Belmont Abbey College

As its name suggests, the core curriculum lies at the heart of undergraduate education at Belmont Abbey College. As with our Catholic, Benedictine heritage and our historic campus, it distinguishes the College from all other institutions in our region. Indeed, the skills, knowledge, and values we seek to instill through the core are a tangible manifestation of the spirit of the Benedictine founders of the College, whose basilica, monastery, and original school buildings give architectural shape to their singleness of purpose.

Just as Benedictinism has carefully balanced fidelity to its origins with adaptation to a changing world in the course of the past 1500 years, so too the core curriculum remains faithful to its grounding in theology, philosophy, and the traditional liberal arts, to which have been added the illuminating insights of the behavioral sciences over the last two centuries. These are the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that will increase a student's chances of living a successful, moral, and ultimately good and happy life: writing and speaking well, thinking critically, mastering quantitative skills; understanding how different disciplines, historical periods, cultures, and significant persons have attempted to make sense of the world; viewing learning in a Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts institution as the search for what is good, beautiful, and true and thus endeavoring to improve themselves and others-not just materially but especially intellectually and spiritually-in the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition and values.

The core courses in the skills and disciplinary knowledge areas are bracketed by the First-Year Symposium (FS 101), an introduction to the values, traditions, and academic culture characteristic of a Catholic, Benedictine liberal arts education, and by the Great Books capstone course (GB 320). Great Books recapitulates, in a broader interdisciplinary context, the exploration of some of life's most important questions and the various answers offered by great thinkers across different cultures, historical periods, and academic disciplines, after students have already encountered them discretely in the other courses of the core curriculum.

Through a competency test, students are also assured of computer literacy, and information literacy is integrated into a number of courses, from the First Year Symposium and English 101-102 sequence to advanced courses in the majors. A Global Perspectives "flag" assures that each student has at least one significant academic experience with a foreign culture, either through course work or a study abroad experience. Finally, all students must take at least one course flagged as writing intensive. Such courses are designed to provide extensive writing opportunities, including work with specially-trained faculty on multiple-draft projects.