In 1979, the College Council mandated the creation of a new College Core Course, Ideas Values and Images, to replace Collegiate Seminar. The Council's Curriculum Committee ... stated the following as legitimate and important objectives of the new course: (1) general literacy: an introduction to formative works and ideas; (2) to provide an occasion to reflect on various "ways of knowing"; (3) to provide an introduction to the various resources of the college, i.e. humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. The new course would be taught as a seminar [and] organized around a number of concepts or root ideas, "Nature," "Society," "The Self" and "God" rather than a chronology of "great books," as was the case in the previous core course....

A liberal education should provide the student with an awareness of those general concerns and problems that are involved in determining the parameters of human existence. A central aim of such an education, then, would be to promote the growth of a critical understanding of the perennial issues at the basis of our civilization. These issues include our relations (1) to the natural world from which we arose and of which we remain a part; (2) to the social and cultural forces which continue to shape and constrain our personal development; (3) to ourselves as we have attempted to forge our identities through knowledge, imagination, and agency; and (4) to God whom we conceive as grounding our existence and establishing our destiny....

The liberally educated student ought to recognize the shared concerns of the various arts and sciences and to understand that the basic questions of human existence are most properly approached in a manner that is interdisciplinary. The uniqueness of the core course within the Notre Dame curriculum is that it provides an occasion for the student to begin to see the deeper relationships and connections between the problems and ideas which will be encountered in more specialized courses....

The Core Course is clearly concerned with values. In giving the students some sense of how our tradition has come to conceive of human reality, the course encourages him/her to wonder about the values informing that tradition. The course is meant to stress the manner in which Western Civilization, through Art and Science, has not simply given us knowledge of how the world is, but has also given rise to a distinct values orientation. From the latter consideration the student can examine the effects these values have had upon our manner of living and thinking ....

From: Rationale for the Section on Nature: This section ... assum[es] that ... to think seriously about nature in our time requires careful consideration of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. Questions concern the "nature of nature" [and] the relationship between nature ... and society, the self and God ... will be explored by way of myth, narrative, philosophy and science. Thus, one of the tasks of the nature section is to begin to set an agenda for the year-long Core course taken as a whole. Readings prior to Darwin ... suggest ways it was possible to think about nature prior to ... The Origin of Species. Readings after Darwin suggest ... how radical a transformation of viewpoint a proper understanding of the theory of evolution requires....

From: Society Section Rationale: The final readings in our Nature section raise important questions about society and our relationship to it. Faulkner and Gore, for example, remind us how it is that particular societies with their customs and world views may affect nature for better or worse. They lead us to wonder ...: What exactly is society? How is it related to nature ... and the individual? What approach or method is best for those of us who want to find out? ... The section begins with a graphic depiction [in Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here] of a particular social problem, the plight of the (so-called) underclass....

From: Rationale for the Section on the Self: Previous readings have already raised questions concerning the degree of moral and intellectual autonomy the individual may have in relation to society. In this section we concentrate on the individual as a psychological entity, exploring what classical philosophy would have called "the parts of the soul," and going on to ask what form of life is best for the self in view of its natural condition. A life of reason or of passion? ... What methodology is best equipped to provide an adequate view of the person?

From: Rationale for the Section of God: In the section on the Self a number of suggestions concerning the optimal, or proper life for human persons was raised and discussed. This section begins with the statement of the view of the good life characteristic of both western and eastern religions; ... it is held that the desires and the needs generated within the mundane world of material cause and effect can only be met through knowledge of and relationship with something "Beyond," ... The point of this section is to examine a number of ways in which this religious option has been developed throughout the ages, in a number of social and historical contexts.