Catholic · Emmaus course
Free to Become: How Our Choices Shape the Soul
Every choice is quietly building someone. This course helps you meet them.
For Catholic adults who sense that their daily choices matter but have never been shown exactly how, Free to Become turns St. Thomas Aquinas' account of the moral and spiritual life into one clear, personal hour. Unlike a rules-and-sins approach to morality, it explains the inner mechanics of a free act and the growth those acts produce, and it does so with enough rigor that counselors and pastoral workers can earn continuing education from the same material.
NBCC CE · 1 clock hour · Human Growth and Development (HGD)
With Fr. John Bartunek, LC
- Length
- 1 hr
- Lessons
- 1
- Level
- Beginner
- Version
- Catholic
- Price
- Free
understand who I am becoming and take hold of it
About this course
You make hundreds of choices a day and most feel too small to matter. They are not. In this short, rich course, you will see what actually happens inside a free human act, how the choices you repeat harden into the virtues and vices that become your character, and why the same act can be generous in one person and hollow in another.
Guided by St. Thomas Aquinas, you will learn to tell the object of an act from its intention and its circumstances, and you will learn the hard, freeing line between judging an action and judging a person. In about an hour, with a short video, a guided reflection, and two deep-dive readings (one psychological, one spiritual), you will come away seeing your own choices, and other people, differently.
Counselors and pastoral professionals: this course is built to qualify for 1.0 NBCC clock hour in Human Growth and Development.
Free to begin. Yours to keep.
Who this course is for
Formed Catholic adults
For Catholic adults who sense that their daily choices matter but have never been shown exactly how.
Also for Pastoral workers and counselors seeking NBCC CE; Parish and diocesan bulletins; Counselor and therapist networks.
From the course syllabus
Every day is made of choices, and most of them feel too small to matter. This course begins with a claim that turns that assumption over: the choices we repeat are quietly building the person we are becoming. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas’ integrated view of the moral and spiritual life, the course opens up what actually happens inside a free human act, how virtues and vices take root through repetition, and why the same action can carry very different moral weight depending on why we do it and what surrounds it. It also draws a line worth keeping: we can judge that an action is wrong while remaining unable to judge the person who did it, because we never see the whole story.
The result is a course that speaks to two kinds of learners at once. A formed Catholic adult will find a clear, warm account of how the moral life and the life of grace fit together. A counselor, pastoral worker, or graduate student will find a rigorous developmental model of character, grounded in Divine Mercy University’s own scholarship on virtue and the whole person, that carries directly into professional practice.
Curriculum
-
Module 1
Free to Become: How Our Choices Shape the Soul
- 1.The Role of Morality in the Spiritual Life: Human Action, Virtue, and the Moral Act
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