Rooted in the Benedictine vow that encourages faithfulness to a way of life within community, Conversatio is the foundational shared learning experience for every Saint Anselm student. HU 103 is the first semester of a year-long interdisciplinary course that provides students with an intellectual orientation to studies in the Liberal Arts and acquaints them with the distinctive value of those studies within the Catholic Benedictine tradition. The first semester of Conversatio considers the meaning of humanity in the world by reading and discussing seminal texts that contemplate who we are as individuals, our responsibility within a community, and our relationship with the divine. Among fundamental intellectual ideas, students are introduced to the Catholic Benedictine intellectual tradition through the spiritual teachings in select readings of Saints Benedict and Anselm.

As the common academic conversation orienting students to Saint Anselm College, Conversatio invites individuals to discover their intellectual place and voice within the Saint Anselm learning community by encouraging them to read critically, to contemplate significant questions about human existence, and to communicate their ideas to others with greater effectiveness and respect.

Daniel Dennett's new book looks at the convergence of biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to ask what is human intelligence, how can it be instantiated in a brain, and how could such a thing have evolved? We'll take a quick tour of some contemporary ways of looking at the human mind, the brain, and evolution to explore how the features that make us most human, such as enjoying Bach, can find a home in the natural world from which we evolved.