North Park Community Asks, ‘What is Truth?’
Campus Theme series begins its 13th year
CHICAGO (October 15, 2015) — has been a part of the 萝莉社 undergraduate experience for over a decade. Beginning in 2003, a yearlong series of events, lectures, and discussions occur across campus around a central question of the human experience. It is meant to connect students from a variety of disciplines in a common pursuit. Recent themes have included , , and .
This year’s theme, What Is Truth?, marks the start of a new cycle in the Campus Theme series. Over the next four years, four questions—What Is Truth? What Is Beauty? What Is Good? What Is Sacred?—will be asked. After that, the same cycle questions will begin again over the following four academic years.
“Since most undergraduate students are here for four years, our Campus Theme committee discussed the idea of a common set of questions,” says , associate professor of and the director of the Campus Theme program. “The shared experience of a single question happening across campus is essential to Campus Theme, and this allows us to enhance the shared experience across different classes and perhaps even generations of North Park graduates.”
The committee explored different ideas of what the four questions could be, and ultimately landed on these because, “they’ve been the principle big questions for universities for hundreds of years,” Clifton-Soderstrom says. “These are broad and abstract enough that will allow a lot of flexibility in the kinds of events that will happen across campus.”
The pursuit of What Is Truth? is already underway. In September, the Campus Theme program and the University's new Creative Guild brought together , professor of , and artists Catherine Prescott and , assistant professor of , for a discussion on the idea of truth in relation to art, with a focus on the artists’ recent work.
Last Friday, students, faculty, and staff gathered in Anderson Chapel to hear from Gerardo Cárdenas, a Mexico City-born writer and journalist who now lives in Chicago.
Cárdenas’s visit was particularly meaningful for North Park, as his book Our Lady of the Viaduct is the University’s Common Read selection this year. The Common Read program, similar to initiatives like , is in its third year as part of . Through the program, incoming freshmen have a shared experience of reading the same book—selected based on the Campus Theme—and then gather throughout the year to discuss its meanings and implications.
Cárdenas’s book—about a 2005 sighting of what some believed to be the image of the Virgin Mary underneath a viaduct in Chicago, and the ways it affected the surrounding neighborhood—was written in Spanish. , professor of at North Park and coordinator of the Common Read, translated it into English, and sent copies to each incoming freshman last summer.
“Truth is invariably something we concern ourselves with on a daily basis,” Cárdenas said in his lecture on Friday. “Whether it is through art, or thought, or our social interaction, we’re constantly searching for something that provides meaning, and we call that truth.”
Campus Theme events will occur throughout the year, with most of them free and open to the public. Highlights this year include a visit from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who will be on campus November 12–13 for a class on creative writing, a poetry reading, and a lecture in Anderson Chapel on “Truth-Telling and the Role of the Artist in Society.”
This spring, the University will also welcome Dr. Richard Kearney, the Charles B. Seeling Professor in Philosophy at Boston College. Kearney has written extensively about truth as it relates to imagination.
More events related to Campus Theme will be announced throughout the year. Please visit for updates and more information.
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