In Appreciation of Human Skills
03/21/2025
So many of my students say they are “afraid to say the wrong thing.” I don’t think they are alone. We all feel a need to arrive at the correct answer quickly and efficiently. To begin by stating the obvious, we live in an exciting, strange and scary time to work in higher education. Academic life asserts the importance of inheriting the past and wagers on the future. Without entering pressing political or environmental conversations, colleges and universities nonetheless confront changes to student demographics and preparation, questions about the long-term value of a high-cost investment of time and resources, a societal shift in capacities for sustained attention and reading comprehension and the speed and scope of a technological revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision making.
But colleges and universities are always a bit outside of the regular timeline. Thorough research and good scholarship move at slower paces than news alerts and social media. At Catholic schools, committed as they are to a fuller vision of education than merely job training, that slower pace also permits a gradual development of students as whole persons. When academic communities strive to engage hearts (like I believe we do as part of the Pioneer Journey at Sacred Heart University), we recognize student (and human!) identities that are far more complex and richly textured than a resume of skills and accomplishments. Indeed, I think a Catholic education promises not only training in a robust set of career-ready technical skills but also perennially necessary human skills: creativity, critical questioning, historical consciousness, self-expression and rhetorical prowess, moral sensitivity, intellectual curiosity and interior resilience.
But I think there are two human skills where the renewal of the Church and Catholic higher education intertwine: appreciating the beautiful and disagreeing well. Both appreciating the beautiful and disagreeing well require work, require rigor and require time. Both are also about learning what it means for humans to seek delight rather than distraction when encountering, confronting and engaging differences.
Permit the indulgence of an academician’s aside. The Christian understanding of God as triune suggests for us what would be boringly called a metaphysics of diversity. That is, any discussion of “diversity” logically presumes more fundamental unity. Diversity describes differences within a shared category. The diversity of apples in the produce department signals variations on the fruit theme: Gala, Macintosh, Red Delicious, Granny Smith. But if an absent-minded professor forgets their iPhone in the pile of Honeycrisps, we will notice either the difference between fruit and smartphone or a different category for diversity altogether, asking now about how many objects can be rightfully called an “apple.”
Christian thought should consider this kind of diversity-in-unity to be a good thing. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are “three persons in one God.” Somehow, in God, distinctions can express oneness. God’s way of being God happens as diversity-in-unity. Those are big and fancy words and complicated concepts. St. Patrick famously summarized the Trinity in the image of a three-leaf clover. But I think the Trinity offers an image for making sense of the confounding reality where our differences not only can be bridged, overcome and unified through procedures and processes but where differences offer a source of delight, of pleasure, of wonder, of holiness.
How could an idea as confusing as the Trinity be a model for delighting in differences of opinion or different kinds of beauty? The answer is love. For many theologians of the tradition writing in Latin, the verb for the kind of love expressed between God the Father and God the Son is condillectum, mutual love that delights. This is the same Latin word for love that forms the title of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ, Dilexit Nos. Such love that delights in differences-in-unity shines forth God’s glory, and I happen to believe that’s the same glory we encounter through the beauty of the world God has made by loving it into being. And while some of the beauty we seek seems only to confirm our worldly pleasures and interests, there are other graced moments when creation’s innumerable differences shimmer with the very light of their Creator. Sure, the Trinity is a mystery. To quote one of my favorite theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” But an experience of the beauty of difference offers us a glimpse and clue as to what it might be like to encounter the God who reveals Godself in acts of love.
Recalling the image of the Trinity might nudge higher education toward a thicker description of delight as a human skill. We work in an era of polarization and totalization, an era of metrics, speed and anxiety, an era of ecological crisis and threats of plague. Can we still remember how to value delight in our disagreements about the good? Can we still trust that it is good to make inefficient art? Training in how to take time for delight may be the human skill we need most.
Charles A. Gillespie is an assistant professor in the department of Catholic Studies and director of Pioneer Journey at Sacred Heart University.