HCU’s Liberal Arts Core Curriculum guides students to more fully know and make known God, His creation in its complexity, humans as His image-bearers, and His plans to redeem and renew the world for His glory. The Core Curriculum fosters curiosity, inspires creativity, develops habits of inquiry, integrates knowledge coherently, promotes the formation of virtue, and cultivates intellectual humility and charity.
Mission of The New Liberal Arts Core
The Three-Part Framework
Drawing from HCU鈥檚 Ten Core Convictions, every course in HCU鈥檚 Liberal Arts Core is organized around a three-part framework that will guide students to know and make known:
- God, the Creator and Redeemer, as He has revealed Himself in His Son, by the Holy Spirit, through the Scriptures and His world.
- God鈥檚 creation by examining and engaging with the design, intricacy, and coherence of His world.
- Humans as God鈥檚 image-bearers by investigating and celebrating human dignity, interdependence, and flourishing through their status as created, purposeful beings.
Within this framework, HCU’s Core Curriculum emphasizes nine outcomes:
Nine Core Outcomes
To Know and Make Known:
God
The Creator and Redeemer, as He has revealed Himself in His Son, by the Holy Spirit, through the Scriptures and His world.
Core Outcomes
His Creation
By examining and engaging with the design, intricacy, and coherence of His world.
Core Outcomes
Humans as Image-Bearers
By investigating and celebrating human dignity, interdependence, and flourishing through their status as created, purposeful beings.
Core Outcomes
Signature Assignments
Signature Assignments promote and assess at least one of the core outcomes selected in the Course curriculum matrix. All core courses have at least one Signature Assignment that addresses one or more core outcomes.Embodied (Off-screen Activities)
Christian Wisdom (Shaped by and Shaping)
Courage-building
Community-building
Transferable skills (Extended real-world benefits)
Reflective
For example: after learning about different Christian denominations, visit a church with a different mode of worship, write a reflection, and upload a selfie.
Goals for Our Core Curriculum Renewal
- Transfer Friendly 鈥� and Distinctively HCU: The Liberal Arts Core is designed to transfer smoothly while still providing a uniquely HCU experience. Students and families will find many strong reasons to prefer our core curriculum over anything available elsewhere, and every course is shaped by our mission to know and make known God, His creation, and humans as His image-bearers.
- A Sense of Belonging and Identity: The core curriculum is for the whole HCU community. It strengthens students’ sense of belonging and identity as members of Houston Christian University 鈥� not just as students completing requirements, but as participants in something larger than any single major or program.
- Supports and Enhances All Undergraduate Programs: A liberal arts core serves every major 鈥� math, science, the arts, history, government, composition and literature, and more. These courses are meant to enrich the hearts, minds, and lives of our students. The core is not something to “get out of the way.” It is a formational experience designed to transform and support students for their present and future: their classes, their careers, and their relationships.
- Relationships, Resilience, Freedom, and Flourishing: The core emphasizes connections 鈥� between disciplines, between courses, and between formal education and life outside the university. It is designed to develop student resilience, personal freedom, and flourishing.
- Character Building and Christ Honoring: The core curriculum is not only about building skills. It is about building character and honoring Christ. The virtues it seeks to cultivate include humility, charity 鈥� love of neighbor 鈥� and Christian wisdom. Because all truth is God’s truth, and because HCU is a distinctly Christian university, we intentionally seek to cultivate Christian wisdom in all our core classes.
- Accessible and Well Scaffolded: Developmental courses like MATH 1302 and ENGL 1303 are not strictly part of the core, but core courses are designed to provide the support and introductory knowledge students generally need. Faculty conversations about identifying and meeting those needs are an ongoing part of the curriculum renewal process.
- Depth and Richness: Like the Holy Bible 鈥� whose central message is both simple and profound, accessible to children and inexhaustible for scholars 鈥� the core curriculum invites students into the depth and richness of every discipline they study. It is designed to cultivate wonder, appreciation, and intellectual humility.
Freedom & Flourishing
The ideal liberal arts curriculum will equip聽students to expand their options, recognize their agency, and make virtuous, God-honoring choices. It will create 鈥渇low鈥� opportunities that stretch students to (sub)create & contribute to their fields of inquiry, allowing聽room for delight in nature and in art, and聽supporting meaningful work & grateful worship. We want to create an environment where students can thrive, discover their unique talents and passions, discern their vocation, and actualize their potential.
“Any art, any 鈥榮ubject,鈥� can be taught as a liberal art, if it is taught in such a way as to liberate the mind and enlarge its vision and powers. The natural sciences, the social sciences, the arts of literature and expression, can be all taught in a way that is genuinely emancipating.”
— John H. Randall, Jr., "Which are the Liberating Arts?" (1944)
Contact
For more information, please contact the Dean of Core Curriculum.
