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College Curriculum
The Holy Cross Difference
Required for all students regardless of major, our College Curriculum forms students into graduates ready to serve and lead in any field who see the world as an interconnected whole.
Through the College Curriculum you’ll learn to:
- Engage deeply with the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic Social Tradition, and the Charism of the Congregation of Holy Cross
- See connections across disciplines
- Think critically and collaboratively
- Lead with virtue and compassion
- Live your vocation with purpose
This integrative education, together with your major course of study, will prepare you to have the competence to see and the courage to act as a scholar, citizen, leader, and disciple for the benefit of your community, the Church, and the world.
While we prepare useful citizens for society, we shall likewise do our utmost to prepare citizens for heaven.
– Blessed Basil Moreau
Four Seminars. One Integrated Curriculum.
The backbone of the College Curriculum is comprised of four cohort-based seminars. As you progress through them, one per year, they will help you integrate what you are learning both inside and outside the classroom.
Each section of this seminar is connected to a location in the College’s surrounding community. Through readings, seminar activities and site visits, you will sharpen your skills of observation, attention, and inquiry. In one major assignment, you will create a graphic essay for a community-wide exhibition.
Common course readings include works by St. Augustine, Bl. Basil Moreau, Josef Pieper, Simone Weil, Charles Taylor, Wendell Berry, Pope Francis, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Iain McGilchrist — all of which illuminate what is meant by mind and heart.
This seminar will challenge you to see their studies within broader contexts, perspectives, and paradigms. Through close reading and discussion, you will consider how meaning can be clarified—or distorted—by the lens through which it is viewed.
You will participate in and lead discussions on complex works by a wide range of witnesses, theologians, historians, novelists, and poets including Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, P. D. James, Lawrence Principe, and Immaculée Ilibagiza.
In this course you will examine the Catholic tradition of the common good, how this tradition differs from rival conceptions of the common good, and how it shapes our shared life together. In the classroom you will focus on the principle of subsidiarity, vocational discernment, and such as solidarity, prudence, cooperation, hospitality, neighborliness, and righteousness. This course also features community-based learning where you will identify and foster common goods through apprenticeship, engagement, and practice.
Readings include Sacred Scripture, the Catholic Social Tradition, and CSC documents, along with works by St. Augustine, St. Benedict, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope Francis, Martin Luther King Jr., Alasdair MacIntyre, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Wendell Berry, William Cavanaugh, Maggy Barankitse, and Emmanuel Katongole.
In this seminar you will work in groups on an interdisciplinary project. Your journey of integrative thinking and cooperative scholarly activity throughout your time at Holy Cross culminates in this course with a public presentation of your work interpreted in light of CSC educational principles.
The course involves a speaker series as well as seminar discussions of common readings by authors such as Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Gustavo Gutierrez, Robert Barron, Daniel Groody, Vivek Murthy, and Bl. Basil Moreau.
To enhance your academic formation with a greater understanding of the whole, (Greek, kat’holon), the College Curriculum includes required courses from the humanities as well as the natural, quantitative, and social sciences.