College of Humanities, Education and the Arts: Arts and Humanities
About the College
The College of Humanities, Education, and the Arts (colloquially known as HEARTS) houses academic disciplines that have a long history of exploring what it means to be human. These fields of teaching and learning have endured for centuries because they foster curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, compassion, and community—qualities that are deeply human and essential for fruitful service in every vocation. We believe these qualities reflect a loving Creator, in whose image we are made; we invite students to embrace a spirit of inquiry as we debate complex life questions in the context of Christian faith.
College of Humanities, Education and the Arts Website
Our Mission
To prepare students for the challenges of a rapidly evolving world, we aim to make them well-rounded and highly adaptive by cultivating the following skills and qualities:
- Critical Thinking: analyzing texts, cultural artifacts, social behavior, and human assumptions in search of wisdom and truth
- Communication: engaging the world courageously, creatively, and persuasively through text, image, voice, and sound
- Cultural Competence: seeking to understand and welcome people with different experiences, identities, and values
- Ethical and Social Responsibility: valuing integrity, professionalism, and justice in work and relationships
- Servant-Leadership: helping human organizations thrive; inspiring hope and positive world change through service to others
- Creativity and Innovation: understanding the past in order to inventively address the problems and opportunities of the present
About the Division of Arts & Humanities
The Division of Arts & Humanities includes the following programs:
- Art: learn how art and design can promote wisdom, empathy, and cultural change; get hands-on experience using digital and physical media to impact visual environments, transforming the way people see
- Communication and Media Studies: investigate how communication shapes history, how film helps us more deeply understand human behavior, and how to communicate ethically and artfully
- English and Cultural Studies: learn how language, literature and film shape the world; wrestle with complex questions about identity and culture; practice the arts of creative writing, interpretation, analysis, and persuasion
- History: investigate how understanding social and economic inequalities of the past cultivates empathy, fosters hope, and inspires solutions for present-day problems
- Honors Liberal Arts: enlist in a challenging interdisciplinary program that investigates what it means to be human and how we can live together in the midst of difference (See Honors Liberal Arts)
- Music: practice the art of musical performance, composition, or production, and investigate how music is deeply tied to its cultural, sociological and historical context
- Philosophy: investigate persistent human questions about what is “good,” what is “real,” what is “knowledge”; learn to listen, reason, and judge well regarding contemporary philosophical, religious, moral, social, and technological issues
- Sociology: investigate how social systems, institutions and interpersonal contexts help us understand the individual; learn how to collect and interpret data to understand the larger patterns of human behavior and culture that underlie particular social problems
- Writing: discover how the practice of writing and revision ("re-seeing") leads to complex, transformative insight; learn how to effectively shape writing for different audiences, purposes and contexts (see Writing Curriculum)