The School of Arts, Culture and Society serves students on many different intellectual, artistic, and career journeys, from Business to Music, from Philosophy to Social Work, from History to Education to Digital Media. Graduates pursue their vocations in nearly every area of life, serving and leading in church and society as the mission statement of Messiah University proclaims.
While representing a wide range of human ambition, interest, and calling, The School of Arts, Culture and Society is characterized by three dominant emphases.
- Education for human action: Through our disciplines we are a school that studies, interprets, and enhances human action in church and society. Whether through artistic performance, the development of business systems and educational leaders, or through analysis and interpretation of culture and society, faculty and students seek to understand human beings in the world and seek to enhance the ways human beings act upon and change the world.
- Education with and for others: The School of Arts, Culture and Society intentionally faces outward in public engagement, educating for and in the company of church and society. We enhance the cultural life of the region through the arts, assist community partners in understanding and addressing crucial social and cultural issues, and prepare students for the difficult work of citizenship in the 21st century. In these ways and many others, the school works from a fundamental conviction that learning is for others and pursued with others.
- Education toward reconciliation: We produce graduates focused on pursuing reconciliation with others and with God’s desires for the world. We seek to understand and develop forms of human action that are consistent with the action of God in and for the world, that action being realized most concretely and wholly through the person of Jesus. We seek to know and contribute to what is beautiful and just in a world where human beings act as persons made in the image of God. We also look compassionately at the places where the world is broken and unreconciled, and we work to make it more of what God created it and us to be.
The School of Arts, Culture, and Society pursues these ends in the academic offerings in the following departments and programs:
- Department of Art and Design
- Department of Biblical, Religious and Philosophical Studies
- Department of Business
- Department of Communication
- Department of Education
- Department of History, Politics and International Relations
- Department of Human Development and Family Science
- Department of Language, Literature and Writing
- Department of Music
- Department of Psychology, Criminal Justice and Sociology
- Department of Social Work
- Department of Theatre and Dance
- Program in Digital Public Humanities
- Program in Digital Media
- Program in Peace and Conflict Studies
- Teacher Education Program
Additionally, The School of Arts, Culture and Society provides public oriented programming through the following entities:
- Center for Public Humanities
- Thriving Together: Congregations for Racial Justice
- The Messiah University Performing Arts Series
- The Messiah University Theatre Season
- The Galleries at Messiah University
- Community Connections Conference
- Summer Camps in Arts and Academics