A Graduate School Culture

The Templeton Honors College at Eastern University has been described as offering a "graduate school culture in an undergraduate setting." Located as it is on Philadelphia's Main Line, the Templeton Honors College is an opportunity for high-achieving students who want the moral commitments of a Christian college but who also want the intellectual challenges of the humanities and natural sciences at an Ivy League level.

At Eastern, we believe that knowing is a moral function, and knowledge a moral accomplishment. 

The Templeton Honors College at Eastern University takes seriously the command, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." Too often, we concentrate on just one of these three loves, and the choice usually falls most often on the first, sometimes on the second, and not enough on the third. But at the Templeton Honors College, we believe that they cannot be separated. When knowing and learning are separated from loving, the mind becomes selfish, sterile and disconnected, no matter how technically brilliant. But at the same time, when the heart and the soul are taken apart from the mind, they become sentimental, impulsive and defensive.

Genuine loving of God is intelligent—it is based on truth, and truths that everyone can know. Similarly, genuine knowledge is a moral accomplishment, since knowledge which operates apart from the love of truth and right only produces a lightweight, disorganized, and mass-market culture. Knowledge which has no moral principle becomes merely information, and neither deepens our capacity to make decisions or our capacity to govern ourselves democratically. Knowledge is not merely a byte. It can kill or it can make alive. Truth leads to life, wholeness and uprightness before God. Knowledge which is only information, to be entertained simply because it's there, actually has the capacity to demean, to demoralize, or to kill.

At this critical point in your life, you need to acquire a command of what is to be learned, how it should be learned, and what is worthy of being loved in learning. You need more than just the technical skills to make a living; you need to find out what makes a life. You need to learn not just how to see, but to acquire some ground from which to perceive the rest of what you will see for the balance of your life.

And that is what the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University is all about.

"I am firmly committed to the value of a Christ-centered liberal arts experience—in what it can teach students about a quality of life, a quality of community, and a quality of an individual's existence that is really worthwhile.

Such an experience should foster learned habits of  thought, speech and character(behavior) considered essential for anyone who is free in Christ.

Eastern's distinctiveness is grounded in an epistemology that bases being free on knowing truth (John 8:32). The truth we can know through a wisdom that is spiritual and given by God (1 Corinthians 2:6- 16) reveals both an incarnate example of how we are to be and a calling as to what we are to do."  

- Dr. David Black, President of Eastern University