Humanities (HUM) Course Descriptions

• HUM 3310 Technical Communication

  Prerequisite(s): COMM 1323 or CLAS 1343

  This course is designed to help students develop advanced skills for producing accessible and effective medical, scientific, and technical written documents and oral presentations. Focusing on audience analysis, the students will apply good writing and speaking principles to the professional work common in different organizations.

• HUM 3320 Introduction to Bioethics

  Prerequisite(s): None

  This course surveys the most pressing ethical issues that are emerging in the field of biomedical research and medical care. It includes ethical theory training from which consistent principled medical decisions can be made. Although the course provides insights from different ethical theories, it will be taught from a Christ-centered ethic.

• HUM 3360 Medical Humanities

  Prerequisite(s): None

  A course designed to introduce students to medical humanities. The course is an interdisciplinary approach to looking at medical ethics and culture that will focus on the humanities and especially philosophy. Subjects to be covered may include the concept of personhood at the beginning and end of life, the arts and medicine, the historical development of medicine, theology of medicine, and the philosophy of science and medicine.

• HUM 3370 Health and the Law

  Prerequisite(s): None

  This course introduces students to the essential legal issues within the healthcare industry and the medical field, including negligence, liability, and malpractice.

• HUM 5301 The Trivium in the Western Tradition

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5301

  This course explores the historical and practical importance of the Trivium as a fundamental part of teaching and learning. It incorporates the basic elements of the Western tradition and the liberal arts, focusing them around the disciplines of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

• HUM 5330 Cloak and Dagger – Spies in Fiction and Film

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5330

  Spies appear in some of humankind’s oldest stories; in modern culture, the spy is viewed as both hero and antihero. The moral and political ambiguities of espionage fiction are considered parables of the moral dilemmas of modern humankind.

• HUM 5332 The Old South: History and Literature

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5332

  This course covers the Old South (American South) from the pre-contact period to the beginning of the Civil War, with an emphasis on social, cultural, and intellectual history and on literature. The course will focus particularly on eastern Texas and on the Gulf South as a distinctive region of the South.

• HUM 5354 Law and Lawyers in Literature, Film and Video

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5354

  A study of the ways in which lawyers have been viewed in literature, cinema, and television.

• HUM 5360 Mythology in Literature and the Arts

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5360

  This course provides an overview of the major myths, the archetypes based on those myths, and their use in literature and the arts. It emphasizes the Greco-Roman, Norse, and Celtic myths, but also covers other mythologies. Coverage will include major stories from the Old and New Testaments.

• HUM 5364 Chaucer and the Fourteenth Century

  Prerequisite(s): None

  Examines the fourteenth century as a turning point in English and European culture: the end of the High Middle Ages and the beginnings of the pre-Renaissance. The course emphasizes the rise of vernacular languages as literary languages, particularly in Italy and England, and the role of Geoffrey Chaucer as the father of English poetry.

• HUM 5381 Special Topics/Independent Study

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5381

  Topics are selected on basis of student need and academic qualifications of staff. If regular lectures are not given, a minimum of 30 hours of work for each hour credit must be included.

• HUM 5390 Western Culture and Human Experience I

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5390

  This course is a core component of the MLA program and offers a broad overview of history, politics, art, and philosophy. HUM 5390 will cover the years from the time of classical Greece through the medieval period; HUM 5391 will cover the Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modern period; HUM 5392 will cover from the French revolution through Modern times.

• HUM 5391 Western Culture and Human Experience II

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5391

  This course is a core component of the MLA program and offers a broad overview of history, politics, art, and philosophy. HUM 5390 will cover the years from the time of classical Greece through the medieval period; HUM 5391 will cover the Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modern period; HUM 5392 will cover from the French revolution through Modern times.

• HUM 5392 Western Culture and Human Experience III

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 5392

  This course is a core component of the MLA program and offers a broad overview of history, politics, art, and philosophy. HUM 5390 will cover the years from the time of classical Greece through the medieval period; HUM 5391 will cover the Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modern period; HUM 5392 will cover from the French revolution through Modern times.

• HUM 5393 The Grandeur That Was Rome

  Prerequisite(s): None

  Through a vigorous dialogue with the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and The Divine Comedy, supplemented by lectures on ancient Roman and medieval history, religion, philosophy, and culture, students will enter in to the Great Conversation of the key Roman poets. The class will center on the perennial questions of life and will seek to gain true wisdom and virtue from a direct wrestling with those questions. Although Virgil and Ovid’s epics will be assessed in terms of their own culture, they will also be studied as pre-Christian works that point ahead to the fuller revelation of Christ and the Bible and that find their culmination in Dante’s fusion of Athens and Jerusalem.

• HUM 5394 The Glory That Was Greece

  Prerequisite(s): None

  Through a vigorous dialogue with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, supplemented by lectures on ancient Greek history, religion, philosophy, and culture, students will enter in to the Great Conversation that begins with the ancient Greeks. The class will center on the perennial questions of life and will seek to gain true wisdom and virtue from a direct wrestling with those questions. Although the works will be studied in terms of their own culture, they will also be studied as pre-Christian works that point ahead to the fuller revelation of Christ and the Bible.

• HUM 6344 American Popular Culture

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 6344

  A study of the development and impact of the mass media and society with an emphasis on the 20th century. Materials to be studied include dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperback books as well as their relationships to other mass media, particularly radio, television, and motion pictures. Other aspects include the production, marketing and distribution of popular culture as well as the sociological and psychological implications.

• HUM 6346 King Arthur in History and the Arts

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 6346

  This course examines the major literary, musical, and artistic works inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The course will cover the historical roots of the legends, their use by major historians, and their influence on European and English literature.

• HUM 6381 Special Topics/Independent Study

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 6381

  Topics are selected on basis of student need and academic qualifications of staff. If regular lectures are not given, a minimum of 30 hours of work for each hour credit must be included.

• HUM 6397 Shakespeare: History and Film

  Prerequisite(s): None
  Course Equivalency: MLA 6397

  The purpose of this course is to introduce students to William Shakespeare’s plays about the Wars of the Roses, to examine those plays in the contexts of Shakespeare’s era and our own, to analyze his use and misuse of his sources for dramatic and political purposes, and to study the major modern cinematic and televised adaptations of the plays.