Ethics Across the Curriculum
The 草榴社区 Initiative: Ethics Across the Curriculum
The 草榴社区 launched a new, three-year Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative, beginning during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Update: We are now accepting applications for a new round of Ethics Across the Curriculum Course Development Grants. More information can be found . Applications for the current round are due by 3/3/25.
A New Initiative Rooted in Our 500-Year-Old Jesuit Tradition
From its beginning, Jesuit education has never sought merely to increase students’ grasp of various bodies of knowledge, enhance their communication skills, cultivate their analytical abilities, and so on, as important as all these things are. At its heart, Jesuit education has also always aimed to form students’ moral characters, to prepare them to be persons for and with others, people who, in the words of Pedro Arrupe, S.J. (former Superior General of the Jesuits), “cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors” and who are “completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.”[1]
As John O’Malley, S.J., puts it in his book, The First Jesuits, “the Jesuits looked more to formation of mind and character, to Bildung, than to the acquisition of ever more information or the advancement of the disciplines.”[2] The aim of Jesuit education has always been to graduate students who “will be able to face and solve, for themselves and others, the composite problems of life, social, civic, moral, and religious – who, in short, may contribute through influence, service, and example to the up-building of the kingdom of God in the heart of humanity.”[3] In the words of another Superior General of the Jesuits, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.,
"For 450 years, Jesuit education has sought to educate “the whole person” intellectually and professionally, psychologically, morally and spiritually. But in the emerging global reality, with its great possibilities and deep contradictions, the whole person is different from the whole person of the Counter-Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, or the 20th century. Tomorrow’s “whole person” cannot be whole without an educated awareness of society and culture with which to contribute socially, generously, in the real world. Tomorrow’s whole person must have, in brief, a well educated solidarity. We must therefore raise our Jesuit educational standard to “educate the whole person of solidarity for the real world.…
Paraphrasing Ignacio Ellacuría, it is the nature of every university to be a social force, and it is the calling of a Jesuit university to take conscious responsibility for being such a force for faith and justice. Every Jesuit academy of higher learning is called to live in a social reality… and to live for that social reality, to shed university intelligence upon it and to use university influence to transform it. Thus Jesuit universities have stronger and different reasons than many other academic and research institutions, for addressing the actual world as it unjustly exists and for helping to reshape it in the light of the Gospel.[4]"
In making these points, Fr. Kolvenbach emphasizes that, “Every discipline, beyond its necessary specialization, must engage with human society, human life, and the environment in appropriate ways, cultivating moral concern about how people ought to live together.”[5]
Inspired and challenged by this long tradition, and bolstered by the generous support of an anonymous donor, we have launched this new Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative. Upon graduation, our students will join various kinds of professions and communities - in these settings, they need to be prepared to take the opportunities afforded to them to promote justice, care for the poor, stand with the outcast, and advance the common good of all. The Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative will help prepare our students for these eventualities so that they can approach them with confidence, creativity, courage, and conviction.
Key Objectives of the Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative
This initiative has four main objectives:
- First, we seek to equip faculty from disciplines across the university with the resources and training they need to develop new, meaningful, and effective ways of incorporating careful ethical reflection, reasoning, and application in their courses. By doing so, we aim to substantially increase our students’ opportunities to engage in such careful ethical reflection, reasoning, and application while completing their academic coursework.
- Second, we seek to expand our students’ understanding of the specific kinds of ethical challenges and opportunities that they can expect to encounter in various kinds of professions and to better prepare them to respond effectively to these challenges and opportunities by providing them with chances to develop their knowledge of relevant ethical considerations and to practice deploying that knowledge in realistic scenarios.
- Third, we seek to increase our students’ understanding of various large-scale threats to the welfare of our global, national, and local communities (especially those aligned with the Universal Apostolic Preferences of Caring for Our Common Home and Walking with the Excluded) and prepare them to be more effective in helping to address these challenges by increasing their knowledge of relevant empirical, historical, and technological information and by promoting their understanding of the many ethical considerations at stake in how we address these challenges.
- Fourth, we seek to increase our students’ opportunities to engage one another in respectful, thoughtful, well-reasoned, factually-informed discussions about current social, political, and ethical issues, especially with peers who disagree with them about such matters.
Activities Sponsored by the Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative
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[1] Quotation from Arrupe’s address to the "Tenth International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe," in Valencia, Spain, on July 31, 1973.[2] John W. O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 214.
[3] Allan P. Farrell, S.J., The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum (Bruce Publishing Co., 1938), 408. For further discussion of these themes, see the Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., “Core Renewal as Creative Fidelity,” in Mary Thomas Crane, David Quigley, and Andy Boynton (eds.), Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core (Fordham University Press, 2023).
[4] Quotation from Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education” (Lecture, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, October 6, 2000) .
[5] Ibid.