Kinship on the Margins: Encountering Poverty and the Catholic Social Tradition

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This three-credit letter-graded fall semester course is restricted to students currently participating in the Summer Service Learning Program (SSLP). To learn more about the SSLP, please visit the website at https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/sslp. Only students accepted to the SSLP and who have signed a contract for a placement are eligible to take this course. Students enroll in the course for the fall semester following the SSLP, but coursework is distributed before, during, and after the summer immersion concluding in September. This course provides students with an introduction to an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and responding to poverty, with lectures from experts in History, Political Science, Gender Studies, Poverty Studies, Theology, and Sociology. Students in this course will gain skills and resources for the demanding work of providing direct services to individuals living in poverty, while also developing capacity to critically analyze contemporary social issues. While the course will equip students to identify causes and symptoms of inequality and poverty, it also endeavors to provide students with a Catholic moral framework for evaluating competing notions of justice and to be able to propose and defend cogent moral arguments for constructive courses of action to alleviate suffering and injustice. The weekly themes of the course are drawn from the Catholic social tradition, such as human dignity, solidarity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. The course examines these concepts from within the religious context of Catholic thought by way of weekly readings of foundational Scripture passages, papal social encyclicals such as Laudato Si and Solicitudo rei socialis, and contemporary Catholic theologians. Weekly assignments ask students not merely to factually relate Catholic tenets, but to inhabit the moral perspective of Catholic social tradition and to offer first-person arguments for how members of society ought to respond in the face of human suffering and inequality.