Heart of the University, Faculty Retreat Series 2023-2024

Todd Stockdale Ph.D.  reflects on Mission and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Transformed by Love, in the first of four retreats for faculty and administrators

The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for input and guided reflection. The series is co-sponsored by the Office of Mission and Ministry, and the Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership.

The first retreat, given by Todd Stockdale Ph.D. on the theme of Mission and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Transformed by Love (or saying “yes” to the good), will be held on Wednesday, October 4, 2023, from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. in the Beck Rooms and via Microsoft Teams.

As professional educators, administrators, and staff in higher education, our “jobs” require us to teach, research, assess, approve, coordinate, promote, catalogue, calculate, report, facilitate, and perform any number of other tasks associated with our professions. Do these tasks with a certain level of proficiency, and we will continue to receive compensation for our work. Do this compensated work for a series of decades and we call that a career. But if we move through our tasks and our careers absent love, we are, to borrow from St. Paul, at best noisy gongs or clanging cymbals, and at worst “nothing.”

This retreat will explore the way in which mission provides meaning and direction to our work. Beginning with the notion of wonder—an underlying property of human nature and a hallmark of the academic life—we will seek to uncover new horizons made possible when “wonder” is transformed by love. These new horizons rest beyond ourselves, our tasks, and our careers, and open us up not only to the human good, which is the goal of education, but also to a transcendent meaning beyond.

Todd J. Stockdale, Ph.D is a teaching fellow in the Department of the Core and is the Curriculum Coordinator for the Signature Two course—Christianity and Culture in Dialogue. He is a GEM Fellow and a participant in the Praxis Program.

If you have any questions, please contact Linda Garofalo or Francia Peterson at [email protected].

RSVP to [email protected] by October 2, 2023. Click here for further information.

Categories: Campus Life