Hungry Hearts
09/27/2024
We see on Catholic college campuses two converging phenomena. The first is a decline in enrollment and a disparagement of the humanities as disciplines that bring no revenue and have no practical value. At the same time, we are witnessing something of a religious crisis—an increasing number of young people who are disaffiliated from institutional religion and for whom God is absent in their lives.
We see these phenomena dramatized in students whose world overwhelms them with materialism, fills them with feelings of anxiety and depression, and breaks their trust in political, educational and religious institutions that should support and guide them. These students arrive on campus motivated to gain an education that promises professional success. They have been taught that they need to develop resumes that are populated with credentials, awards and activities in order to accelerate their drive to get to the top.
The culture has stuck them in a market-driven, return-on-your-investment understanding of what attending college means. It does not fill them with a desire for an authentic fullness of life; instead, the culture impoverishes their humanity with reality television and millionaire influencers. And despite their resentment towards social media because of how it burdens them, social media is the platform they use to fill their lives but not their hungry hearts.
When they come to college, they do not think about learning with curiosity, wonder and awe. They do not understand that studying everything from literature to economics is an intellectual and spiritual journey that can bring them closer to the fullness of their humanity. They do not realize that their human reason, which can be open to studying all humanity and all reality, is speaking about God or that it can reflect deeply on experience and look deeply into their heart’s desire and need for love, truth, beauty and good.
Like Augustine, they carry an aching emptiness in their souls, and though the desire is buried deep within them, their hearts are hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives. They yearn for love, connection and community; and they search for an experience of transcendence that will move them out of the mundane numbness of their world.
So, what is the responsibility of the Catholic university? How can the Catholic university awaken in them the ultimate meaning and purpose of their education? What curriculum and pedagogy can be used to show them what Pope Francis describes as our deepest reality: “The heart is the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty and good are planted”?
In an essay in America Magazine, Cardinal Blase Cupich states that the task of the Catholic university is to engage students in an understanding of the Catholic intellectual tradition. While that tradition reaches across all disciplines and professional studies, it was built upon a study of the humanities. This tradition is defined as a dialogue between faith and culture, studying everything human, whose writers and texts bring students an appreciation for truth, beauty and goodness, and whose assumption, as Cardinal Cupich writes, is that, “the universe can be fully intelligible only in reference to God as its ultimate origin and end.” I would only add that how we engage our students in this ongoing tradition is as important as the curriculum we teach.
At Sacred Heart University, we engage students in two core seminars: The Human Journey Seminars: Great Books in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Students spend two semesters reading, reflecting upon and discussing the great works of this tradition. We frame these seminars with ultimate questions of meaning and we use a synodal seminar pedagogy to bring our students into this 2,000-year-old ongoing conversation of great Catholic thinkers asking questions about God, humanity, society and nature.
This synodal seminar combines reading, intentional reflection and courageous conversation that becomes a search for truth. We encourage students to keep their minds open, to listen intently, to discuss courageously and to become enriched by the larger reality that the conversation unfolds for them. As students relate these texts to their lives and the world in which they live and engage with their peers, they connect in a small community where they feel safe enough to express their ideas, feelings and perspectives.
Asking students to consider ultimate questions raises in them an attitude of awe and wonder at the mystery that these questions pose. We have found that as students reflect upon and discuss questions concerning faith, freedom, love, identity, truth, justice, happiness and evil, they awaken to an awareness of the mystery of ultimacy. The seminar may not have solved the “God crisis” or prevailed against the culture in which they live, but students are reading texts from the humanities; and the seminar pedagogy, asking ultimate questions of truth and meaning, has opened and responded to students’ hearts yearning for meaning. Our seminars in the Catholic intellectual tradition do not aim to catechize or teach doctrine; rather, they aim to engage students with all reality more intentionally, including engaging with the reality of mystery that brings them to “The heart … the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty, and good are planted.”
Michelle Loris is the director of Center for Catholic Studies and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Sacred Heart University.
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