• Seton Hall University
• University Core Curriculum

Hello and Welcome to the University Core at Seton Hall University.

I am very happy to welcome you to the University Core experience at Seton Hall University. Centered in our Catholic intellectual tradition, in dialogue with other traditions, the Core engages the deepest questions of life: what is truth? What are good and evil, and how do they connect with my own choices? What is community, and how do I engage in it for the common good? Who is God, and what is my relationship with God? These questions, and others like them, are a deep part of our common humanity, and the Core courses guide you through them, in an interesting and meaningful way, using some of the most important and powerful texts ever written. Cutting across the disciplines, the Core relates to any major, as it engages questions about how to live our lives, whatever path we choose to follow in terms of a career. The Core is an important component of our Mission, which seeks to educate students as servant leaders, engaging the whole person -- body, mind and spirit.

The Core involves three "signature" classes, as well as proficiencies, all of these spelled out on the website, where you can look at them in detail. Ideally, the Core will encourage you to engage deeply with the texts, not only in class, but beyond it, as students across campus will be dealing with a common group of core texts, allowing discussion to go beyond each individual classroom. A painting in the Blackboard site for the first year course, Journey of Transformation, called The School of Athens by Raphael, depicts Plato and Aristotle and a variety of teachers and scholars all discussing ideas, texts, and meaning. The painting hangs in the Apostolic Palace, part of the Vatican museums, where it symbolizes the kinds of intellectual discussion that has become a deep part of our Catholic intellectual tradition, even as it pre-dates it. Reason searching for truth, rooted in love (love for community, for the other, for the common good, for God), is a beautiful thing, and those of us working in the University Core hope to cultivate and to encourage that search and even that passion in all students taking our courses, and the faculty teaching them as well.

I wish you success and joy in your academic journey here at Seton Hall!

Nancy Enright
Director, University Core Curriculum