From October 25 to October 29, Honors Community freshman and Wisdom and Beauty faculty attended the annual Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture to present findings and attend lectures given on the topic of “Art Seeking Understanding.”
Each year, the Honors Community takes freshmen to Baylor University for this conference as a part of the Wisdom curriculum, dividing them into groups to research the symposium’s topic for the year. After researching, the Honors freshmen go through two rounds of presentations to select which groups will present at Baylor, the final round taking place the day before the class leaves for Waco, Texas.
Because the topic this year revolved around art — which the Honors course on Beauty covers extensively — this year was the opportunity for many Beauty faculty to attend and present material of their own.
For the students who attended, the conference offered lectures or panels on why artists need the church, a poet’s perspective on understanding or seeking to be understood and the moral responsibility to use artistic gifts, according to Hannah McPherson, a freshman applied linguistics major whose group spoke on “Understanding Love’s Complexity” at this year’s conference.
“There was just so much diversity of information, which was just so interesting,” McPherson said. “Because when we started having this question, and we started, like, talking about these topics in my group, and like picking stuff, you get such a narrow look at it. And then you are focused on your presentation and you forget how broad the topic is.”
The Honors Community first began attending the Baylor Symposium in 2011, when the topic of the Symposium was “Educating for Wisdom in the 21st Century,” which the Honors professors thought fitting for the freshmen Wisdom class. Since 2011, the Honors Community has received an invitation every year to attend the conference and present research. The tradition of taking freshmen has continued, even as topics have changed.
The Wisdom faculty instead have sought to alter the curriculum for the Wisdom course to incorporate elements of the year’s symposium topic.
Justin Barnard, philosophy professor and one of the instructors for the Honors Wisdom course, sees the conference as a way of opening the Wisdom students up to a range of ideas that might shift perspectives, since perspective reorientation is one of the necessary pieces of the “arc” of the Wisdom class.
“I think it’s important to remember that in a course on Wisdom, we don’t just want you to treat the study of wisdom as an academic subject,” Barnard said. “We actually want to try to cultivate wisdom in the students that take the class. And I think one of the ways that you can cultivate wisdom is by being given an assignment which challenges you in any number of ways.”
According to Barnard, the process of researching and group dynamic management, and then attending the conference with such a breadth of information, leads to an experience that will cause students to grow in wisdom.
“It’s not just another paper,” Barnard said. “So it’s a really valuable experience, I think, for the Wisdom course overall.”
