Our instructors are chosen for their abilities to promote the programmatic goals of the department in a school that deliberately brings together students from a wide variety of backgrounds. We seek to reap a rich harvest of learning from that diversity in order to prepare our students for a world that will challenge them to understand and work fruitfully together with people of many backgrounds, habits and beliefs.

III. Explication of Statement of Purpose

Regardless of when students enroll in a course in philosophy or religious studies, they are able to select from a variety of offerings. We believe that this policy increases the likelihood that students will bring some established commitment and curiosity to our class explorations. We encourage students to think for themselves, to discover and assess the way they are inclined to answer fundamental questions of meaning, justice, and knowledge and to do so with a growing awareness of the variety of approaches and conclusions humans in various cultures have found compelling over time. Critical reflection about the questions and the answers they find persuasive helps students identify and assess the influences of tradition, convention, parents, peers and fashion on their beliefs and actions. It puts students in the best possible position to identify justifiable and evolving positions of their own.

We are committed to working with outstanding literature in each field for a number of reasons. To understand and critically examine texts like the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita or the Republic of Plato, students must develop their awareness of cultural context and confront issues of interpretation. They must work together to clarify key concepts and achieve empathetic understanding of unfamiliar dimensions of experience. They must learn to support their views of the meaning of a text by identifying key issues and responses offered in the text in ways that accurately reflect the complexity of the material at hand. The study of the core texts of religious and philosophical traditions confers a number of additional benefits: it can (1) unveil the intellectual roots of ideas that are still at work in the minds of our students and the world at large (2) provide models of inquiry and action for students (3) reveal new ways of thinking about contemporary experience (4) allow a student to understand and even participate in conversations about fundamental issues that have evolved over many years (5) promote awareness that even a single tradition speaks with many voices and draws on as well as dismisses many cultural resources (6) raise important questions about what these texts have brought about and why they continue to be studied.

We seek to help our students reflect on the fact that texts have authors, audiences and linguistic, cultural and political contexts. With this in mind, we encourage students to ask a variety of important questions as they strive to understand and assess the views supported in the texts. Included among these questions are the following: "What in the cultures of the time might account for this way of addressing fundamental human concerns? Who, if anyone, is likely to benefit if this point of view becomes dominant? What objections have and have not been raised to the view in question? For what reasons? Whose response, if anyone's, is absent? For what possible reasons and with what results?"

Where possible and appropriate, we seek to include a comparative element in our courses. Fundamental assumptions about what is real and what is important are the most difficult parts of a position to identify and evaluate, especially if the position is or reflects one's own. These are the very beliefs an author or agent is most likely to take for granted, to feel no need to explicitly support. A course that encourages students to compare and assess the way two or more traditions address fundamental human concerns can promote a deeper understanding of a perspective that may be shared by a significant number of people in another culture. It can also help students uncover unidentified assumptions of their own--assumptions that once located can then be held up for evaluation, according to criteria that are themselves then available for identification and evaluation.

In all of our courses we hope to inspire our students to continue their searches for meaning, justice, and the foundation of knowledge after the term ends. We strive to provide them with the skills, understanding, and attitudes they will need in order to progress in the future.

Our list of programmatic goals reflects our ideas about how best to engage our students in reflection on fundamental questions of meaning, justice and the foundations of knowledge as they arise in the contexts of various philosophical and religious traditions and in their own lives.

• to give students a choice of a range of age and ability appropriate courses

• to offer students the opportunities to understand and critically examine core texts of philosophical or religious traditions

• to develop in students an awareness of the importance of cultural context and of issues of interpretation

• to include more than one philosophical or religious tradition where appropriate

• to promote a cooperative effort on the part of students in the classroom to

• to encourage students to explore fundamental questions in the context of their own experiences

• to enable students to write papers that translate the fruits of scholarship and classroom explorations into clear, insightful prose

• to prepare and inspire our student to continue their searches for meaning, justice and the foundations of knowledge after the term ends.

Three and four year students may choose any grade-appropriate course the department offers at any time in their academic career to meet our graduation requirement. It should be noted that the current program for juniors leaves no room for them to take philosophy and religious studies. There are no pre-requisites for any of our courses. However, they are numbered according to grade-appropriate texts and instruction. 300 level courses are open to 10th, 11th and 12th graders. They include introductions to various religious traditions and sacred texts, to ethical reflection in the western philosophical tradition, and to applied logic. 400 level courses are open to 11th and 12th graders and to 10th graders only with the permission of the instructor. These courses tend to be issue and topic oriented. The intellectual challenge for students is increased as they apply a variety of religious and philosophical points of view to historical events like the Holocaust and to difficult dilemmas that surface in the contexts of civil rights, medicine and the environment. 500 level courses are open only to 11th and 12th graders. These advanced courses are comparable in sophistication to introductory courses offered to first and second year college students, and they may involve more than nine hours of work per week. Our offerings reflect the interests and abilities of our students, our training as scholars, and our sense of what is appropriate for achieving our department goals in this educational context.

One thing all our courses have in common is the explicit attention we pay in them to normative issues--judgments of value and worth--especially as they bear on human conduct. Reflection on what kinds of thoughts, actions and lives are most worthwhile is at the core of philosophical and religious traditions. Our efforts here are directed at asking each student to reach a deeper understanding of a variety of points of view, including their own. We seek to provide a classroom environment where students feel free to try out new ways of feeling and thinking, to change their minds, and to retain their deep convictions as they wrestle with a growing awareness of the complexities of the issues.

Honesty and academic freedom are crucial to the success of our courses. No points of view are prescribed or proscribed in advance. At the same time we ask that students learn to apply intellectual standards including accuracy, exemplification, and coherence to the discussion of various points of view. Given these commitments we are admittedly uncomfortable with students who remain dogmatically and unreflectively doctrinaire or skeptical.

We adopt a variety of strategies to achieve our programmatic goals in and out of the classroom. We often set aside time in the beginning of our courses for exercises designed to help student locate the views they bring into the course. In many courses we require students to keep journals of their personal responses to the readings and to the issues that surface in class discussions. We often ask them to share those responses with another class member at the beginning of class. Groups are often assigned tasks of analysis of texts that lead to class exercises in critical reflection. Quizzes and tests are administered to establish student mastery of important information. Prepared in-class essays and short papers are frequently assigned. On these essays students are asked to show the depth of their understanding of the texts and the issues. They are often also asked to express and justify a position of their own. In some courses the term ends with a long paper that should reflect carefully guided research on a topic chosen by the student. Often the resources of the library are employed. In other courses the term concludes with a final exam that encourages the student to revisit fundamental questions with a term's work of reflection in hand.

In all cases, we encourage students to view their reflection on issues raised in our courses as work in progress. We hope they will find the continuing reflection on the issues we have addressed together to be enjoyable as well as challenging and fulfilling.