Joy and Hope: the Sermon on the Mount and Christian Practice

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, Pope Frances called Jesus's Sermon on the Mount the Christian’s “identity card.” In this course, we will take this sermon as it has come to us in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as the starting point for an exploration of Christian practice. In the first half of the course, we will be concerned with historical interpretations of this sermon, in the form of sermons, commentaries, saint’s lives, monastic rules, dramatic performances, and, culminating in, the Second Vatican Council’s "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." The second half of the course will then follow Vatican II's turn to the wider world by taking up various struggles for peace and justice under the rubric of the Beatitudes, including those fighting against poverty, lynching, racially motivated police violence, war, distraction; and on behalf of the incarcerated, migrants, and the earth.