Father Edward Sorin staked Notre Dame’s academic success on the Catholic tradition’s claim that faith heals and elevates reason, rather than impeding its progress. I would like to offer my testimony as proof that Fr. Sorin’s wager was successful. I have been at Notre Dame as long as I was an undergraduate at Yale. And I can sincerely say that Notre Dame’s core curriculum makes students better thinkers.
Yale’s system, which does not include theology and is based upon “distribution requirements” and “learning goals” rather than disciplines, left me with a mind that has needed these four years at Notre Dame in order to think coherently. True, I was surrounded by exceptionally smart people and an intellectual energy and rigor that Notre Dame would do well to encourage, and my mind became sharper and quicker and more aware of its own workings. But this only accelerated the crisis: I began to ceaselessly seek some regulative ideal for truth that could unify the fragments of knowledge I had gathered, and lead my mind out of its own turnings. It took the intellectual journey of a 196-page senior thesis for me to understand that what I was really looking for was theology. After four years in Notre Dame’s theology department, I know that what I was really looking for was Scripture.
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