Appalachia

(Includes fall break experience!)

SOCO/CST 33950 

Meets: M 6:00–7:30pm (Class dates: Sept. 14–Oct. 12 & Nov. 9th; mandatory immersion dates Oct. 18–24, 2026)

Instructor: Ed Jurkovic, M.Ed.

This course is designed to introduce students to the cultural and social issues of the Appalachian region – its history, people, culture, challenges, and strengths – through study and experiential learning. The course also provides engagement with the people of Appalachia through a required immersion over Break. The Appalachia Seminar utilizes a Catholic Social Tradition (CST) framework to build skills around social analysis, critical thinking, and theological reflection. Students examine the relationship between solidarity and service and consider how the Common Good is expressed in local communities across the region. This course requires mandatory travel for immersion over Fall break from Sun. Oct. 18th-Sat. Oct. 24th. This course has a fee. Course may not be taken pass/fail. Learn more.

Contemplative Leadership Practicum

SOCO 23916 

Meets: T 6:00–7:15pm

Instructor: George LaMaster, Ph.D.

Studying the theory and practice of contemplative leadership, students reflect on their leadership experiences on and off campus. Restricted to students in the Corde Scholars Program. (1 enhancement/activity credit, may be repeated).

Discernment & The Common Good

SOCO/CST 33961 

Meets: F 10:30am–12:00pm (Class dates: Sept. 18–Dec. 4)

Instructor: Felicia Johnson O’Brien, MSW

This course provides undergraduate students an opportunity to reflect on their undergraduate education and to explore their respective vocations as it relates to the common good. Whether considering a change in major, deciding on postgraduate plans, navigating a relationship, or seeking greater intentionality in daily life, students in this class will accompany each other as they consider their vocation, learn different methods of discernment, and develop practices to listen and respond to these callings. Content will include Catholic Social Teaching, cultural critique, narrative theology, spiritual practices, and the arts. Must be a sophomore, junior or senior to take this course.

Franciscan Land Experiences

(Includes fall break experience!)

SOCO 23911 

Meets: Mandatory Class Dates & Immersion: October 18–23, 2026

Instructor: Sr. Damien Marie Savino, FSE, Ph.D.

This fall break service learning course combines hands-on outdoor work experiences with community living and study in the spirit of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’. The course is held at the Franciscan Life Process Center, a Franciscan retreat center founded by the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist and located on 230 acres of rural land outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The center is a small working farm and outdoor education center with three miles of nature trails, a restored native prairie, animal barns, rain gardens, an orchard and vegetable gardens.

The Askesis of Nonviolence

CST 20643

Meets: T/Th 9:30-10:45am

Instructor: Margaret Pfeil, Ph.D.

This course will explore the theology and practice of nonviolence as a form of askesis, or spiritual discipline. The material will include readings from Scripture, the early Christian tradition, and Catholic social teaching. Religious sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition will include Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh. This course will use the method of community-engaged learning and will require twenty hours of service spread over ten weeks at designated sites in the South Bend area. The goals of this course include: that students will thoroughly process and integrate their site experiences with the course readings and class sessions, particularly through the practice of keeping an Integration Notebook; that students come to a deep theological and spiritual awareness of nonviolence as a disciplined way of life; that students develop the skill of correlating theological insight with other disciplinary perspectives in particular contexts of application.

Confronting Poverty

JUS/SOCO/CST 23000

Meets: T/Th 2:00–3:15pm

Instructor: Connie Mick, Ph.D.

In this course we ask: Why are people poor? We take an interdisciplinary look at poverty to better understand the forces that maintain poverty and the forces that resist it. From sustainability to social entrepreneurship, from economics to creative writing, we explore a variety of mindsets and methods for understanding, representing, and assessing poverty. Through academic and experiential learning, we gain a deeper understanding of the public and private programs and institutions that address poverty on the local, national, and global level.

Decarbonizing Catholicism and the Common Good

SOCO/JUS/CST 33305

Meets: MW 3:30–4:45pm

Instructor: Ryan Juskus, Ph.D.

How has the use of fossil fuels for heat, energy, and raw material shaped contemporary Christian ethics and social teachings? Has the Catholic pursuit of virtue and the common good driven climate change? Is there a need to “decarbonize” Christian concepts, cultures, and communities? While the concept of decarbonization is most commonly applied to technology, policy, and the economy, what would a “decarbonized” vision of human flourishing and the common good look like? In this course, we will generate responses to these questions by examining the extent to which fossil fuels have shaped Catholic concepts of moral virtue, human dignity, and the common good in the modern world, as well as how Catholic moral and social teachings can inform a just transformation of energy systems.

Delivering Justice: Justice & Society Minor Capstone

JUS 48001

Meets: T/Th 3:30–4:45 pm

Instructor: Connie Mick, Ph.D.

In this collaborative workshop, you will learn the craft of public scholarship as you explore a variety of methods and venues for communicating research findings to wider publics. The culmination will be your own effort (an op-ed, a policy memo, an exhibit, etc.) to showcase the fruits of your justice research conducted throughout the minor.

Doing Justice

JUS/SOCO/CST 30573

Meets: MW 12:30–1:45pm

Instructor: Daniel Graff, Ph.D.

Put your education to work for justice. The study of justice—discerning how to know what is right, just and fair—is an ancient, multi-disciplinary pursuit. This interdisciplinary course offers students a foundational understanding of this rich theoretical tradition while also providing them with the research tools and skills to both explain and indeed respond to today’s most challenging questions of justice in the areas of environment, labor, incarceration, migration, poverty, and technology. What does it mean to live and act justly, both individually and collectively? Explore the answers in Doing Justice.

Environmental Justice & Social Transformation

SOCO/JUS/CST 33317

Meets: MW 2:00–3:15pm

Instructor: Ryan Juskus, Ph.D.

Environmental justice has emerged as one of the most significant frameworks shaping contemporary environmental policy and scholarship at local, national, and international scales. Less well known is that it originated and has been led at the grassroots level with social movements making connections between racial, gender, and economic justice, political empowerment, and vastly unequal exposure to environmental harms and hazards. In short, the meanings, values, strategies, and concepts that make up the environmental justice (EJ) framework have been driven by grassroots leaders and organizations with a transformative vision.

Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching

CST/JUS 20610

Meets: T/Th 12:30–1:45pm

Instructor: Margaret Pfeil, Ph.D.

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the rich tradition of Catholic social teaching in order to develop skills for critical reading and appropriation of this canon of magisterial documents. Students will examine papal, conciliar, and episcopal texts from Rerum novarum (1891) up to the present time, identifying operative principles, tracing central theological, ethical, and ecclesial concerns, and locating each document within its proper historical context. Students will hold recurring themes in conversation with the broader theoretical framework of Catholic social thought and relevant secondary literature.

Just Life

SOCO 33313

Meets: T 5:30–8:00pm

Instructor: Suzanne Shanahan, Ph.D.

Just Life is an interdisciplinary exploration of what it means to live an ethical life of purpose, meaning and impact. Drawing on philosophy, political theory, sociology and theology but also on contemporary fiction, the course will explore moral purpose, theories of justice and understandings of why and how we are called to the common good. It will foreground core principles of Catholic Social Teaching linking them to other disciplinary and theological traditions. The course will also introduce students to research and evidence linking robust moral purpose to positive health outcomes and higher levels of happiness. But more significantly, it will provide a space for students to begin discerning their own moral purpose beyond the predictable false binaries of money or happiness or success or community.

Just Wage Research Lab

SOCO/JUS/CST 30951

Meets: F 12:30–3:00pm

Instructor: Daniel Graff, Ph.D.

This interdisciplinary research lab enlists students in the efforts of the Just Wage Initiative (JWI), a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Institute for Social Concerns. Students will help develop, refine, and update the Just Wage Framework, a multistakeholder online tool designed to advance a more inclusive and equitable economy. Students will also undertake research projects connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the JWI’s foundational question: What makes any given wage just or unjust? In addition, students will collaborate with the instructor and local, national, and international practitioners to envision and execute collaborative research and advocacy campaigns to promote a just wage economy. Extended weekly class sessions will feature visits by scholars and activists, as well as facilitate interactive group discussions and collaborative experiments.

Mass Incarceration Research Lab

SOCO/JUS 33312 & SOCO 63312

Meets: W 6:00–8:30pm

Instructor: Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft, Ph.D.

This research lab will employ an interdisciplinary approach to research on a range of issues related to mass incarceration. Collaborating with faculty, scholars, activists, practitioners, those impacted by systems of incarceration, and other classmates, students will develop, refine and implement a research project which contributes to the overall body of scholarship on incarceration. Students will be able to design projects (exploring moral, normative, and/or empirical etc. dimensions of incarceration) which connect their own academic and intellectual interests to emerging research questions at the Institute for Social Concerns. This research lab is open to students in all disciplines.

Peace, Prints & Protest

SOCO 20502

Meets: T/Th 9:30am–12:15pm

Instructor: Justin Barfield, MFA

This introductory course, open to non-majors and majors, will show students how the reproduction of images has created social change for better or for worse. In doing so, the course will survey a variety of basic traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques including relief, etching lithography, and silkscreen. Through global conversations about printmaking, demonstrations, lectures, and readings, students will become actively involved in specific social justice issues while understanding how printmaking can function as a relevant voice in the context of the modern world.

Race, Sport and Identity

SOCO 33966

Meets: T/Th 11:00am–12:15pm

Instructor: Keona Lewis, Ph.D.

Throughout this course, students will examine the social and cultural aspects of sport through an exploration of the unique ways that race and identity influence sport participation, access and engagement. This course will engage topics such as: Sport and Identity; Identity, “Success” and resilience; Media Imagery, Identity and Power; and, Race in American Sport.

Reimagining Reentry: Explorations from the Inside Out

SOCO 35002

Application required

Meets: M 5:30–9:00pm

Instructor: Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft, Ph.D.

“Reentry” is one of the key fields of justice the U.S. must address in the 21st century: how to engage the millions of incarcerated people who reenter the outside world from prisons and jails every year, often with significant barriers to voting, housing, education, employment, and other staples of society that help create strong communities. This course will explore what it means to reimagine reentry, from small, technical questions of policy and programming to the deep moral issues that underlie them. What changes in policy and programming would most help those returning from prison or jail? What are the most transformative new models for thinking about reentry support? What responsibilities do returning citizens have to their communities and governments, and what responsibilities do their communities and governments have to them?

Rethinking Crime and Justice: Explorations from the Inside Out

SOCO 33997

Application required

Meets: F 11:00am–4:30pm

Instructor: Pam Butler, Ph.D.

This course introduces some of the issues behind calls to reform the US criminal legal system, including mass incarceration and supervision, racial disproportionality, and the challenges of “reentry.” But the heart of the course is our exploration of deeper concerns, including why our criminal legal system relies on punishment, how we might cultivate other forms of justice, and what responsibility we have for the systems that operate in our names. As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course involves inside students (people incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility in Westville, IN) and outside students (people enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Marys, or Holy Cross) learning with and from one another and breaking new ground together.

Rich, Poor & War

CST 20619

Meets: T/Th 12:30–1:45pm

Instructor: Todd Whitmore, Ph.D.

This course examines the economic dimensions of violence in light of Catholic social teaching and Western political and economic thought. After an in-depth overview of Catholic social teaching in relation to alternative social theories, we bring them to bear on the issue of violence in three social spheres: the domestic (domestic abuse and sexual assault), the economic (sweatshops), and the international political (war). In each case we will examine Catholic responses to the problem.

Sustainability @ ND/SMC/HCC and in the Holy Cross Charism

CST 23470

Meets: T 2:30–4:30pm & Th 2:30–3:15pm

Instructor: Margaret Pfeil, Ph.D.

This course will address sustainability in the context of the local academic community and its institutions. In conversation with the recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si?, On Care for Our Common Home, this course will provide students with interdisciplinary opportunities to explore the challenges of sustainability and develop collaborative strategies for making our common campus homes more sustainable. Students will be invited to examine the course materials in conversation with the mission of the Congregation of Holy Cross through immersion at each of the campuses and encounters with professionals whose work impacts sustainability. This course will involve 20 hours of community-based learning with site placements in the local community.