Incarnate Word Week - UIW Core Values
March 24-28, 2025
Education
Transformative Education
All of these insights offer higher education a framework for the social responsibility which we hope to import to our students. We have the ability, the time and freedom to instill this global responsibility if we choose to take it. It seems to me that educating our students: first, to understand these imperatives; second, to develop the capacity and the moral commitment to respond to them is critical to our identity and role as a Catholic institution. Students leaving our institutions must be prepared and motivated to take a transformative leadership role in addressing the crucial issues of our time...we have this challenge as we educate for the global marketplace, or will we educate for peace, social justice, diversity and integral development in our world? (O’Sullivan. 1999)
Spiritually Conscious Communities
UIW, like many religious institutions, is blessed with a committed and compassionate community that gives living witness to this response. The much deeper challenge is, “How do we stay rooted and anchored in this on-going transformation process?” ...It is our spirituality more than our professional preparation that nurtures our drive to inspire as well as teach, and to grow personally as we as encourage our students to learn and transform. And it is to remain faithful to this call. More and more I am convinced that the most signatory call for higher education today is to consciously integrate and celebrate the fullness of our religious identity as a spiritually conscious community, a community that is, itself, transforming, a community that honors in numerous and diverse forms the spiritual growth of the members, a community that is deeply in touch with our role and our responsibility in a majestically evolving universe and an inherently interconnected world. This is how we must be recognized. And this is our ordinary journey.
Faith
UIW’s Faith Journey Continues Through Community
“A Catholic University pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ.” (ECE 21). Incarnate Word’s active Campus Ministry helps to build this campus community by promoting the integration of the life of faith with the life of study and extracurricular pursuits. In addition to liturgies, Campus Ministry sponsors retreats, bible study, lectures on religious topics, and holds community building prayer and sharing sessions in the Residence Halls. Programs in the Pastoral Institue prepare young people to serve parish and diocesan communities. The Mission Office offers heritage immersion experiences that introduce faculty and staff to the core of who we are as a University. Mentoring opportunities help to create a unified community dedicated to the mission values of truth, development of the whole person, academic integrity and working for the common good.
Truth
Faculty Reflection: Pursuit of Truth Experts for “The University as Catholic,” by Bernadette O’Conner, PH.D., Professor of Philosophy
...our Univeristy Mission Statement identifies the University of the Incarnate Word as a “Catholic institution.” A such our university stand in a long tradition dating back to the original universities founded in twelfth and thirteenth-century Europe either as an outgrowth of bishops’ cathedral schools or by a special character from a pope or a king.
A Catholic university is characterized by its openness to two sources of true knowledge: first, natural human reason deployed in philosophy and the sciences, and second, the virtue of faith, infusing the intellect of a Christian with knowledge of supernatural realities, such as the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead and the Incarnation. Further, a Catholic university is distinguished by the intellectual effort it undertakes to synthesize in a coherent whole the knowledge derives from these two sources, faith and reason.
...as Catholic, UIW is aided in its fulfillment of its mission as a university -- discovering and transmitting truth -- both by faith in divine revelation and by human reason. As Catholic, UIW has an institutional respect both for the authority of divine revelation and the magisterium, or teaching authority of the Church, which we access through faith and for the freedom of human reason to pursue truth through the methodologies appropriate to the various disciplines, wherever the quest leads.
Because of this commitment to the truth of Chrisitan faith, UIW has an institutional vision of reality that includes more than the material, that acknowledges as real non-phyiscal or spiritual beings, for example God, the human soul, and the moral quality of human actions as good or evil. As a corollary of this, UIW has an institutional philosophy, reflected in its curriculum, which holds the empirical-mathematical method is inadequate to know all reality. Therefore, it must be complemented by philosophical and theological methodologies.
...to fail to consider the implications of our mission as a Catholic institution for our curriculum is to fail to relate the university’s essential Catholicism to its essential and distinguished goal as an institution of higher education: the discovering and dissemination of truth.
...if we are to preserve our identity both as Catholic and as university in a coherent unity of the two, we must ensure that there will be a critical mass of persons, well placed in administration, faculty, and staff. Who have a congenial understanding from their own experience and education; of what it means to be a Catholic university. Not just in its extracurricular aspects, not just in the general tone of goodwill pervading the community, but in the very curricular heart of the university.
Service
Faculty Reflection: Faith Doing Justice
Experts from “What Difference Can Faculty Mentoring Make” by Denise Doyle, Ph.D., J.C.D., Vice President for Academic & Student Affairs
...many faith-based schools are motivated by a commitment to social justice. Education for social justice influences the recruitment of students and faculty and the type of partnerships established in the community. This commitment may influence what faculty teach, building courses into their curriculum that include social analysis and discussion of ethical challenges. Ideally, faculty will link the spiritual and theological foundations of their commitment to social justice into the fabric of these courses.
The University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio is planning a program of service learning, like many other schools. This task will be for a variety of courses to incorporate a hands-on, community-based experience of Christian service for students. Two recent examples include a Fashion Management course that will focus on the redistribution of clothes and a Nutrition course that will feature food reclamation. The active involvement of students in work places that serve the needs of the poor, such as Goodwill Industries, a food bank or a second harvest agricultural organization, is clearly important to a religious school. However, the challenge of the faculty teaching such courses is to articulate the rationale for including this in a student’s education. Why is exposure to this important? How does it connect to the core values for our mission? Why should social justice themes be raised around issues of food and clothing here and elsewhere? In other words, we don’t let the experience speak for themselves nor should we bring in the chaplain or theologian to explain the meaning of experience...