Explorations: Liberal Arts for Life is a one-semester common course required of all entering students in their first semester at the College. A complete description appears in the Collegiate Center section of this Catalog.

The Engaged Citizen is a one-semester course required of all first-year students entering Hendrix College. The theme of the "engaged citizen"combines the spirit of Hendrix's Odyssey Program with the College's stated purpose of "inspiring students to live lives of accomplishment, integrity, service, and joy." From philosophers and physicists to artists and anthropologists, we all approach questions about what it means to be involved in our communities, whether locally or globally, in different ways. This course seeks to illuminate the multiplicity of possible interpretations of engaging as a citizen through interdisciplinary team teaching, in which pairs of faculty from across the institution come together to form dyads and explore as sub-topic from different methodological "ways of knowing." The varying disciplinary and individual approaches to this theme are intended to provoke discussion and reflection on this topic both within the dyads and throughout the Hendrix community. The students divide their time equally between the two dyad professors over the course of the semester. The dyads can also meet periodically as a combined group if the professors deem it appropriate. The course includes an engaged learning component involving an introductory, hands-on activity that engages academic material in or outside the classroom and is tied to the content of the course.

What does a life expressing wholeness look like? What are the joys and struggles of leading a life of commitment and integrity? What ultimately gives meaning to life? How is suffering overcome? What place to faith, love, justice, and friendship have in a meaningful vocation? How can one’s life-work bespeak one’s fundamental values? These and other questions related to the search for a life well lived are investigated in this interdisciplinary course sponsored by the Hendrix-Lilly Vocations Initiative. Literary, philosophical, and artistic forms are selected for study by the course faculty.