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Cosmopolis or the New Jerusalem: Modern Social Imaginaries and the Catholic University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2016

Timothy P. Muldoon
Timothy P. Muldoon*
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Abstract

Charles Taylor's exploration of modern social imaginaries sheds light on the differing ways that university faculty and leaders today reflect and help shape the world. This article examines Taylor's work as a point of departure for suggesting two contrasting models of social imaginary abroad in university education—namely, cosmopolis and new Jerusalem. It explores what a robust Catholic imagination represented by the latter model might mean for the contemporary Catholic university, especially as regards the desire for integration of knowledge that is truly reflective of the term “university.” It pays particular attention to Bernard Lonergan's notion of cosmopolis as a way of imagining anew the ways that Catholic universities form students and contribute to research and scholarship, and emphasizes the task of faculty formation as central to Catholic mission in the academy.

Keywords

social imaginariesuniversitycosmopolisepistemology
Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , June 2016 , pp. 35 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2016 

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References

1 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1. The former models were Newman's Oxford and the Catholic University of Dublin, and the latter model was the original University of Berlin.

2 Kerr, The Uses of the University, 3–4.

3 Ibid., 5.

4 Ibid., 6.

5 Ibid., 14–15.

6 See George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), which chronicles the secularization process in prominent American universities founded by religious congregations. See also James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).

7 C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–4.

8 Ibid., 6.

9 See Muldoon, Tim, “The Boutique and the Gallery: An Apologia for a Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Academy,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 12, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 74–96CrossRefGoogle ScholarHlabse, Peter, “Saying What We Mean and Meaning What We Say: Multi-versity and Uni-versity—What Difference Does It Make?,” Colloquia vol. 1 (2013–2014), March 2014Google Scholar; Boidin, Capucine, Cohen, James, and Grosfoguel, Ramón, “Introduction: From Uni-versity to Pluri-versity; A Decolonial Approach to the Present Crisis of Western Universities,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 10 (2012):, 1–6Google Scholar.

10 Taylor explores the changing social imaginaries of modernity in his book A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. chaps. 3 (“The Great Disembedding”) and 4 (“Modern Social Imaginaries”). Much of this work relies on an earlier book, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), which drew from his article “Modern Social Imaginaries,” which appeared in Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 91–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 92.

12 Taylor alludes to the fact that norms may, in fact, be corruptions of an underlying moral order. Referring to Christianity, he writes that “what we got was not a network of agape, but rather a disciplined society in which categorical relations have primacy, and therefore norms” (A Secular Age, 158).

13 Cf. Bernard Lonergan's exploration of the nature of common sense as concerned with useful knowledge within a community in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick E. Crowe, SJ, and Robert M. Doran, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), chaps. 6 and 7.

14 Taylor, A Secular Age, 25.

15 Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 96.

16 Taylor, A Secular Age, 160.

17 Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government 1.86, cited in Taylor, A Secular Age, 166.

18 Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries” 106; cf. A Secular Age, 171.

19 Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries” 106; cf. A Secular Age, 171–72.

20 David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 259.

21 Anthony Kronman, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

22 Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Elsewhere, Delbanco opined that “the most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.” Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 114.

23 Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Case for College” (speech, Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Dallas, TX, October 24, 2014), http://www.harvard.edu/president/speech/2014/case-for-college.

24 Ibid.

25 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006).

26 Voltaire, Essai sure les mœurs et l'esprit des nations, vol. 16 of Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: L'Imprimerie de la Société Littéraire-Typographique, 1784), 241, cited in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv.

27 Plante, Thomas G., “Get Rich U or Get Transformed U: Reflections on Catholic Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century,” Integritas 2, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 1–13Google Scholar. See also James L. Heft, ed., Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

28 Plante, “Get Rich U or Get Transformed U,” 11.

29 On this point, Plante reflects echoes remarks made by the former Jesuit superior general Peter-Hans Kolvenbach in an address in 2000 to the Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States gathered at the University of Santa Clara: “All American universities, ours included, are under tremendous pressure to opt entirely for success in this [professional] sense. But what our students want—and deserve—includes but transcends this ‘worldly success’ based on marketable skills. The real measure of our Jesuit universities lies in who our students become” (http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Kolvenbach/Kolvenbach-SantaClara.pdf).

30 “The CIRP Freshman Survey,” Higher Education Research Institute, http://www.heri.ucla.edu/cirpoverview.php.

31 Plante, “Get Rich U or Get Transformed U,” 3.

32 See, for example, Isaiah 56:7, Ezekiel 45:6, Zechariah 14:17–19, Revelation 3:12, and 21:2.

33 Plante, “Get Rich U or Get Transformed U,” 3.

34 Ibid., 4–5.

35 Kenneth Garcia, Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Cf. John Haughey, Where Is Knowing Going? The Horizons of the Knowing Subject (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009); Michael Buckley, The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998).

36 Garcia, Academic Freedom, x.

37 Ibid.

38 Marion, Jean-Luc, “The Universality of the University,” Communio 40 (Spring 2013): 64–75, at 65Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., 70.

40 Garcia, Academic Freedom, 36.

41 Muller, Steven, “Universities Are Turning Out Highly Skilled Barbarians,” US News and World Report, November 10, 1980, 57Google Scholar; cited in Buckley, The Catholic University, xviii.

42 Haughey, Where Is Knowing Going? xiii. Compare Michael Buckley's analysis of the outmoded distinction between sacred and secular, revelation and reason, which he describes as arising “from a heritage of the neo-scholastic misunderstanding and miscasting of the relationship between nature and grace.” Buckley, “The Catholic University and the Promise Inherent in Its Identity,” in Catholic Universities in Church and Society: A Dialogue on “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” ed. John P. Langan, SJ (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1993), 80; quoted in Garcia, Academic Freedom, 140.

43 I am intrigued by Garcia's suggestion that Catholic universities must embrace a new model of academic freedom, which he describes as “the freedom to follow the mind's telos toward an ultimate horizon and the freedom to prescind from going there” (Garcia, Academic Freedom, 149), but wonder what such an embrace might mean in the university's policies both ad intra and ad extra.

44 For a history of the core curriculum in Catholic universities in the United States, see Quigley, David, “The Making of the Modern Core: Some Reflections on the History of the Liberal Arts in Catholic Higher Education in the United States,” Integritas 2, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 1–13Google Scholar.

45 On friendship at the heart of inquiry in the Catholic tradition, see Díaz, Marian, “Friendship and Contemplation: An Exploration of Two Forces Propelling the Transcendent Hope and Power of the Liberal Arts,” Integritas 2, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 1–18Google Scholar.

46 Bernard Lonergan, Insight; Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); see also his “The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World,” in Collection, University of Toronto Press, 1993, 108–13. See also R. J. Snell and Steven D. Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism: Love, Sin, and Grace in the Christian University (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013).

47 Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si’ offers one example of the need for such cooperative work among scholars, students, pastors, and others at a university. Writing of the challenges of solving the ecological crisis, he states: “Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.” Pope Francis, Encyclical, Laudato Si’, May 24, 2015, §111, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

48 Snell and Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism, 176.

49 Beck, Ulrich, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theology, Culture and Society 19 (April 2002): 17–44,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 18.

50 Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006), 89.

51 On discernment, see Timothy Gallagher, Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide to Everyday Living (New York: Crossroad, 2005); Dean Brackley, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times (New York: Crossroad, 2004).

52 Heft, Believing Scholars, offers reflections from prominent scholars on how faith has influenced their academic work.

53 John Haughey, In Search of the Whole (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011) is a collection of essays by scholars describing their vocational call to academic life, and the dynamism toward wholeness they have found in their questions.

54 John J. Piderit, SJ, and Melanie M. Morey, Teaching the Tradition: Catholic Themes in Academic Disciplines (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

55 Garcia, Academic Freedom, chap. 8.

56 John Richard Wilcox, with Jennifer Anne Lindholm and Suzanne Dale Wilcox, Revisioning Mission: The Future of Catholic Higher Education (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013).

57 See http://www.bc.edu/offices/intersections.html and http://www.bc.edu/offices/intersections/common_room.html.

58 James Keenan, “Coming Home: Ethics and the American University,” Theological Studies 75, no. 1 (2014): 156–69. Keenan's article is expanded in his book University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

59 Keenan, “Coming Home,” 158.

60 See a description of the Roundtable, and its accompanying journal Integritas, at http://www.bc.edu/offices/fopa/Bostoncollegeroundtable.html. A qualitative research study on the effectiveness of the Roundtable can be found in Integritas 5 (Fall 2015)Google Scholar, yet unpublished as of this writing.

61 See www.bc.edu/integritas.

62 “A university is a reproductive organ of cultural community. Its constitutive endowment lies not in buildings or equipment, civil status or revenues, but in the intellectual life of its professors. Its central function is the communication of intellectual development,” Lonergan, “The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World,” 111.

63 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 106, 126, 180–81; cited in Liddy, Richard M., “Lonergan on the Catholic University,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 7, no. 2 (October 1989): 116–31Google Scholar.

64 Cf. Liddy's comment on the “stand” of a Catholic university: “In order to do its job of presenting some comprehensive viewpoint, it has to take a critical stand vis-à-vis the culture in which it exists. For not to take a stand is to take a stand. Not to take a stand is to say that everything goes: everything is equally meaningful and valuable.” Liddy, “Lonergan on the Catholic University,” 130.

65 One of the most slippery terms in academia is the word “prestigious,” particularly in the context of mission-related questions. The very idea of prestige strikes me as bound up in a naïve cosmopolitanism, particularly in light of Saint Paul's observation that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God” (1 Cor 3:19).

66 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education, edited by Robert M. Doran and Frederick E. Crowe (University of Toronto Press, 1993), 206.

67 See, for examples, Díaz, Marian K., “Friendship and Contemplation: An Exploration of Two Forces Propelling the Transcendent Hope and Power of the Liberal Arts,” Integritas 2.2 (Fall 2013), 1–18Google Scholar; Werpehowski, William, “A School of Non-Violence: Resources and Reflections,” Integritas 4.1 (Fall 2014), 1–15Google Scholar; Miller, Amata, IHM, “Ending Extreme Poverty: The Call from Catholic Social Thought” Integritas 4.3 (Fall 2014), 1–30Google Scholar.