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CARITAS CENTER: MISSION AND VISION

Caritas – our universal call to love, holiness and vocation

Brescia University Mission

Brescia University is a Catholic, liberal arts institution founded in the Ursuline tradition of personal and social transformation through education.

Directed to academic and moral excellence in a student-centered environment, Brescia offers undergraduate and graduate programs that serve students who seek success through rewarding careers and service to others.

Learn more about Brescia University's Mission and Vision here:  Mission and Vision

View our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan

The Caritas Center Mission and Vision

The Caritas Center is an interdisciplinary project created to manifest and expand the vision of Brescia University’s strategic plan for caritas as a guiding principle infused through the university mission, in its programs, operations, and outcomes. The Center will have an online presence and repository for related resources and materials for implementing Brescia’s campus and community wide caritas initiatives, as it undertakes the following:

Goal #1:  Encourage and track engagement with the practice of caritas across the disciplines of the university, and with every business process within the university, including property management, investments and housekeeping. 

Goal #2:   Coordinate academic resources about caritas with the library and across disciplines (material and human resources).

Goal #3:  Plan and facilitate programming for professional development.

Goal #4:  Network with local, national and international institutions and organizations on scholarship, research, consultation, and curricula.

Using an inquiry-based approach to caritas, our work will be guided by the following core questions and sub-questions related to identity, knowledge and action:

  1. Identity - Who are we as people who are loved and called to love?
    • As we reflect upon this question, we might consider caritas as an “attitude of the heart” – toward self, others and all of creation.
  2. Knowledge - What do we need to know as people called love?
    • What do we and our students need to know to empower us to love as fully as possible?
    • What knowledge content from my discipline is important to promote a culture of love?
  3. Action - What do we need to do as people called to love?
    • How does my discipline contribute to making the world a better place through empowered loving individuals and communities?
    • How can we, as a university community, concretize love, diversity and inclusion?  What difference is love making?  What difference does it make to strategic imperatives?
    • How does love hold a key to ways of creating strategies of justice? What difference does love make to the structures?
    • Our university slogan is “The Brescia Difference: Respect for the Sacred; Devotion to Learning; Commitment to Growth in Virtue; and Promotion of Servant Leadership.” Is love already making a difference?  What difference does love make?  What things do we need to continue to do in order to realize our goal of creating a culture of caritas at Brescia University?

The Caritas Center Steering Committee

Dr. Josh Clary, Vice Pres. for Student Life & Diversity, Marian University, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Dr. Francis Davis, Head, Digby Stuart College, Roehampton University, London, England

Dr. Emily DeMoor, Director, Caritas Center, Asst. Prof. of Theology, Brescia University

Revd. Dr. Paul S. Fiddes, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Oxford, Principal Emeritus of Regent’s Park College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Project for the Study of Love in Religion at the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture

Ann Flaherty, former Superintendent of Catholic Schools, Diocese of Owensboro, Kentucky

Dr. Rainer Gehrig, Head of the Diocesan Office Odenwald Tauber, Archdiocese of Freiburg, Germany

Fr. Larry Hostetter, President of Brescia University

Dr. Michele Johnston, Executive Director, Catholic Charities & Mother Teresa Shelter, Corpus Christi, Texas

Dr. Anna Kuthy, Director, Ursuline Center for Teaching and Learning, Brescia University

Sr. Pam Mueller, Director of Campus Ministry, Brescia University

Naheed Murtaza, Brescia Board of Trustees, part time instructor in Political Science

Sydney Warren, Vice President for Institutional Advancement, Brescia University

Rosann Whiting, Director, Ursuline Education Network

Green Vine to the rightDr. Elaine Wright, Assoc. Prof. of Social Work, Brescia University