“I don’t know what nursing or business will look like in five hundred years, but I know that we will still be reading Plato and Aristotle.” In this conversation, Chris Evans introduces listeners to the history of the esteemed Core of the University of St. Thomas and the Basilian charism of forming the whole person. He considers how the rise of professional majors and other cultural dynamics have challenged the breadth, depth, coherence, and sense of purpose of the Core. He considers the difference between having the Core as an “integral part” of the university's course of studies and making it an “integrating” part of a university education, a luminous center of gravity that brings clarity to all of the university’s activities (within and beyond the classroom) and gives them order and a telos. And throughout the conversation he gives many details (with their rationale) of the renewal of the Core. These and other questions and topics animate this wide-ranging conversation about how the renewed Core and its culture promise to become a models for liberal learning within a comprehensive university in the twenty-first century.

Links of Potential Interest:

Josef Pieper, What Does "Academic" Mean?

"UST Renews Core Curriculum"

The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

St. Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences

Pope Saint John Paul II, Fides et Ratio

Pope Benedict,  "Address to Catholic Educators"