"Jesuit Scholarship in a Post-Modern Age"
On June 2-3 1991 a group of 25 Jesuits gathered at Boston College to discuss issues relating to contemporary Jesuit scholarship. At the meeting, 15 were from the Boston College community, while the remaining 10 came from places as near as Weston School of Theology and Boston University and as far away as JSTB and Loyola, New Orleans. All present were committed to scholarship, engaged in research and writing as well as teaching, and interested in defining the future of the Jesuit intellectual apostolate.
We have three aims in what follows: to summarize, in an inevitably incomplete fashion, our meeting of June 2-3, 1991; to provide a common point of reflection for all of us, as we, as individuals and a group, recollect and seek to understand that complex series of discussions, which included many voices and which is inevitably remembered by each of us in his own way; to serve as the basis for a further exchange of ideas among us during the coming year, in the extended reflection which alone can be the true follow-up to the meeting. Before addressing these issues we present the background that led up to the meeting.
Background
In September 1990, two of us formulated a statement describing what we perceived to be the current situation of Jesuit scholarship, and seeking to initiate a new conversation taking that situation into account. We circulated the statement to the ten Provincials and higher education Rectors of the Assistancy with the request that they pass it on to potentially interested Jesuits in their communities. In that letter we attempted to describe major features of Jesuit intellectual work today, and put forth in particular two premises which we believe characterize the new features of today's situation.
First, we suggested we work increasingly within a post-separate incorporation context, in which the memories of the older modes of Jesuit control are increasing distant and faded. These post-separate incorporation colleges and universities have goals which only partially intersect with those of the Society of Jesus, and which can no longer provide a complete context for our work as Jesuit scholars. Placement at one of our institutions is no longer a sufficient rationale for getting a PhD and committing oneself to a life of scholarship.
Second, the contemporary dynamic of intellectual work in the USA is centrifugal, as different disciplines naturally pull scholars in different directions, and as broad disciplines, such as theology or philosophy, require within their scope further degrees of specialization such that a community of discourse can no longer be presumed. The increasingly pluralistic milieu of new knowledges can be a threatening one, fragmenting received and presumed ways of knowing; but it is also a highly creative situation in which the most interesting work is being done by those who step across their disciplinary boundaries and imagine new connections and possibilities.
In our letter we argued that the new institutional and professional environment prevents Jesuit scholars from conceiving in traditional ways of their work as cooperative ventures, and leaves us in need of a new way of constructing relationships among themselves, not in a vain pursuit of an escape from the solitude of scholarship, but in the hope of articulating how scholarly work is an apostolate shared by Jesuits and not the private domain of each individual Jesuit. We believe that something more is needed, a bond which unites Jesuit scholars in their diaspora and which provides a practical framework within which potential Jesuit scholars can discover and commit themselves to a distinctively Jesuit intellectual work.
In order to explore these ideas a number of us engaged in a series of conversations throughout the school year examining some of the specific problems arising from our areas of research and their implications for the issues mentioned above. Topics included modern physics, ancient Hinduism, Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum on Aristotle, and the construction (sic.) of a theology of spiritual direction.
The June 2-3 Meeting
The intent of June meeting was to advance the discussion which had been under way at BC, with the presence and input of those who had responded to our September 1990 proposal. Following a practice which had proved useful during the year, we focused on three questions:
1) What is the key problematic that defines one of your current intellectual projects, and provides it with its real energy?These questions directed our attention to the particularities of our areas of research and writing; they helped make explicit the motivations and energies within that scholarship, giving it a new effectiveness by the very fact of our articulating it for one another and, implicitly, to call those of us present to decide if a group so specifically focused was truly a group of which we wished to be a part.
2) How did you come to articulate this problematic, and where is it most clearly operative in your current practices as a scholar?
3) Do you see ways in which this problematic engages the primary directions operative in the Society today, or suggests new directions?
Frank Clooney's opening presentation on Sunday evening, June 2, was a progress report on the conversations that had taken place so far at BC during 1990-91, and the manner in which they had developed ideas from the 1990 document and introduced other themes and questions. That presentation included these themes: the 1990s provide us with a vulnerable and creative moment, marked by the transformation and, to a large extent, diminishment of our commitments to and responsibility for certain institutions of higher education; there is an array of new, productive and perhaps destabilizing questions being heard in our culture, which call into question our accustomed stories about ourselves as Christians, Jesuits, scholars; a very important resource for our response lies in the particular areas of research we have committed ourselves to, the potential of which, however, has been diminished by a range of factors inside and outside the Society. Our discussion that evening developed some of these points, attacked some, and introduced other questions and perspectives, all of which contributed, again, to our effort to define the project in which we are at least for the moment together engaged.
Monday morning was devoted to presentations by Ron Anderson, Bill Richardson, Joe Appleyard, and Arthur Madigan on aspects of their current work and issues they saw that work as raising. By lunchtime most of us shared, it seems, the conviction that the morning was a bit too crowded (a true embarrassment of riches), that the presentations succeeded in being specific enough that listening was a demanding and active task, and that each in its own way and out of its specificity provoked us to push forward in questioning how and what we think and write about as Jesuit scholars. Tom Regan's prepared-on-the-spot response brought to our attention the tension between the telling of our stories and the challenges posed by our presumption of rationality, the required transition from intellectual hubris to humility and vulnerability, and the valuable nature of the anomalies which annoyingly surface in our work, our community lives, our discussions.
The afternoon discussion was by design unstructured, except insofar as the input of newcomers as to their work and its energies was particularly welcomed; on the whole, the discussion allowed a further exploration of the issues of the morning session. Points raised included:
1) Where do we stand on the foundationalist-antifoundationalist issue?By the end of the afternoon session we were able to recognize that we had spent a significant amount of time talking to one another about things that often are left unspoken, that the project as a whole is an important and even urgent one - and that more remains to be articulated and accomplished than had been achieved. Some felt that we had wandered too far, and missed the opportunity to draw conclusions, define ourselves, and either conclude our project or move on to a single next task or set of tasks. Others felt that it was important to resist the temptation to formalize our thinking through the statement of conclusions and an organization, in order to extend the period in which we lay open before ourselves the series of questions that need to be addressed. Indeed, most recognized as a very positive feature of the day the very fact that these questions were raised and taken seriously, and that we had been able to come together to respond to them.
2) Who are we talking to, and with, in our research?
3) What is the nature of a legitimate apologetics in the current intellectual scene?
4) How do particular paradigms have the importance and power to give significance to certain questions and concerns?
5) Are there particular qualities that mark the pursuit of the academic life by Jesuits?
6) How do our various academic settings - small and large universities and colleges, seminaries, non-Jesuit schools - influence the way in which we do our work and think about the problems related it?
We were also left with a clearer though largely implicit sense of who belongs in this discussion, and who needs to be drawn into it; for it was also clear that some felt the urgency of the topic more deeply than others, and that it would in any case be improbable that all would wish to pursue it in the same fashion. It was noted, too, that the line between "us" and the "world" - or "modernity" or "post-modernity" or "our colleagues who are not Jesuits or who are not believers" - is marked differently by different members of our group, and that the questions posed by the contemporary world are noticed, and appropriated in various ways: some of us have questions we need to pose to society, bridges to build, while others have questions for the Society and for the way we Jesuits are accustomed to think.
The day concluded with a Eucharist and enjoyable dinner.
Conclusions and looking ahead
Where do we go from here? This report is itself the next common step, meant to accompany, we expect, our own summer reflections on the meeting. As noted, our desire to protect the newly developing conversation from premature consolidation precluded decisions at the meeting's end as to formal structures. At the moment we are reluctant to institute new structures, build a national organization, accept membership, call an annual meeting; we believe that small and large institutions readily strive to perpetuate themselves, expend great energy to that end, and may confuse that survival with a successful accomplishment of original goals; we believe too that most important analysis and debate must occur on the local level and that our common discussions must be complemented by discussions in the specific places in which we do our work. We hope to learn more of such discussions around the country and even abroad.
Therefore, while further meetings may result from this project, at this moment we are more interested in further conversation through shared memos, phone calls, local meetings and initiatives. To encourage such further conversation, in conclusion we first highlight four key components of our project at its current stage, and we then conclude with two requests.
1. There is a problem. As mentioned, we believe that neither our higher education institutions nor individual disciplinary commitments comprise fully coherent frameworks within which we can articulate our intellectual commitment as Jesuit scholars; we believe too that this situation has not been adequately discussed by Jesuits, and that a major part of our current contribution is to help make it a topic of ongoing, public discussion.Our two requests are these. First, this report needs your responses, further reflections on the meeting, your questions - be they rephrased, newly emphasized or newly discovered - and your suggestions about what we ought to do next. We ask you to put such comments into writing, to send them to us, and we will circulate them to the entire group - in hopes of further reactions and therefore gradual clarification of our direction. So please do write to us, and sooner rather than later!
2. We wish to privilege particularity. We seek to proceed by engaging in a conversation which is strategically unhomogenized, generated from and textured with the particularities of our disciplines, designedly interrupted and slowed by the accumulated but often still unnoticed body of knowledges possessed by Jesuit scholars today. Discussion of our particular disciplines is therefore not merely a starting point, and will not be replaced later on by a generic discussion of the "scholarly apostolate," etc.
3. We wish to affect the Society's discourse about itself. We are committed to a critique of the Society's own writings, its pronouncements and documents about the intellectual apostolate, especially those written directly by Jesuits on the provincial, assistancy and international levels, but also those composed on university campuses as representative of Jesuit and Ignatian thought. We wish to apply to these the same skills we apply to texts in our disciplines, with the goal of creating within the Society itself an extended and unrestricted debate on intellectual issues and our self-presentation regarding them.
4. We wish to create a Jesuit intellectual apostolate. We therefore intend to identify, and so help bring into existence (or, in deference to those who prefer to insist that there are precedents, to retrieve) an identifiable and clearly delineated intellectual apostolate for the contemporary Society, one that is irreducible to institutional commitments and areas of professional and disciplinary expertise, proceeds in particularity and, while accepting the Society's current commitments and ways of proceeding, approaches these in terms of the internal dynamics and particular demands of contemporary scholarship.
Second, though our group constitutes only a particular grouping of Jesuits, we are very much interested in including every Jesuit who would be truly interested in what we are doing. We have appended a list of those who are at present involved in our discussion, including those who have not been able to attend either the June meeting or the earlier, local meetings at BC. If you know of someone who should be on the list who isn't, let us know.
Ronald Anderson, S.J.
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
August 15, 1991
![[*]](/JSPMA/back.gif){kind=small}
Return to the Jesuit Scholarship in a Post Modern Age homepage