The Liberal Arts and Human Flourishing
An education may be put to many valuable purposes. Our courses develop both discipline-specific skills, enabling our graduates to earn livings in fulfilling jobs, and “soft skills,” helping them to be agile in their careers and adept in working well with others, so they can succeed even in adverse conditions. Yet a liberal arts education intends to instill not only skills, but also a love for knowledge and values that are sufficient as ends, not merely as means to ends. Taken this way, our Core Curriculum, rooted in the liberal arts tradition, can help students escape instrumental thinking about their time at NNU. Instead of continually asking, “What can I do with this?” NNU students can approach their educations with the liberating question, “How will this shape me as a person?”
A “Christian” Liberal Arts Education?
The liberal arts lend themselves well to a Christian way of thinking about the world and our place in it because they engage with all domains of life, and God makes claims on all domains of life— “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Submitting all of our abilities to God and cultivating them to their utmost potential let us live into Irenaeus’s recognition that “the glory of God is the human being fully alive.” We glorify God by fulfilling the goal of a liberal arts education, which is to become fully human. The pursuit of Christian habits developed through the liberal arts is a worthy goal for any Christian undergraduate, and is rightly at the heart both of NNU’s mission and of the Core Curriculum.
The NNU Core Curriculum (42 credits)
- Core One and Core Two Courses to be taken in the first two years in residence (24 credits).
- Core Three and Core Elective Courses to be taken at various times in residence (18 credits).
- Mathematics Proficiency (0 credits) *
- Cultural Awareness Program (CAP)
When planning a schedule, students should carefully review the detailed requirements following this summary.