The Asbury University Honors Program (AUHP) explores a range of enduring questions concerning our humanness. Questions like, “What does it mean to live the good life?”, “What gives people value?” “What are the implications of finding value in ourselves and others?”
Post-modern challenges to identity and difference have opened up the prospect of rediscovering images and ideas of human worth and dignity often left out of the overly quantitative and scientistic assumptions embedded into the enlightenment-infused modern understanding of humanity. As a result, conceptualizations regarding our humanness are being revisited; thinkers across the disciplines are considering anew the deep nature, meaning, and implications of terms like “me,” “you,” “us,” and “them.” Amidst this discussion lies an opportunity to recover a more sacred understanding of humanness, one in which all people possess unique status and are endowed with intrinsic value; our moral natures being understood not as mere social constructions, but as central features of our identity and our responsibilities to others. The AUHP invites students into a community of scholars who engage in an interdisciplinary exploration of virtue and human value anchored in the richness of orthodox Christianity.
Asbury University, a Christian liberal arts school in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, affirms an historic Christian understanding of human persons as intentionally created, but terribly fallen, yet greatly loved, and with hope and help for restoration and right-relationship with God and others. Furthermore, Asbury University upholds that the proper grounding for our common humanity and equality is anchored firmly in God’s sought relation to humans, each one of us a dearly loved image-bearer of Himself; as testified to by Jesus’ incarnation, call to repentance and discipleship, act of atonement, and invitation to participate in the divine life. The sacrificial love of God that restores right-relatedness, not only binds us together with other disciples of Jesus, but also compels us to recognize our social interdependency and responsibility, and empowers us to live lives of service to others. The AUHP takes up the task of exploring what is entailed in these profound claims through careful and reflective study of human experience in the various academic disciplines of the arts, humanities, and sciences, with an aim towards facilitating transformative restoration.
Asbury University’s living and learning community is an ideal setting for an integrative, rigorous, curricular experience reflecting the width and depth of studies and programs exploring the origin and implications of human value. The program will ever-aspire to comprehend more fully and accurately the Imago Dei and to educate students in light of this truth so that they may live virtuous lives and serve others more abundantly.