CSP 232 Won't You Be My Neighbor? Catholics and Community
“Who is my neighbor?” This question inspired the Good Samaritan parable in the Gospel of Luke, and it resounds today. How do places, communities, and the built environment help people embody the Catholic Intellectual Tradition? This course introduces an interdisciplinary Catholic Studies approach to social structures and material cultures by reading “the signs of the times” in local buildings, local objects, local practices, and local policy choices. We understand what it means to be a neighbor when we take the “local” seriously: this course focuses on connections between the universal and the particular through our social location at Sacred Heart University and the greater Bridgeport region. What is SHU’s relationship to the pioneering vision of the Second Vatican Council and Bishop Curtis’s idea to empower the vocation of the laity here at home? How have Catholics and their institutions related to the ideal of neighborly communities? How does the Catholic Intellectual Tradition encourage us to learn by serving others? Students will be invited to encounter neighbors different from themselves and to situate those stories within a larger framework. Students will also consider how generational and neighborhood divides can be overcome through dialogue, encounter, and shared commitments to justice and the common good.
Prerequisite
CIT 201