I'll never forget the hour-long car ride that my father and I spent talking about faith, reason, and the pursuit of truth. For me, that conversation after my sophomore year at Notre Dame crystallized the meaning and importance of my entire undergraduate education.
The ideas that I was so privileged to study in theology (and philosophy) will probably never put clothes on my back or a roof over my head, but they are precisely the difference between another good education and one so great as to be irreplaceable. Our country's great colleges and universities are looking too much like glorified job-training centers these days, but Notre Dame remains a place committed to the notion that the Truth is just plain worth knowing.
Notre Dame's core curriculum and the whole structure for students' advising need plenty of work, to be sure, and I'm glad to see the curriculum review considering the pedagogical issues raised by Advanced Placement. For the work that they do in high school and the money that their parents pay, Notre Dame students ought to demand some real structure from their university. Theology, regardless of individual academic interests, is the indispensable foundation of that structure.
Theology, not fine art or social science touching on religious themes, is how we take all of the amazing and disparate things that we learn from Dante Alighieri and Stephen Hawking and Stanley Kubrick and find in them a unique vocation that leads us through life to that ultimate Truth.
In his memoir God, Country, Notre Dame Fr. Hesburgh writes with great pride about his work as university president to transform the "Religion" curriculum into a serious academic program in theology. Let's not go back to the 1950s.
Let 1000 flowers bloom. Go IRISH. JRG1
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