Pursuing the Unity of Knowledge: Integrating Religion, Science, and the Academic Disciplines

Inspired by the universalism of the Catholic intellectual tradition, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) seeks to integrate the currently fragmented academic disciplines so that scholars may study our time’s most significant practical and theoretical problems collaboratively and within ethical frameworks. The NDIAS proposes an ambitious three-year program of residential Templeton Fellowships and collaborative research, including Templeton Colloquia, supported by student assistantships and a unique research library collection. These components are designed to promote vigorous dialogue between scholars of various disciplines, especially philosophy and theology—the former committed to conceptual analysis and cogent arguments, the latter to the appropriation of a long intellectual and spiritual tradition. Its unique mission, its signature academic strengths, and its commitment to a new era of research excellence, well position Notre Dame to undertake this endeavor of advancing research on the great questions privileging value and faith. We hope the world’s most advanced scholars will rethink basic assumptions underlying their academic disciplines and become catalysts for new thinking and ideas. In this, we agree with John Henry Newman, who believed that all branches of knowledge form part of a whole, forming “one integral subject for contemplation,” with theology and philosophy serving as integrative discourses. Notre Dame’s president, Father John Jenkins, echoing Newman’s Idea of a University, writes in his inaugural address: “Truth is one. Knowledge in every branch of inquiry is intrinsically valuable, and scholars in diverse disciplines pursue the same truth. Truths found in physics and biology do relate to those found in art, literature, and philosophy, and our common pursuit of truth must include conversations across disciplines. The Catholic tradition resists the fragmentation of knowledge; it insists on the essential unity of a university.”