This course will trace the history of the Latina/o presence in the United States – from the period of Spanish colonization to the present – so as to gain an understanding of the current and historical issues in the Latina/o community. The major questions addressed will be those of identity and the struggle for place, recognition, and justice in the society at large. (CTI Level 2 – Cultures and Traditions)
- Teacher: Robert Wells
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (JCI) is a mid-level religion course in the religion major and also counts as a Level II CTI course in the core curriculum entitled, "The Responsible Self." The course is designed to fulfill the objectives of both the religion major and the Level II CTI "Sacred and Secular" objectives [link to objectives of both]. JCI offers students an introductory comparison of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The three are compared in reference to the following five criteria: historical origins, scripture, worship, ethics and political presence.
- Teacher: Milton Horne
This CTI Capstone works on applied ethics as we study the promise and problems of technology and sex, procreation, family, and infertility. We will focus on ethical debates about Assisted Reproductive Technology. We will examine 3 key issues: donated gametes, surrogate motherhood, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. We will examine two major ethical views, a Secular Liberal and a Roman Catholic Natural Law, in addition to feminist views.
Students will develop their own views and philosophies by building ethically-founded and defensible proposals in some "real-world" areas of assisted reproduction.
- Teacher: Gary Armstrong
In this course, we will examine issues that arise at the intersection of medicine, economics, and ethics, with a particular focus on contemporary controversies in health care policy and reform. We will address a range of issues, including especially: how and why many judge the current health care system to be failing; the effectiveness of the market as a means of distributing health care; how various theories of justice bear on the distribution of health care; the role of government in ensuring access to health care; how the practices, successes, challenges, and failures of the United States health care system compare to those of other capitalist democracies; and what we might make of the new health care law. In engaging these and other issues, it is my hope that you will be provided with conceptual and intellectual tools that will enable you to understand and critically evaluate recent (and still on-going) debates about American health care. The ultimate goal of the course is to enable you to gain some insight into what a health care system that controls costs, ensures quality, and upholds equity might look like.
The first half of the course will be concerned with foundational issues relating to the problems that drive, conceptual frameworks and issues that underlie, and ethical positions that inform contemporary approaches to health care policy and reform. Building upon this foundation, the the second half of the course will be devoted to the practical matter of examining and evaluating competing frameworks for approaching health care reform.
This course is interdisciplinary in character, and will address these issues through texts drawn from economics, public policy studies, political science, philosophy, sociology, and theology. This textual and conceptual diversity is crucial to enabling rich, multi-faceted responses to the central issues of the course.
- Teacher: Christopher Libby