The Liberal Arts And The Jesuit College System

The Jesuit educational system, with its successful applications in all parts of the world for several centuries, is one of the most durable, influential, and far-reaching experiments in the history of education. In this monograph Aldo Scaglione explores the complex genesis of the system, which it regards essentially as a heritage of Renaissance Humanism; the impact of both Reformation and Catholic Counter-reformation on it; and its conflicts with the secular traditions and systems with which it competed through the centuries.

Ranging from Plato in antiquity to Martha Nussbaum in the present era, the authors of the seventy readings included in The Liberal Arts Tradition present significant and exemplary views addressing liberal arts education over the course of its history, particularly in the United States. Most of the documents are newly translated or no longer available in print. Arranged chronologically, each selection is accompanied by an informative introduction and extensive explanatory notes discussing its place within the liberal arts tradition. Based upon the author's twenty-five years of experience leading seminars concerning the history of liberal education, this collection presents a uniquely comprehensive and salient set of documents, while incorporating the neglected portrayal and discussion of women within the history of the liberal arts.

Is Classics still important and relevant to a Jesuit education? The answer is a resounding "Yes." Classics remains an essential component of Jesuit education. This series of essays argues and proves that Classics and Jesuit education are indivisibly intertwined. Moreover, any Jesuit school that embraces liberal arts must have Classics at the core of its curriculum.

This volume explores two radical shifts in history and subsequent responses in curricular spaces: the move from oral to print culture during the transition between the 15th and 16th centuries and the rise of the Jesuits, and the move from print to digital culture during the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries and the rise of what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard called "hyperreality." The curricular innovation that accompanied the first shift is considered through the rise of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). These men created the first "global network" of education, and developed a humanistic curriculum designed to help students navigate a complicated era of the known (human-centered) and unknown (God-centered) universe. The curricular innovation that is proposed for the current shift is guided by the question: What should be the role of undergraduate education become in the 21st century? Today, the tension between the known and unknown universe is concentrated on the interrelationships between our embodied spaces and our digitally mediated ones. As a result, today’s undergraduate students should be challenged to understand how—in the objectively focused, commodified, STEM-centric landscape of higher education—the human subject is decentered by the forces of hyperreality, and in turn, how the human subject might be recentered to balance our humanness with the new realities of digital living. Therein, one finds the possibility of posthumanistic education.

One of the most precarious and daunting tasks for sixteenth-century European missionaries in the cross-cultural mission frontiers was translating the name of «God» (Deus) into the local language. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) introduced the Chinese term Shangti as the semantic equivalent of Deus, he made one of the most innovative cross-cultural missionary translations. Ricci's employment of Shangti was neither a simple rewording of a Chinese term nor the use of a loan-word, but was indeed a risk-taking «identification» of the Christian God with the Confucian Most-High, Shangti. Strange Names of God investigates the historical progress of the semantic configuration of Shangti as the divine name of the Christian God in China by focusing on Chinese intellectuals' reaction to the strangely translated Chinese name of God.

The Renaissance paradigm in crisis - Politics, language and power - Individualism, identity and gender - Art, science and humanism - Religion: tradition and innovation.

A reassessment of the Jesuit contributions to the emergence of the scientific worldview.

Sir Keith Thomas is one of the most innovative and influential of English historians, and a scholar of unusual range. These essays, presented to him on his retirement as President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, concentrate on one of the broad themes illuminated by his work - changing notions of civility in the past. From the sixteenth century onwards, civility was a term applied to modes of behaviour as well as to cultural and civic attributes. Its influence extended from styles of language and sexual mores to funeral ceremonies and commercial morality. It was used to distinguish the civil from the barbarous and the English from the Irish and Welsh, and to banish superstition and justify imperialism. The contributors - distinguished historians who have been Keith Thomas's pupils - illustrate the many implications of civility in the early modern period and its shifts of meaning down to the twentieth century.