Mission & Faculty Life
Mission & Faculty Life
What do we seek?
Providence College has been committed to the project of Catholic higher education and the evangelical mission of the Order of Preachers since its founding in 1917. As the only college in the United States founded and run by the Dominican friars, we believe we have a distinctive educational mission to offer our students. This mission grounds our core curriculum and shared intellectual life, as well as institutional decision-making across departments and divisions. We seek faculty of goodwill to accept and share responsibility for upholding the mission and objectives of the college. We encourage those seeking to join this community to explore our mission statement, as well as executive leadership communications on the college’s mission. Consider, too, the reflections below on concepts central to Catholic and Dominican identity.
TRUTH
Veritas, Latin for truth, is the gravitational center of the Catholic and Dominican tradition. This foundation is shared by all Catholic universities. Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his teaching on Catholic education, that “with every other university, [the Catholic university] shares… the joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge.” But the pursuit of truth does not end with each discipline in its own context; the intellectual vision that animates the Catholic tradition has a grander scope. Catholic universities are committed to working “towards a higher synthesis of knowledge.” This notion is grounded in a confidence that human beings are disposed to seek and know the truth and can expect that all knowledge will ultimately find unity in the truth. The pursuit of veritas is the pursuit of such an integration, which the Catholic tradition holds is ultimately found in the person of Jesus Christ, who called himself the way, the truth, and the life.
FAITH AND REASON
Central to pursuing veritas is the integration of knowledge across the disciplines of a university. This larger task includes an incorporation of the Catholic faith. The intellectual vision animating Catholic universities such as Providence College is one committed to the integration of truths accessible through both reason and faith. Faith is not merely the result of custom, feeling, and private choice but can be a thoughtful and reasonable response to one’s experience with the world.
This vision is distinctive to Catholic educational institutions. For many, faith and reason stand in opposition to each other; they are black and white, irreconcilable and best kept apart. Providence College seeks to resolve this tension. In the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, our history is rooted in the confidence that faith and reason are compatible, complementary, and reconcilable. Excluding from any field of study the contributions of the Catholic tradition would offer an incomplete exposure to the synthesis of knowledge made available by the complementarity of faith and reason.
HOSPITALITY
An atmosphere of hospitality characterizes the pursuit of truth by faith and reason. At Providence College, the search for truth is relational and is therefore shaped by and grounded in community. So too is the freedom to seek the truth where it may be found. The college draws on the Dominican pedagogy of disputatio, or the disputed question, which seeks out the strongest arguments from all interlocutors. In this way, care for the common good and for the flourishing of each conversation partner and community member is intrinsic to our task. Accordingly, the intellectual rigor of our efforts is always inseparable from our care for the conversation within our community.
While we maintain a foundation in the Catholic and Dominican intellectual tradition and support a faculty that can work explicitly within this tradition, we also seek faculty from different religious backgrounds and beliefs, or no faith at all, to participate in this endeavor. Sharing in this mission, however, requires at a minimum familiarity with and respect for its foundational tenets.
