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Humanities and Social Sciences
led by Brad Gregory
Associate Professor of History
Professor Gregory has invited several Notre Dame faculty members to give presentations on their disciplines to the seminar and to discuss whether and how the dominant paradigms in their fields could be in conversation with Catholic intellectual traditions. Among the guest presenters are:
Kevin Hart (Literature); David Burrell (Philosophy); James McAdams (Political Science); Mary Hirschfeld (Economics); Patrick Gaffney (Anthropology); Don Pope-Davis (Psychology); Cathleen Kaveny (Law); Brad Gregory will lead the session on History.
The kinds of questions and issues to be discussed include both something about
where each of these disciplines in its modern, academic form came from, and
what some of its guiding preoccupations and assumptions are. The seminar will
consider issues related to each discipline, respectively, and "big
questions" related to religion in general and Catholicism in particular, which
are sometimes part of the motivation for why people choose to enter academia,
but so often seem to get lost or buried in the specialization and minutiae of
professional scholarship.
The readings will be, on average, 3-4 articles or book chapters in preparation
for each class. There will be a final paper, due the last day of class, whose
objective is to provide students with an opportunity to write about something out of their own readings and
reflections from the classes.
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