Concentration in Dominican Studies

The concentration in Dominican Studies is being re-structured to meet distance-learning needs. Please inquire about the curriculum at theology@mail.barry.edu.

General Description of Program

The Order of Preachers was founded by St. Dominic in the 13th century to respond to the urgent need for a new type of evangelization within the existing Church and culture. St. Dominic realized that many of the people of that age, though nominally Christian, had never really heard and understood the basic message of the gospel. In a society torn apart by dissension and confusion over basic values and core beliefs, Dominic sought to create a religious movement that could convey the message of the gospel through both words and deeds. Dominic believed that the gospel could only be genuinely and persuasively proclaimed by a community of men and women who could authenticate their proclamation through the example of their own lives. For this reason, Dominic established the Order of Preachers as a broad-based community of friars, nuns, lay women and men united together in a common search for truth and a desire to bring the gospel to the lives of the ordinary people in their society. For this reason, Dominic strived to form not only a highly educated and talented band of preachers, but a wider community of brothers and sisters whose life and spirituality truly embodied the gospel values that they proclaimed. For 800 years this has been the goal of the Order of Preachers: to evangelize individuals and cultures through both word and example of life.

Dominican spirituality can be described as a pattern of life that seeks to integrate prayer, study, community life and ministry to the Church and culture. Dominic called this pattern of life "the Holy Preaching." One of the earliest and most important decisions that Dominic made was to send the friars off to the great university centers to study not just theology, but also to learn about the world that was emerging, growing and developing in Europe at that time. From the beginning, Dominic wanted his preachers to actively engage the cultures in which they lived and served. He also wanted them to be theologically creative so as to respond strategically and positively to spiritual and religious crisis of the society. For the early Dominicans therefore, theology was not just a body of received ideas, but an ongoing process of reflection, dialogue, investigation and prayer. Theology, in the Dominican tradition, is a complex communal process of interpretation: interpreting the world and God's action and plan within it. Theology therefore, is closely related to spirituality. Theology itself serves as a means of articulating the search for meaning and purpose in human lives and the content and meaning of the revelation of God conveyed in the Judeo-Christian tradition within this very urgent context. From the beginning of the Dominican tradition, theology embodied the broader goal of evangelization and presumed the pattern of life that Dominic established as its source.

For the Dominican tradition theology and spirituality are not just bodies of doctrine or information that have been passed on from generation to generation, they are primarily a method: a way of doing theology and living intentionally that have the following characteristics:

• They are grounded in scripture and are intended as an attempt to interpret the gospel in the contemporary situation.
  The questions and the agenda of the theological task and the spiritual journey are really set by the needs and problems of the culture/milieu in which the theologians are living.
• Dominican theology is always a communal process coming out of an ongoing dialogue with one's community, the wider scholarly community, the local and universal Church, and the Tradition and traditions that we have inherited. It tends also to be literally communal in that it is a process of many individuals working in tandem and mutual cooperation. Even the great systematic theologians in the tradition (Aquinas, Cajetan, Vittoria, Banez, Congar) are really synthesizing and communicating many diverse strands of work emerging from other members of their community.
• From the beginning it has been a theology and spirituality in dialogue with the non-believer, the unbeliever, the heretic and the believer's of other faiths and traditions. The Dominican tradition has attempted to unite and synthesize diverse traditions and conflicting interpretations within the wider Christian Tradition. Dominican theology tries to respond to the questions of others and to respect both their experience and beliefs.
• The Dominican tradition is willing to listen and learn from seemingly unrelated and unconnected fields of inquiry. Based on the assumption that "truth is one," it is willing to learn from all of those earnestly pursuing truth of any kind, and at any level. Furthermore, Dominican theology has been willing "to eat with sinners" - to listen and learn from people and areas considered off limits or unacceptable, not just out of kindness, but with the expectation that they could have a word of truth for us.
• It attempts to be evangelical in that it seeks to proclaim, persuade and convince, rather than silence, defeat and conquer its opponents and respondents. The end or aim of theology in this tradition has always been the direct preaching of the word in any context: "faith, theology and preaching are difficult to separate" (Schillebeeckx)
  It attempts to be a prophetic movement that "speaks truth to power" and to consider issues of justice, natural rights, civil affairs and our relationship to the earth and all creation to be important areas of theological and spiritual concern.
• Dominican theology and spirituality tend to begin with the primacy of grace, and interpret the world in the light of grace, and even see sin in this context (rather than the other way around). They tend to emphasize the continuity between creation and Incarnation and the relationship of the Incarnation to the many forms of God's presence in human history. They are suspicious of rigid dualisms and un-nuanced, exclusive and literal pronouncements about God and our understanding of God and God's plan. They always respects persons, conscience and diversity of opinion, but also assumes that there is truth and that we can know it (or approach it) in a limited and fallible way.

To study the Dominican tradition is not just to retrieve the spiritual insights, the theological formulations and historical lives of the past; it also requires one to enter into this process of becoming a contemplative theologian and preacher. The role of retrieving the past is always put in the context of learning how to interpret the present and prepare for the future. The Concentration in Dominican Studies therefore, will focus on helping students to actively incorporate and integrate the long tradition of Dominican thought, reflection and experience. Within this context, the dominant theological developments and trends of the tradition as well as the spiritual and pastoral history of the Order and its members will be investigated. To examine the words and deeds, the theory and historical praxis of the Order of Preachers in all its manifestations serves as not only the best way to discover the riches that the Dominican tradition has to offer, it also takes seriously the founding vision of St. Dominic. This program is designed so that it is not just a study of medieval sources, but is an immersion in the long and complex history of interpretation of the Word of God by those who followed the pattern of life created by St. Dominic and developed over the centuries.

The goal of this program is to prepare the student to actively engage their own culture and the questions and problems arising from that culture that require a theological and evangelical response. This program follows the method of practical theology in that it seeks to prepare students and those already engaged in ministry to return to work directly in a community of faith or to serve society in some kind of practical and direct way. The program helps the students identify ways in which the long tradition of Dominican thought and spirituality can enrich and enhance their own ministry and mission. The program also strives to form students in Dominican spiritual tradition so as to better to prepare them for their mission and enable them to in turn form others.