Core

The University of St. Thomas’ unique core curriculum offers students entrance into the great conversation unfolding across human history, a conversation about the fundamental questions we must all consider if we hope to live fully human lives. But it is about more than questions.

The wisdom our students discover—animated by faith and reason—and the skills they cultivate prepare them to serve society with conviction and become leaders known for integrity, insight, and courage. Students who complete the UST Core will have both the skills needed to succeed professionally in life after graduation and a true sense of the greater purpose of that life.

The Goals of the Core

  1. Self-knowledge: To form in students an understanding of themselves as human persons endowed with intellectual and imaginative capacities and free will, so that they are empowered to pursue wisdom and to cultivate virtues, in which their humanity is fulfilled.
  2. Intellectual Virtue: To cultivate intellectual skills that shape the life of the mind across multiple disciplines and enable a person to grow intellectually into the best version of himself or herself. Such skills take many forms. They could, for example, include, without being limited to, the ability to read and interpret, to draw conclusions from principles or data, to formulate accurate definitions, or to persuade others without manipulation or deceit.
  3. Wisdom: To develop in students a reflective, philosophical habit of mind from the perspective of which the truths of all disciplines, of faith and of reason, can begin to be grasped as an ordered whole unified by underlying principles. This manifests itself in a healthy curiosity and a reverent wonder for truth in all its forms and in a keen interest in the underlying causes of things.

In the Core and as a University, We Are Committed To:

  1. The Catholic intellectual tradition, a tradition that (i) understands human persons as rational, imaginative, free creatures capable of fulfillment through wisdom and virtue, (ii) prizes the intellectual skills formed by the liberal arts that have always been foundational in Catholic universities, and (iii) understands all of created reality as intelligible through principles and causes.
  2. The dialogue between faith and reason, which depends upon the reflective, philosophical habit of mind our curriculum fosters.
  3. The Basilian core values of goodness, discipline, and knowledge, virtues through which our students’ humanity is fulfilled and which enable students to understand the relationship between the different parts of human knowledge, making possible constructive collaboration across different disciplines.
  4. The unity of all knowledge, insofar as the truths of all disciplines can be grasped as an ordered whole unified by underlying principles.
  5. Forming our graduates to think analytically, communicate effectively, succeed professionally, and lead ethically.

Degrees

Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: BS 66+ Hour Degrees, 30-90 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: Honors Program, 15+ Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: All Engineering and Physics Degree Plans, Honors Program
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: Transfer ABSN, 60+ Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: 0-14 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: Transfer ABSN, 31-59 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: 15-29 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: Transfer ABSN, 0-30 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: 30-59 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: 60-90 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: BS 66+ Hour Degrees, 0-14 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: Honors Program, 0-14 Credits of Transfer
Bachelor's Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum: BS 66+ Hour Degrees, 15-29 Credits of Transfer

Courses

ARTSC 3301: Art and Contemplation

This course examines the nature of beauty and the role of contemplation in the arts within the Catholic intellectual tradition. Grounded in the aesthetic principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy of leisure articulated by Josef Pieper, the course engages modern interlocutors in exploring the meaning and experience of art. Major art forms—including painting, music, theater, and film, among others, like architecture and dance—are studied through analysis of their formal elements and principles of integrity, proportion, and radiance. Students encounter representative works of art, develop skills in interpreting them, and evaluate the relationship between aesthetic experience, leisure, and cultural formation. The course situates artistic experience within a broader account of human flourishing and the cultivation of the moral imagination.

ENGLC 1301: The Classical Tradition

Classical Imagination is a writing-intensive course that introduces students to the arts of close reading and discussion necessary for the cultivation of wisdom. This course engages timeless human questions through study of Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Students are encouraged to step outside of the mass culture of the present moment, appreciate the artistic achievements of the distant past, and take their place in the great conversation that is the Western literary tradition.

ENGLC 1302: Middle Ages and Renaissance

Medieval and Renaissance Imagination is a writing-intensive course that builds on the skills of close reading, discussion, and personal reflection introduced in Classical Imagination. This course explores the ways in which Dante, Shakespeare, and other seminal authors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance took the best of the Classical literature and integrated it creatively with Christian revelation. Students are exposed to the tensions among and extraordinary synthesis of faith, reason, and artistic excellence that characterizes the Christian imagination.

ENGLC 2301: Modern World and American Expressions

Modern Imagination is a writing-intensive course that allows students to apply the close-reading and discussion skills learned in earlier English Core classes. This course explores various artistic responses to the fragmentation of personhood caused by the disintegrating forces of modernity. Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and other important modern authors challenge students to consider what the persistence of the Christian imagination means for themselves and their cultural moment.

HISTC 1301: History of Western Culture and Ideas

This course introduces Western culture and ideas from the ancient Near East through the twentieth century, examining the seminal events, enduring ideas, and primary sources—philosophical, theological, literary, and political—that shaped cultures across Europe, the Atlantic world, and the Americas. Central to the course is the relation of selfhood and interiority to the public sphere of human action, traced from ancient Israel and Greece through the medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, early modern, and modern periods. Through close reading, discussion, and historical analysis, students develop skills in textual analysis, historical interpretation, and the evaluation of comparative worldviews. The course fulfills the University’s Core curriculum requirement by cultivating the historical understanding essential to intellectual, moral, and civic life, situating Western culture within the Catholic intellectual tradition’s vision of human flourishing.

LS 1301: Foundations of Liberal Learning

Foundations of Liberal Learning serves as the gateway to the Core Curriculum. This course guides students to a deeper understanding of the liberal arts of language—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—in the context of a larger exploration of the nature and importance of liberal education. Students will learn to think and communicate their thoughts more clearly, reasonably, and persuasively, even as they also engage with transformative texts that encourage them to seek answers to fundamental questions about education, freedom, and the good life. The course may be taught from different disciplinary perspectives.

MATHC 2301: Quadrivium: The Mathematical Arts

"Quadrivium: The Mathematical Arts" explores the quantitative arts of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. As the second stage of a traditional liberal arts education following the qualitative trivium, the quadrivium reveals the beauty and nature of the created universe through the universal language of mathematics.

PHILC 2301: Ethics

This course is a study of the components of living a good human life, including human action, conscience, human goods, and virtues, together with the application of moral principles to particular circumstances.

PHILC 3301: Metaphysics

This course is an introduction to metaphysics, the philosophical discipline concerned with being insofar as it is being and its principles, causes, and properties. The course culminates in philosophical theology, considering what can be known about God through human reason.

POSCC 2301: Politics and Society

This course offers an introduction to the political and social order with an emphasis on the American context, presenting theories and their practical application. Themes include natural law, civil rights and civil liberties, and forms of social and economic organization. Students will develop their ability to frame, interpret, and answer political and social questions from a Catholic perspective. Note: POSCC 2301 fulfills the SACSCOC general education social and behavioral science requirement.

SCIEC 2301: Quadrivium: The Mathematical Arts

"Quadrivium: The Mathematical Arts" explores the quantitative arts of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. As the second stage of a traditional liberal arts education following the qualitative trivium, the quadrivium reveals the beauty and nature of the created universe through the universal language of mathematics.

THEOC 1301: Faith, Reason, and Revelation

This course is a foundational introduction to Catholic Fundamental Theology, presenting the basic openness of the human person to divine revelation and the challenges that sin and the problem of evil present to the reception of this revelation. By showing students the fundamental compatibility between faith and reason and illustrating the integral relationships between history and revelation, as well as nature and grace, the course equips students with philosophical and theological principles necessary for recognizing the Gospels as historically reliable witnesses, the Church as legitimate spiritual authority, and the credibility and coherence of the mysteries of the faith.

THEOC 2301: Scripture and Salvation History

This course is a capacious introduction to the Sacred Scripture, both in its historical unfolding as well as in its theological significance. God reveals himself through history. For this reason, the course considers some of the principal events of salvation history: the creation of the world; the creation and fall of man; the calling of Abraham, Israel, the prophets; and the coming of the Son of God, whose human life, death, and resurrection founded the Church. This course equips students with theological principles of Biblical interpretation so that students may discover the origins of the doctrines which the Church teaches today, especially those doctrines pertaining to the Trinity, Incarnation, and Sacraments.

THEOC 3301: The Return to God

This course is an introduction to theological anthropology which seeks to provide an integrated account of the moral, mystical, and sacramental dimensions of the human person. It recapitulates the core curriculum’s investigation of the contemplative elements constituting human happiness and shows how perfect human happiness ultimately consists in the beatific vision of God. Suspended between Eden and Eternity, the drama of human salvation reveals the origins of sin, suffering, and death. But the downward trajectory charted by sin is not our final end. Through the missions of Word and Spirit God has poured out his grace and truth so that we may return to him in wisdom and love. The incarnation of the Son of God and the coming of the Holy Spirit redirect human life ecclesially and liturgically, configuring us as new children of the Father.