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The Core Human Questions cluster offers seminars that invite students to explore topics fundamental to human experience, emphasizing humanities- and theory-based readings from a variety of periods, traditions, and genres.  Though each course has a discrete focus, exploring such subjects as love, family and identity, memory and anticipation, illness and health, community relationships and resource distribution, and the realms of public versus private, all work toward understanding how texts are embedded in, and represent, the cultures from which they emerge—even as those texts pose enduring questions about the individual and shared search for meaning across history.  Class discussions and assignments are designed to improve students’ oral and written communication skills and to provide encounters with ideas and issues, both in and outside the classroom, that move students beyond their existing attitudes and positions.  Common texts and activities within the cluster foster a wider community of intellectual inquiry and social interaction while understanding that each student brings a unique perspective to their seminar’s, and the cluster’s, collective endeavors.