Welcome to the Capstone

Let me share with you a taste of what gets me excited about my work in a Catholic university, as a way of suggesting the direction of this blog.

For the moment, if you’re unfamiliar with either Catholicism or the actual life of a university, please suspend your disbelief. I have found that pop culture knows little of either institution. (Monolithic, ivory tower, hierarchical, brain-washing, yada yada). Similarly, if you are Catholic, or if you do know university life, please practice what Paul Ricoeur calls “second naiveté“– that is, allowing yourself enough critical distance to see something new for the first time. Here is what excites me.

• Being part of a community of scholars who are passionately committed to advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
• Being able to bring that passion into Mass and offering it, along with bread and wine, back to God. I rejoice when my colleagues or students join me, but I understand when they do not.
• Developing relationships with students who come to campus with great, yet often still unspoken, desires to make themselves and the world better.
• Walking with students over the history of great thinking, rather like a host at a cocktail party (opens PDF, h/t Michael Himes), and introducing them to people who help them name their great desires.
• Engaging in conversations that unfold dimensions of truth I have not fully appreciated.
• Growing in the faith that ultimately a passion for truth and a passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ are ultimately coterminous.

Here, on the other hand, are the challenges I face.

• Navigating the temptation to see my work as limited, finite, a matter of conversing with people who agree with me, falling into a silo.
• Lapsing into a narrow parochialism, or a Catholic triumphalism that sees colleagues as ideological enemies rather than as conversation partners whose differing ideas I must honestly wrestle with.
• Seeing students as a distraction from work rather than the core of my work.
• Seeing tradition as a road backwards, rather than a necessary toolkit for the road ahead.
• Engaging in arguments rather than conversations. (Remembering that “conversation” and “conversion” share the same roots.)
• Fearing that truth will ultimately disprove the gospel. (My read of history is that it disproves false understandings of the gospel.)

It is a new academic year. I can’t wait to get started.

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