This course introduces students to the History of the early and medieval Church. Topics include: Judaism and the Christian faith; first Christian communities; the challenges of Christian expansion; persecutions; organization and Christian life; controversies and doctrinal development; the Church in the Roman Empire and changes under Constantine; monastic life; migrations and evangelization; the Church and feudal society; the Church in the West and in the East; Gregorian reform; the manifestations of Christianity: the crusades, administrative centralization, popular heresies and the inquisition, the medieval university; the decline of Christianity.

This course is an introduction to the Founding Fathers of the Church from the sub-apostolic period to the end of antiquity. The lives, writings, and doctrines of the great Early Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers will be presented through readings, lectures, films, and discussions. The genius of the Church Fathers and their ongoing legacy will be shown.

Using the contributions of critical biblical scholarship, this course will first reconstruct, from the various Gospel accounts, the traces of what Jesus said and did during his ministry. The way Jesus seems to have faced death will be compared with the way his death and resurrection were interpreted by the early church. Moving through the Christological developments of the second to the eighth centuries, the course will finally consider how contemporary human experience impacts on current theological interpretations of Jesus and his meaning for our times.

This course is a historical and systematic study of Christian faith in the God of Jesus Christ. This course will include discussions of the understanding of God in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, modern critiques of belief in God and Christian responses to these critiques. Participants will also address questions regarding God's relation to human suffering.

As an integral part of the Licenciate studies, all undergraduate students at USJ are required to prepare and present a portfolio of their work. The portfolio is assembled over the entire duration of their undergraduate studies, and is to consist of selected pieces of work that they have produced during their studies. A student’s portfolio may contain examples of assignment work, tests and examination answer scripts, presentations and project reports, and other work done by the student during his or her studies.

The focus of this Marian Theology course is the Scriptural Christocentric and Ecclesiotypical Mariology emerging from Vatican II. This course will also study the contribution of the Fathers of the Church, and the rich legacy of some Marian writers prior to Vatican II, because an appreciation of the past is indispensable for an understanding of Marian Theology today. Future directions in Mariology will also be explored.