Curriculum Reform at Catholic Universities

“Captive Education: Church schools, especially primary and secondary, are weighted in presumptions of SWV (static worldview); psychological estrangement from evolutionary reality happens early in people’s lives, and becomes thereby profoundly imprinted, so that liberation from estrangement happens only with the great effort, if at all.

The origin of colleges and universities is closely connected to the Monastic Orders of the Middle Ages and to institutions of religion committed to theologies of SWV; these citadels of SWV continue to advance mindsets of SWV. So, it is easy to understand why colleges and universities of today are not helpful in bridging the divide between SWV and EWV (evolutionary worldview). Thomas Berry has suggested how colleges and universities might bring students to a liberated vision of evolutionary consciousness, also with respect to religious consciousness, namely, by recognizing that in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, Nature is the sacred scripture that precedes all other scriptures of human writing. (5).

Toward the specific objective of enabling the liberation of students from the obfuscating inhibitions of SWV, this writer has written a trilogy of “New Genesis Poems" whose intent and content mean to confront static-world mindsets and their consequences, so as to exercise students in critical thinking by putting in dialog ideas that seek out communal well-being. (6). It is for elders to prepare youth to inherit the Earth. (30 July 1992, Sylvester L. Steffen)
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5. Thomas Berry, “The DREAM of the EARTH”, 1988 copyright, Sierra Club Books, paperback edition, 1990, 730 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109.
“…Professional education should be based on awareness that Earth is itself primary physician, primary lawgiver, primary revelation of the divine, primary scientist, primary technologist, primary commercial venture, primary artist, primary educator and primary agent in whatever activity we find human affairs…(pg 107)
“…Within this context the American college could understand in some depth its role in creating a future worthy of that larger universal community of beings out of which the human community finds its proper fulfillment…” (Pg 108)

6. Ibid. No 1 above, Pg. 299. L1, 11-16.
“…Through a sharing of resources and points of view, let all who teach in seminaries, colleges and universities try to collaborate with men well versed in other sciences. Theological inquiry should seek a profound understanding of revealed truth without neglecting close contact with its own time. As a result it will be able to help those men skilled in various fields of knowledge to gain a better understanding of the faith…”

The complete article “Service to Religion in the Third Millennium” from which the above is taken can be found at www.secondenlightenment.org/about/servicereligion.pdf

I couldn't agree more with you, Ed. You are right on target. May I refer you to my posting this morning "Women and Scholasticism's Unrepented Blunder", at Spirituality and Culture. It corroborates specifically your point that all seven Sacraments pertain to women equally as to men.

How cultured we are to miss the point that Sacraments are about "sacred remembrance" rooted in and advanced by the "paradigmatic human", not by the alienated male. Correcting the "blunder" is critically urgent, and correction will probably come only from the bottom up. Church institutions are still too steeped in the culture of inerrancy to expect them to take the lead.

William, how right you are right too! Thanks to both of you. [Parenthetically, how similar our backgrounds, Ed; if you are curious, my vita is splayed at www.secondenlightenment.org]

To the issue of curriculum reform, it would seem that evolutionary consciousness has now generally advanced to the point that a new worldview (evolutionary) consciousness (paradigm) is in place and should be made the supposition on which college curricula (and all educational curricula) are premised, including all professional fields, e.g., theology.

To fail to begin on premises of such updating is to base education on premises that are counter-intuitional (no longer credible) and therefore necessarily confusing to the student, at least covertly if not overtly. Such built-in irrationality has to have some longterm schizophrenic and damaging consequence.

These are excellent points, in my view, Ed.

You say, "Professor will still talk about Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, and leading philosophers that shape the way we think. In the future, they must study people, not necessarily considered philosophers, to derive values and strategies that point the way to spiritual and environmental restoration."

For me, one of the implications of those observations is that we must push the discourse field for theological and philosophical investigation. Those being trained to assess truth claims of doctrine and religious symbols have to have tools to study how doctrinal statements and religious symbols are "received" in real lives of real human beings.

This means that our theological-philosophical vocabulary will have to comprise sociological analysis, cultural analysis, literary analysis, even an understanding of pop culture. We can no longer talk about doctrinal truth as if that truth is not lived in the lives of those who "receive" (or don't receive) doctrine. Part of the truth claim of any doctrine is how it affects real lived human lives.

Another statement of yours seems profoundly correct to me: "Within a month, the realization hit me that all my Catholic education to the time I entered the novitiate was superficial, certainly correct but lacking depth."

The kind of Catholic education imparted by many Catholic universities that focus on Aristotle and Aquinas as the core of the curriculum IS superficial. It is often rote learning that tries to inculcate a very narrow, defensive, apologetic view of the world in those receiving such education. The Aristotleianism and Thomism often taught in such apologetic curricula are themselves debased Aristotelianism and Thomism.

Graduates of programs in Catholic universities that tout themselves as "traditionalist" or "great-books" oriented often graduate with appallingly poor educations, with well-thumbed apologetic manuals and catechisms, but without the tools to live their faith adequately in a postmodern cultural context. The ethical awareness of these products of Catholic "education" is often embarrassingly childish--like a fifth-grade moral sense with a college graduate's vocabulary.

When these programs increasingly attract home-schooled youth taught in a similarly constrained educational environment, they become part of a real challenge to the church today: the threatened takeover of the church by a generation of very poorly educated young people who believe that their understanding of the tradition is the only possible understanding. With these youth's lack of exegetical skills, of tools for cultural analysis, of broad reading, of sympathetic awareness of the world around them, "the" tradition becomes ever narrower, and is a caricature of itself.

Good luck to you with your project at St. Thomas. I tried something similar over a decade ago at a Benedictine college that asked me to revise its theology curriculum. It was an uphill battle. Though the curriculum I worked on collaboratively with other theology department members had abundant courses in the classic theologians, we were accused of ditching "the" classics.

I was then booted, and the curriculum on which I had worked hard with other department members, and which the faculty had approved, was eradicated and a pale and pathetic substitute put into place. It is perhaps no accident that this college has had nothing but turmoil from that period forward, all centered on questions of Catholic identity. We just don't do the church of today a service when we don't produce thoughtful, broadly read and broadly educated students capable of critical analysis of culture. At their best, that's what Catholic colleges have long done, and in doing so they serve a valuable function in producing good Catholic leaders who know how to bring Catholic values into the culture surrounding them.

William D. Lindsey