With our Catholic, Jesuit Mission at the forefront, Marquette University’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities seeks to advance a culture of healing in response to grand and global challenges of our times. Underlying these challenges are basic issues of meaning, purpose, and value that the humanities confront through engaging the fundamental question: Who are we and how ought we to live? Founded in 2018, the Center strives to cultivate, enhance, and enact the humanistic enterprise vital to the flourishing both of a Catholic, Jesuit University and the wider community.

 

Our Mission

The Center for the Advancement of the Humanities aims to cultivate and enhance knowledge ordered to the pursuit of human flourishing and a culture of healing. We pursue this aim through support of teaching and research in the humanities that seeks new approaches to traditional humanistic disciplines, developing faculty and student affinity groups across disciplinary boundaries, and promoting the fruits of our intellective engagement both in the academy and in the wider community. By sponsoring faculty and student research, interdisciplinary conferences, internationally known speakers, community projects, and public events, the Center strives to be at the forefront of discussions that are enriched by humanistic knowledge directed to the common good and enlivened by the Ignatian principle of being for and with others.

Our History

Much has been said about the peril facing the humanities and liberal arts education more broadly in the present day. However, here at Marquette we participate in a long and esteemed tradition of recognizing that the humanities are at the heart of authentic education. As St. John Paul II famously observed, the humanities bear the responsibility of handing on ‘principles which give full meaning to human life’ not only to our students but also the wider community. With this vision in mind, President Lovell announced in his 2017 inaugural address that Marquette would open a CfAH, and the Center launched the following year.

What started as a vision has grown into a thriving center for engaged scholarship. Students are finding meaning and purpose through their humanities educations. Faculty are translating humanities scholarship to ever widening communities. Individual lives and larger communities are experiencing transformation.

Catholic and Jesuit

Deeply rooted in the person of Jesus Christ, the CfAH contributes to Marquette’s mission of forming bold servant leaders with a commitment to the Jesuit tradition and Catholic social teaching for all people, beliefs and faith traditions by bringing the dynamism of creation and redemption to bear on the unprecedented challenges of our times.

Social Justice Statement

Sr. Thea Bowman once remarked that “people think they have to do big things in order to make change. But if each one would light a candle, we’d have a tremendous light.” We are strongly committed to the promotion of social justice. The CfAH endorses Marquette’s Statement on Human Dignity and Diversity to cherish the dignity of each individual regardless of age, culture, faith, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, disability or social class.