Education that Transforms
The Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts offers a distinctive educational experience founded on respect for our diverse global community and passion for creating a more just and humane society.
The heritages of our Jesuit, Marymount, and CSJ traditions have created and continue to inspire a transformational academic environment.
BCLA builds on its foundation of humanistic and social science disciplines by offering interdisciplinary majors and minors and providing international immersion and study abroad experiences, experiential internships, and community-based service learning opportunities.
We believe our students must develop intellectual, creative, communicational, informational, and intercultural skills and sensibilities needed in today's globalized world.
Our students are:
- intellectually challenged to acquire and demonstrate a profile of academic excellence,
- required to engage in collaborative teamwork with their peers and diverse communities,
- fully aware of and committed to the best practices of social responsibility, and
- value the importance of engaging in a life-long development of their imaginations.
BCLA graduates emerge as women and men of strong heart, individuals characterized by their intellectual preparation, compassionate teamwork with others, and on-going practices of engaged citizenship.
Mission
The Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts embodies the wider University goals of liberal education and commitment to Roman Catholicism and the Judeo-Christian traditions.
Our courses represent the heart of the University's core curriculum for all undergraduates.
Our curriculum liberates the mind, nourishes the spirit, and cultivates creativity for the challenges of today and tomorrow.
We support and reflect the University’s core values of
- social justice
- education of the whole person
- faith
- intercultural understanding
An intellectual understanding and human practices of these values are incorporated into all BCLA department and program goals, student learning outcomes, coursework, and career pathways.
About St. Robert Bellarmine
Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino (1542-1621) was a distinguished Italian Jesuit and Cardinal of the Catholic Church. Born at Montepulciano, he was the son of noble, although impoverished, parents, Vincenzo Bellarmino and his wife Cinzia Cervini, who was the sister of Pope Marcellus II. He was one of the most important figures of the Counter-Reformation. Canonized in 1930, he was declared a Doctor of the Universal Church the following year.
St. Bellarmine spent most of his life writing as a controversialist for the Roman Catholic Church. All his writings were highly respected and used extensively by and in the Church itself. His works covered a wide variety of subjects from an apologetic of the Roman Catholic position, Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos (Ingolstat 1588-93), to writing about the power of the pope. No topic, even criticism of his own leadership, was out of the reach of Bellarmine and his writing.
His book, Controversies, was carried by Roman Catholic missionaries on their journeys, and he also wrote catechisms for children and teachers. At the end of his life Bellarmine published three more essential works, In omnes Psalmos dilucida esposito (Rome 1611), De gemitu columbae (Rome 1615), and De arte bene moriendi (Rome 1620; translated as The Art of Dying Well) which he intended to serve as guides for ordinary people in their spiritual life.