Educating the Whole Person

Ignatius Seminars

For many incoming students, the wealth of educational options and courses of study offered at Georgetown College can be both incredibly energizing and at the same time a bit imposing. Georgetown College’s Ignatius Seminar Program —so named for Saint Ignatius of Loyola, on whose philosophy Jesuit education is based — offers first year students the opportunity to delve into one-of-a-kind courses of study that provide interaction with College faculty in a way that makes very real the Jesuit educational theme of Cura personalis: educating the whole person.  Learn more about the philosophy behind our Ignatius Seminars here.

Living Global

This fall, Dr. DeGioia will teach an Ignatius Seminar entitled, "Living Global"  Here are his thoughts on the key themes and questions that will be raised.

"We live in a world we inherit yet also create. Enabling us to make sense of it is a 'horizon of significance' that provides us with concepts, values, practices, and customs that we constantly challenge as we continually reckon with our own, individual place in this global world. 

In this Seminar, we will see how this horizon is becoming a global vision, a venue for exchanging experiences and reflections about how we are both common and separate. In this Seminar we will address what that horizon encompasses and how we, individually and collectively, are to act given such awareness.  How are we to live given this broader horizon?  How does this impact our responsibilities to one another?  Is there an ethic that guides us? 

First, we will begin to orient ourselves in 'global' terms today by looking at the significance of 'global' achievements in the past. There have been multiple attempts to create an interconnectedness of peoples and social orders that achieved highly integrated states. How is our current form of globalization similar and different? How do we understand the very term, 'globalization?' Today and historically? 

Second, we will look at the manifestations of globalization taking place in our world today. We will explore issues that define our contemporary world—climate change, HIV/AIDS, hunger, labor and trade, migration, and growing inequality. We’ll also look at the wonderful connections that the technology of globalization enables. The political demonstrations mobilized through facebook, the music that spans the planet, even the videos of dancing babies and funny pets that go viral instantly—all this is 'global,' too: the joy of being together, if only on YouTube.   How do we understand the challenges—and pleasures—that emerge in the context of our expanding horizon? In particular, does this expansion create new moral responsibilities? If so, what are they? 

So, in the third part of the seminar, we will wrestle with the idea of whether the globalization we are experiencing demands something else—in particular, whether it asks of us a self-understanding that would activate responsibilities to the 'others' of whom we have become so intimately aware. What would a self-awareness of our place in this world of others demand of us?

Overall, through this seminar we will live with some very important questions and explore the nature of our selves, our place, and the responsibilities that emerge from a widening global horizon and our way of life within that larger view."

Learn more about the content of Dr. DeGioia's seminar, and all of our Ignatius Seminars, here.

Watch a video about the learning and teaching that happens in Ignatius Seminars here.