Cortina Living-Learning Community
About
APPLICATIONS FOR 2025-2026 SCHOOL YEAR ARE OPEN NOW!
Applications are due Feb. 7th, 2025
Link to apply; Cortina Application for 2025-2026
Please contact Dee Shah at dhwanishah@creighton.edu with questions!
The Cortina Community is a sophomore living-learning community that prepares students to connect their passion for justice with their future goals by challenging them to investigate social inequalities and difficult realities in a vulnerable way. We do this through service, examination of faith, purposeful learning, and living in community.
Background
Our program is named after Fr. Jon Cortina, SJ, who worked with the people of Guarjila, El Salvador during and after the civil war. Fr. Cortina was a talented engineer; he worked for NASA and taught engineering at the University of Central America (UCA). However Fr. Cortina had a dilemma; he found it challenging that he was skilled enough to help send men to the moon but did not know how to build a house. It was this tension, at least in part, that drove him to use his engineering skills in Guarjila to build houses, bridges, and a system of aquaducts. He understood his own abilities could liberate others, and practiced what he dubbed as “Liberation Engineering”.
Fr. Cortina understood that faith needs to be backed by action if it is to be transformative. Faith must have an impact in people’s day to day lives and be concerned with bolstering a person's dignity. All people are called to use their talents in a way that transforms the world or, as Fr. Cortina might say, to be a “liberation whatever”. Whether that be a doctor, an artist, or a writer, anyone can use their talents for the liberation of others. Participating in the work of liberation is not only transformative for others, but it is above all a personal transformation. Free of the dominant cultural languages of success, the self is free to respond to the call of the community.
Life as a Cortina Member:
Formation
Formation is a weekly gathering of members which provides an opportunity to expand our knowledge of different social justice topics and challenges us to think about how to live in light of that knowledge. We come together for an hour every Sunday at 6:30 pm.
Service
Weekly service done in small groups allows Cortinians to build compassionate, mutually beneficial relationships with our Omaha neighbors. There is opportunity to be involved in a new service site at the beginning of each semester.
Classes
Sophomores take one class per semester together. In the Fall, they take a class to fulfill the Ethics component of the Magis core, and in the Spring, they take a class to fulfill the Oral Communications component.
Community
Sophomores live together in community in Heider Hall.