The Graduate Study of Theology at LMU

As faculty director of the graduate program in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, each fall I have the honor of accompanying 15-30 graduate students as together they engage in the practice of that activity we call theology. St. Anselm of Canterbury famously described theology as fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” I usually start our class by emphasizing that the students have already been engaged in the activity of theology for much of their lives. The word theology in the koine Greek of the early Church literally meant “God-talk” or “reasoning about God.” In short, we do theology every time we think or talk about who God is in our lives, or what God’s presence means for our identity as human beings, our sense of the world around us, our responsibilities to that world and to one another. In the graduate study of theology, we engage these questions in a disciplined and precise way, and in keeping with scholarly traditions