The Common Good in Ireland: Theology in Place, Poetry, and the Pilgrimage Home

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This is a course in doing "local" theology: It examines the universal Catholic social teaching principle of the common good in the particular idiom applicable to Notre Dame students while studying in Ireland, namely, the place, poetry, and pilgrimages, historical and contemporaneous, that are characteristic of Irish spiritual and theological traditions. The course will equip students to encounter, interpret, and deepen understandings of how environment (sacred geography, landscape place lore, pilgrim pathways), poetry (traditional expressions, storytelling, poems), and pilgrimage (between self and society, homogeneity and pluralism, secular and sacred) shape and give expression to the "ecological conversion, whereby the effects of one's encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them" (Laudato Si', n. 217). From the sacred mountain Croagh Patrick to the Book of Kells to the monastic site of Glendalough to the current Benedictine community at Kylemore Abbey, the course will shadow and augment the students' experience of Ireland so as to put theology, the environment, and society in dialogue. It will enable students, on the basis of their encounters in Ireland, to theologize, including in written and oral forms, regarding the care of creation and the civilization of love, with a particular focus on climate change and social/cultural evolutions as manifest in place, poetry, and pilgrimage.