Prof. Joe Kraus, who also directs the University honors program, has an essay forthcoming in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of The Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council in which he discusses the Scranton Honors Program as one extension of the Jesuit vision for higher education.
Journal editor Ada Long summarizes Kraus’s essay in her introduction, “Having always wished to ‘help heal the world,’ Joe Kraus describes having felt that the humanities were peripheral to such an effort until, as a graduate student, he became inspired by Salman Rushdie and Václav Havel, whose work he saw as ‘a kind of applied humanities, the work of the imagi-nation in the world .’ Teaching in honors at the University of Scranton has been a lesson for him that honors research in any field is ‘an expression of the self attempting to understand itself, which, however it manifests itself, is precisely the central subject of the humanities .’ In his essay ‘Imagination and the Humanities in Honors across the Disciplines at a Jesuit University,’ Kraus describes the value of the humanities in working with students who strive to do more . . . just because,’ which is the core value of the humanities and also of the Ignatian concept of ‘the magis,’ ‘the restless desire to hone oneself for the sake of better serving the world .’
“Kraus’s assertion of the special connection of the humanities to the Jesuit concept of social justice is a perfect lead-in to the research essay titled “Assess-ing Social Justice as a Learning Outcome in Honors” by Naomi Yavneh Klos, Kendall J . Eskine, and Michael Pashkevich of Loyola University New Orleans .”