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Three Principles of IKON
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FAithSt. Newman believed that university students must engage “religious truth”, i.e., their faith, to properly cultivate their minds and hearts during their time at university.
- Many students have a faith that is real but hidden, basic, emotional, and reserved for events at their campus ministry or on Sunday.
- Student’s faith is disintegrated from their university life, which for many is either abstract, technical, or career-oriented learning.
- TNI teaches faith as an intellectual and moral grace that can elevate and integrate the “education of the intellect to the education of the heart.”
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Integral KNOwingSt. Newman believed that college students need Christian Knowledge: first principles and revealed truth found in the Creed and Christian culture.
- IKON is the fulfillment of St. Newman’s vision, as it integrates Christian Knowledge with principles from philosophy, the social and natural sciences, business, fine arts, etc. Few students connect the secular to the sacred and we help make that connection.
- In a typical IKON class, we raise issues that impact their immediate life, e.g., work, justice, freedom, relationships, etc., and read from scholarly sources paired with great Christian thinkers. Students are enthralled to be able to ask questions about their faith in relation to secular topics – such as politics, culture, etc.
- We teach them to see how their faith directly integrates these topics, so that they are empowered to ask how their faith affects their choice of major, careers, family, religious vocation, etc. Students report that they take truths from our class and apply it to the classes they are taking and share it with friends and relatives.
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PERSONAL INFLUENCEFor St. Newman the personal influence of a teacher forms and integrates students morally, spiritually, and intellectually. This is what we see as the heart of our IKON classes. The classes, and community formed by them, accompany students as they pursue their other majors at their university.
- Our classes are intentionally small and usually team-taught seminars with 10-15 students who often come with their friends and/or roommates. We start with prayer and a short reading that directly engages their faith, then discuss the topic from the syllabus through the Socratic method.
- Over the course of the semester students seem to come out of their shells, and begin to ask difficult questions, or engage their faith from new vantage points. Sometimes the classes become a forum for students themselves to teach each other.
- The conversations in the classes tend to continue among the students. Often, they stay after class or ask to discuss the concepts they are learning, or to help them extend it to different areas of their studies or personal lives. This has become the foundation for creating our Cor ad Cor Mentoring Program.
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inspired By St. Newman
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PERSONAL INFLUENCE
Our guiding principle has been Newman's idea that the essence of the Gift of Integrity and of education is Personal Influence. One's education is partial if it is only about information delivery and assessment. Here are a few inspiring quotes from Newman that have informed our practice:
- [Whenever students] aim at something precise, something refined, something really luminous ... they avail themselves, in some shape or other ... of present communication between [person and person], of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple.
- [The] personal influence of the teacher is able in some sort to dispense with an academical system, but that the system cannot in any sort dispense with personal influence. With influence there is life, without it there is none; if influence is deprived of its due position, it will not by those means be got rid of, it will only break out irregularly, dangerously. An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else." - Saint John Henry Newman
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ON INTEGRAL KNOWING
University training [as Integral Knowing]... is the education which gives men [and women] a clear conscious view of their own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence
in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches them to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant.
It prepares them to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows them how to accommodate themselves to others, to know their state of mind, to bring other before their own, how to influence, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them.
- Saint John Henry Newman
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