The Institute on Character Development

Dan Doyle, director

The Institute on Character Development is dedicated to preparing Seattle University students to help guide middle and high school students through their own struggles with confusion, uncertainty and growth. For SU students, it is an opportunity to build their own understandings of the questions and trials of everyday life. After the classroom experience in this course, students will teach these same ideas and experiences to the young people in these outreach projects.

The class is divided into five areas and will be handled in an interdisciplinary fashion involving philosophical, theological, literary, sociological and psychological patters. These areas of interest will include:

• Theoretical understanding of the four levels of happiness as conceived by Plato;
• Idea of faith as it can be defined or experienced from the unconditional love of God, spirituality and prayer;
• Phenomenology of love;
• Vocabulary and arguments of ethics and morals that sharpen an understanding of means and ends, which are central to the understanding of human choice; and
• Suffering as a fact of life that is both a challenge and a catalyst in the inevitable search for meaning in our lives.