Catholicism and The City: Good Urbanism as Human Flourishing, Env. Stewardship, and Sacramentality

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Catholicism and The City is an Architecture course intended primarily but not exclusively for undergraduate and graduate architecture students, and for undergraduate students from other disciplines. Viewed through the lenses of Catholic metaphysics and social teaching, the norms of historic classical humanist architectural and urban theory and practice, and related contemporary academic disciplines, the course is an introduction to cities generally, and more specifically a typological and historical introduction to the physical and spatial characteristics of the traditional urbanism of western Christendom, its global expansion, present devolution, and future prospects. The course addresses generally the nature and purpose/s of cities as cooperative human artifacts embodying particular cultural ideals and related forms of economic and political organization; and considers specifically cities as they relate to a Catholic understanding of human flourishing grounded in truths about God, creation, and human nature, including strategies for urbanism in a post-urban world in which human beings can flourish in towns and city neighborhoods that both anticipate and sacramentally participate in the City of God.