The Good Life Course Pairing
Introduction to Theology: The Good Life and Faith (TH 201)
What is the good life? What does God have to do with it? Christian theologians have been pursuing these questions for two millennia. This course will expose you to their responses and challenge you to join the conversation and begin to articulate your own positions on these timeless questions. Importantly, we will examine how these insights influence life today and their relevance to modern concerns about social justice. Regardless of your faith commitments, this course will provide you an opportunity to wrestle with what it means for you to live a good life: Why am I here? What is my purpose? How should I live my life? Our guides will be the Bible, the experience of Christians, and insight from theologians, ancient and modern.
Faculty biography
Dr. Pamela Cochran is Affiliate Faculty of Theology at Loyola. She has advanced degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia and has taught at Loyola since 2015. She is concerned with issues of gender and racial justice in Christian tradition and practice. She approaches these topics from the lens of historical theology.
Effective Writing (WR 100)
This course will introduce you to the discipline of writing in the university through analytical and productive work with the contemporary essay and its various genres. You will learn how to conceive and pursue a line of inquiry about a subject, how to develop an original argument, and how to support an argument with various sources of evidence, including scholarly research. You will develop and practice a full writing process, including planning, drafting, considering critical feedback, revising, reflecting, and editing. And you will hone your critical reading skills to evaluate and engage with other people's arguments. To help you achieve these goals, we will critically examine and respond to texts, in a range of genres, written by authors in the real world for real audiences. We will also do a lot of writings consciously and reflectively employing the concepts and strategies we learn about inside and outside of class. All of the work we do in this class is grounded in rhetoric: the effective use of language and symbols, always sensitive to context, especially one's audience and productive of change. The various skills you learn and practice in this course will enable you to become a more thoughtful, reflective, critical thinker who can participate in intellectual and world-shaping conversations inside and outside the academy.
Faculty biography
Professor Dominic Micer has been reading and writing for more than half a century and has been teaching writing for nearly a third of a century. His favorite book is Primo Levi's The Periodic Table; his favorite painting is Winslow Homer's Right and Left, and his favorite musical composition is Steve Reich's The Desert Music. He has been known to tell a joke or two in class; students in the class have been known to laugh at those jokes sometimes.
Mentor biography
Kristen Campbell McGuire is Loyola's chief marketing officer and oversees brand strategy, communications, marketing, web development, and creative design for the university. Kristen is actively involved in the Baltimore community and likes to run and play in new and interesting places around town, especially with her two teen children, husband, and dogs. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in speech communication and Spanish from James Madison University and a Master’s in publication design from the University of Baltimore.
Virtual Advisor
TH 201 satisfies the Theology core requirement for all students. WR 100 satisfies the Composition core requirement for all students.
