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Experience the Dingle Peninsula as both physical landscape and living scripture through an intensive, field-based study of Irish pilgrimage traditions, contemporary poetry, and place-rooted theology. Blending seminar discussion with embodied learning, students walk portions of ancient routes, visit early monastic sites and oratories, listen to local historians and artists, and practice attentive “reading” of land and seascapes. Along the way, we explore poems, songs, travel writing, and theological essays that translate Dingle’s textures into language, ritual, and ethical imagination.

The course cultivates habits of seeing and saying: close reading, ethnographic observation, and contemplative practice. Students learn methods from literary analysis, theology, and comparative religion to interpret how pilgrimage forms communities of meaning; how ecological contexts shape ritual, devotion, and ethics; and how place-based art can repair fractured imaginations. Short workshops introduce elements of Gaeilge, oral tradition, and eco-spirituality, while studio sessions support a creative portfolio grounded in field experience and informed by respectful engagement with local communities. Attention to hospitality, safety, accessibility, and environmental stewardship is integral to our practice, as is consideration of decolonial perspectives and the responsibilities of visitors. By term’s end, students will be able to read a landscape as they would a poem: tracing motifs and metaphors, naming sources and stewards, and discerning how place shapes identity, belonging, and hope. In Dingle, the ordinary paths, wells, cliffs, and cottages become a text through which durable questions of meaning can be asked anew.

Description:

Hearth and Star is a course in comparative theological method, not a survey of comparative religious content. Students move — deliberately, in stages — from an insular, protective posture from within one’s own tradition, toward a dialogic, polyphonic openness to chthonic and indigenous religious material (mother earth, mother tree, grammars of animacy) that Christian tradition has always been capable of holding without collapsing into either syncretism or supersession. The vehicle is Corca Dhuibhne itself — its churches, its mountains, its ringforts, and its calendar — read through the comparative theology of Francis X. Clooney, S.J. and Saint J.H. Newman’s account of doctrinal development.

The course window falls entirely within the Christmas Octave, Twelfth Night, and Nollaig na mBan (January 6th) — a liturgical-folk calendar students live inside rather than merely study. Students first learn Clooney’s method of paired close reading on his own ground, then transfer it themselves to Irish material, and finally to global cases (Guadalupe, Japan, China, the 2019 Amazon Synod) and to a contemporary ecological register (Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy”). The course embodies Jesuit and Ignatian formation throughout, grounded in Ignatius’s own conversion narrative at the Black Madonna shrines of Aránzazu and Montserrat.