Hildegard students launch into the Fall session on August 25th.
One thing I love about the undergraduate program at Hildegard is that each term the entire College focuses on a theme—or more accurately, a question fundamental to what it means to be human.
This Fall, we're exploring the question: What does it mean to be Free? And our goal is to grow in fluency in the greatest answers history has given to this question.
We often begin with an anchor text, a book that will frame our imaginations of the questions for the entire term. This Fall, that books is Shelley's Frankenstein. Is Dr. Frankenstein free? He certainly doesn't seem to be. Rather, he is imprisoned by his own creation. And is the monster that he creates free? In some surprising ways, yes, he is, but by his own account, he has been rejected by his creator and designed to live the life of a wretch.
Creation and destruction, affection and hatred, reason and feeling, salvation and damnation, action and inaction — these are the oppositions that Frankenstein introduces.
From there, we discuss philosophical works, like Plato's Gorgias, Descartes's Meditations, Kant's The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.
We read theological works by Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, and Martin Luther.
And we read social and imaginative works by de Tocqueville, Mill, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
And while students study this history of thought on moral, political, and spiritual freedom, they explore the same topic in a focused tutorial on Paul's New Testament Epistles. Students will examine the nature of Freedom from sin and Freedom in Christ.
One thing I especially love is witnessing how the thematic question we investigate in Foundations of Thought affects students' study of leadership and entrepreneurship in the Entrepreneur Lab. This term, students are working through three modules:
Personal Leadership & Organizational Identity
Business Strategy
Product, Program, and Service Development
What makes the Entrepreneur Lab different from other programs in Business is that we take a "Founder First" approach. Meaning, while we teach practical skills that help students understand and contribute to whatever area of work they choose to enter, we prioritize our investment in them, as people of faith, wisdom, virtue, and ingenuity.
And we will ask, what does it mean to be free in our work, our families, and our civic engagement? And, how can we create solutions that help others find the freedom to love God and love their neighbors?
Students will do things the old-fashioned way, sitting around a common table with books and pencils in hand, ready to discuss. But they will also stretch the limits of what college can be—designing real ventures and engaging with real challenges in their communities.
When classes begin shortly, we will welcome students back to our community, but we will also commission them. We will charge them with the responsibility of their education. The questions we ask at Hildegard are not fictional. In a rapidly changing world, we turn to questions like What does it mean to be Free? to continuously orient ourselves toward God's redemptive vision for the world.
Join us in prayer for our students. We ask a lot of them, and we endeavor to meet their ambition and effort with support as mentors and teachers.
Here's to a new term!
MjS
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