosopher, Socrates, we will follow the Socratic model of inquiry and life through the middle age and into the modem period.
Prerequisite: 1100
UCOR 2500 Philosophy of the Human Person
This course introduces students to the methods of rigorous philosophical reasoning; introduces students to the philosophical questions, methods, and figures that have played key roles in shaping the Jesuit approach to education and scholarship; and teaches students to critically examine assumptions about reality (especially assumptions about our natures as human beings). Each section explores two or more of the following fundamental philosophical questions: the problem of human knowing, the mind/body problem, the problem of personal identity, the problem of freedom and determinism, and the problem of other persons. This course also aims to develop critical reflective skills to prepare students for more in-depth study in ethics (in the subsequent Ethical Reasoning course), improve critical thinking and writing skills, and enhance students' appreciation for complexity and ambiguity.
This class examines reproduction through an anthropological lens with a particular focus on the politics of reproduction. By using reproduction as an entry point to cultural analysis we will explore the ways in which reproduction relates to broader systems of power, identity, race, and technology in different cultural contexts around the world.
Cross-listed with: ANTH 4220-01
UCOR 3600 Social Science & Global Challenges
Courses in the social sciences that explore important global issues through the lens of the social sciences. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of a social science as it relates to a global issue, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying know ledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as some kind of reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning is encouraged but not required.
Jesus-the most famous figure in Western Civilization-left us no writings of his own. Instead, he left the storytelling task to others. So we learn about Jesus only through the stories of others, fascinating stories that make claims about Jesus' supernatural powers, identity, and teachings. In this course, we will hear and examine the stories of the canonical (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and non-canonical (Thomas and Mary) gospel writers. We will learn how to interpret these ancient stories about Jesus, determine their value in uncovering the historical Jesus, and appropriate them into our own cultures and settings. In short, we will move from considering Jesus in the Gospels to the Jesus in Seattle.
Prerequisite: 1100
UCOR 2100 Theological Explorations
These courses each include four key elements: An introduction to theology as an academic discipline; an examination of some of the theological beliefs that have shaped Christian understandings of the divine, especially in the Catholic Jesuit theological tradition, and a consideration of their implications for life today; an exploration of a key issue, person, or text that has had a formative role in shaping this theological tradition; and an opportunity for students to reflect on their own spiritual life and become more thoughtful and articulate in expressing their own spiritual values.
This course explores the core tenets and limitations of the field of postcolonial studies. After drawing on this critical lens to read literature written from the epicenter of British empire, we will turn to later writers who respond to and critique the legacies of imperialism and its concomitant literary traditions. We will trace the emergence of this field in its historical and cultural context, recognizing its productive value as well as potential fault lines.
UCOR 3400 Humanities & Global Challenges
Courses that explore important global issues through the lens of a specific discipline in the humanities. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of the humanities as they relate to global issues, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying knowledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as a reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning is encouraged but not required.
Are we on a path to destruction of the planet or is the media reporting hyperbolic claims influenced by hidden agendas? This course will examine 'green' lifestyle choices from two perspectives: the more cerebral understanding facilitated by traditional classroom meetings to discuss the biology behind environmental sustainability and the more visceral understanding afforded by reaching out beyond the classroom to experience first-hand some of the sustainability issues that affect our day to day lives.
8-week
Online
UCOR 3800 Natural Science & Global Challenges
Courses in the natural sciences that explore important global issues through the lens of a specific discipline in the natural sciences. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of a natural science as it relates to global issues, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying knowledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as some kind of reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning and/or field or laboratory research is encouraged but not required.
An introduction to mathematical ideas, emphasizing a multicultural, or global, perspective to studying quantitative methods, logical thinking, and algorithmic processes.
Prequisite: high school algebra & geometry
UCOR 1200 Quantitative Reasoning
Courses in quantitative reasoning appropriate to students' major field. Essential goals include developing basic or more advanced quantitative reasoning skills (including the ability to manipulate expressions), evaluating probabilities, creating and interpreting graphs, using mathematics to solve problems, and making arguments with numbers.
This hands-on studio course offers an exploration of costume design and construction techniques used in costume design for the stage, film, print and photography. Students will experience the world of the costume designer from the designer’s point-of-view through a quarter-long exploration in which they will conceive of designs for a unique historical garments and build each garment themselves. Steps to this project will include design analysis, historical and conceptual research, an introduction to flat patterning and draping techniques, and instruction in hand and machine sewing techniques. Throughout the course, students will move from gathering visual research through collage, to rendering their designs on paper, to learning to put together a three-dimensional sewing pattern, to finally, building finished sewn garment samples they have designed in their entirety.
UCOR 1300 Creative Expression & Interpretation
Courses that engage students in both creating and understanding expressive works of art. Courses may represent a variety of arts disciplines, including: visual art, music, drama, creative writing, etc. Essential goals include: develop skills in creative thinking and expression; have direct experience in the process of creating original works of art in some genre; learn to articulate a vision through art and seek to share that vision with others; learn and be able to apply basic artistic techniques and aesthetic principles relevant to the art form; incorporate understanding of social, political, economic, and historical context of artistic movements into creative expression; learn and be able to apply simple principles to evaluate and interpret works of art; study important and relevant works of art and examples of the form of art on which the class is focused; reflect on and analyze the creative process and works of art, orally and in writing. Fees may apply in some sections.
This writing seminar helps students develop as college-level, academic writers. Students will engage, rhetorically, with the complexities of class war in America to develop their abilities to participate in important discourses, understand and respond to the arguments of others, and develop and support their own positions. Through deep inquiry and argument, this seminar facilitates the habits of critical and creative questioning and thinking to help students become more proficient and skillful academic thinkers and writers.
UCOR 1100 Academic Writing Seminar
A seminar-format course designed to develop English college-level academic writing skills in all students to prepare them for both academic and other forms of writing they will encounter in later classes (argumentative writing, reflective writing, etc.). Emphasis on: 1) fundamental writing mechanics, 2) argument construction and use of evidence and 3) rhetorical thinking/flexibility to address various situations, audiences, and genres. Each faculty member selects a theme for their section(s) to focus students' reading and writing work.
An introduction to mathematical ideas, emphasizing a multicultural, or global, perspective to studying quantitative methods, logical thinking, and algorithmic processes.
Prequisite: high school algebra & geometry
UCOR 1200 Quantitative Reasoning
Courses in quantitative reasoning appropriate to students' major field. Essential goals include developing basic or more advanced quantitative reasoning skills (including the ability to manipulate expressions), evaluating probabilities, creating and interpreting graphs, using mathematics to solve problems, and making arguments with numbers.
This course focuses on the art of putting pictures in motion to tell a story. Students will first explore the history of this art, and then will use film techniques to tell their own stories using found imagery, cell phones, digital cameras and visual and audio editing software. The course goal is visual literacy, as it pertains to the students' ability to both share ideas and to understand motion pictures.
UCOR 1300 Creative Expression & Interpretation
Courses that engage students in both creating and understanding expressive works of art. Courses may represent a variety of arts disciplines, including: visual art, music, drama, creative writing, etc. Essential goals include: develop skills in creative thinking and expression; have direct experience in the process of creating original works of art in some genre; learn to articulate a vision through art and seek to share that vision with others; learn and be able to apply basic artistic techniques and aesthetic principles relevant to the art form; incorporate understanding of social, political, economic, and historical context of artistic movements into creative expression; learn and be able to apply simple principles to evaluate and interpret works of art; study important and relevant works of art and examples of the form of art on which the class is focused; reflect on and analyze the creative process and works of art, orally and in writing. Fees may apply in some sections.
This course investigates the philosophical, social and psychological forces at work in the way humans create and deploy monsters to cope with the fear and uncertainty. Using philosophical and psychological resources, and drawing from stories, myths and media, this class seeks to understand and rethink the way strangers are turned to monsters.
UCOR 3400 Humanities & Global Challenges
Courses that explore important global issues through the lens of a specific discipline in the humanities. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of the humanities as they relate to global issues, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying knowledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as a reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning is encouraged but not required.
All societies have crime. All societies punish. This course will explore the problem that crime and its punishment presents to modern civilization. By examining how different cultures throughout the modern world address the inevitability of crime and punishment students will interrogate the contours of modernity and investigate the relationship between punishment and the formation of modern society. At its heart we will examine what it means to be modern by exploring how it is that the way a society chooses to punish reveals its unique outlook on justice and injustice, rights and responsibilities and its appreciation of mercy and forgiveness.
UCOR 3600 Social Science & Global Challenges
Courses in the social sciences that explore important global issues through the lens of the social sciences. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of a social science as it relates to a global issue, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying know ledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as some kind of reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning is encouraged but not required.
This course explores the development of select doctrines in the history of Catholic theology (including the status of women and the problem of war) in order to show how Catholic theology is frequently shaped by political alliances, philosophical systems, and social biases. We emphasize questions surrounding the humanity and divinity of Christ, the problem of war, the problem of Christian anti-Judaism, the doctrine of the church, the doctrine of salvation, and the doctrine of the Eucharist.
Prerequisite: 1100
Cross-listed with THRS 2011-01
UCOR 2100 Theological Explorations
These courses each include four key elements: An introduction to theology as an academic discipline; an examination of some of the theological beliefs that have shaped Christian understandings of the divine, especially in the Catholic Jesuit theological tradition, and a consideration of their implications for life today; an exploration of a key issue, person, or text that has had a formative role in shaping this theological tradition; and an opportunity for students to reflect on their own spiritual life and become more thoughtful and articulate in expressing their own spiritual values.
How has well-being been represented (in popular and academic discourses) as a thing to be attained in the 21st century? This course will offer a more complex perspective on the lived experience of well-being particularly in an era in which humans face potential catastrophe from myriad sources: environmental, political, social, economic, etc. We will read literary narratives of homelessness (exile, dislocation, refugee-ism, a sense of being estranged or a stranger, etc.) that, simultaneously, locate a sense of connectedness, community, and hope in the midst of such upheaval.
UCOR 3400 Humanities & Global Challenges
Courses that explore important global issues through the lens of a specific discipline in the humanities. Each course focuses on a particular issue/challenge and course content assists students in understanding key disciplinary knowledge and approaches that provide insight into the issue. Students explore ways to productively think about and address the issue. These courses help students increase their understanding of complex global issues, develop knowledge of the humanities as they relate to global issues, explore approaches to and solutions for global issues, develop skills and confidence in applying knowledge to complex issues, and improve writing and research skills. Global Challenges courses include students from a variety of disciplines, promoting interdisciplinary conversation and understanding. This course requires a major paper or project, as well as a reflective assignment where students are asked to synthesize their overall learning as it relates to the global issue being studied. Community-based learning is encouraged but not required.
We will use a combination of historical, textual, legal, and anthropological approaches to analyze the complex interplay between Quranic exegesis, Islamic religious traditions, gender, sexuality and politics in the Muslim world. We will start with Quranic tenets and traditional precepts on gender and sexuality; we will continue with a study of how classical interpretations were altered by the encounter with the West; and we will conclude with different views and strategies adopted by Muslim women and gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims around the world.
Prequisite: UCOR 2100
UCOR 3100 Religion in a Global Context
Courses that examine religious traditions, spiritual practices and worldviews in a global context. These courses examine diverse religious traditions with respect to sacred texts, doctrines and beliefs, rituals, ethics, and spiritual practices in a global context. Emphases can include the study of a specific religious tradition, comparison and dialogue between religious traditions, and/or applying theological/spiritual perspectives and methods of analysis to global issues. Courses will include explorations of the relationships between religion, society, culture, history, and aesthetics. These courses assist students in applying theological thinking and spiritual reflection to global issues, help them develop understanding of diversity within and between religious traditions, develop facility in dialoging with persons from various religious and spiritual backgrounds, and teach them to reflect on religious traditions outside of one's own.