This past October, hundreds of Boston College students walked out of class in protest following a pair of racist incidents on campus. The students converged in front of Lyons Hall, the university's administrative home, chanting: “No justice, no peace, no racism at BC!” and “Black lives matter!” Students also shared their stories of discrimination and racism, often as experiences of racial and homophobic slurs. One student remarked, “It [racism] starts from the top. BC has failed not only its black students but its LGBT students, and white students also.”Footnote 1 The rally, organized by Eradicate Boston College Racism, mirrors burgeoning student discontent over racial discord on campuses across the country.Footnote 2 Students at nearly eighty schools nationwide have submitted lists of their demands to university administration.Footnote 3 This sweeping movement indicates a widespread breakdown of interpersonal relations constituting higher education.Footnote 4 The wave of political action on campuses reflects the failure of dialogue and the intractable divisiveness marking the public square at large.
The university is a constellation of interpersonal relationships. It is an intellectual and political organon. Meaning emerges within the context of intersubjectivity, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty indicates: “perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other.”Footnote 5 The mission of Catholic education grounds the university's interpersonal situation in the person of Christ. In his apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II states:
A Catholic University pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. . . . As a result of this inspiration, the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons; in turn, everyone in the community helps in promoting unity, and each one, according to his or her role and capacity, contributes towards decisions which affect the community, and also towards maintaining and strengthening the distinctive Catholic character of the Institution.Footnote 6
The fracture of community at a Catholic university therefore strikes at the heart of its mission. The sharp divisions marking the campus green and the public square in our time obligate Catholic higher education to initiate practices of healing as an expression of the university's distinct identity.
This article enters into an already vibrant discussion about the mission and identity of Catholic higher education today.Footnote 7 While philosophical and theological frameworks abound, such appeals—on their own—are unlikely to speak meaningfully to the critical mass of teachers and scholars in Catholic higher education, who don't have a “feel” for a theologically grounded vision of education.Footnote 8 Most of the dominant academics in Catholic colleges and universities today have themselves been educated in a desacralized culture and society in which the academic vocation enshrines the Weberian ideal of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”Footnote 9 Through no fault of their own, perhaps, academics in the main would find Michael Buckley's axiom bewildering: “The fundamental proposition that grounds the Catholic university is that the academic and the religious are intrinsically related, that they form an inherent unity, that one is incomplete without the other.”Footnote 10 John Haughey's Lonergan-inspired approach to Catholic higher education in Where Is Knowing Going? stands out in its attention to the foundational role of cognitional theory or what R. J. Snell and Steven Cone have called “noetic exegesis” in their account of the Christian university in Authentic Cosmopolitanism.Footnote 11 These works confront the contemporary challenge of articulating a sacred vision of education that is accessible to educators formed in a desacralized world.
Strikingly neglected in the burgeoning field of university mission and identity scholarship is the contribution of pedagogy as a set of concrete teaching practices. Pedagogy cuts across the variegated intellectual, moral, and religious life of a Catholic university. Teaching-learning events occur in residence halls, on the playing fields, and within the chapel walls—in addition to in the classroom. Pedagogy is a shared activity linking educators operating out of religious and nonreligious horizons. Catholic universities, in particular, trumpet an education of the whole person and should have a heightened concern for teaching. At the popular level, the discussion of identity is commonly reduced to a litmus test on select controversial issues as criteria of Catholicity (e.g., performance of The Vagina Monologues, availability of contraception, pro-choice speakers). This approach hacks at the branches rather than striking at the roots. The Catholic university is distinct as an ongoing conversation of meanings and values throughout history in the mode of reason informed by faith. Pedagogy is not merely a series of teaching techniques; it is also a quality of conversation governing the unique contribution of Catholic higher education. These two expressions of pedagogy mutually irrigate each other. The ordering and health of interpersonal relationships on campus profoundly inform the quality of the conversation. The interpersonal situation links the individual with the political. In fact, this “hidden curriculum” can have greater formative influence than the advertised curriculum. Parker Palmer remarks: “In a thousand ways, the relationships of the academic community form the hearts and minds of students, shaping their sense and relation to the world.”Footnote 12 The impact of meaningful relationships tends to persist in the lives of students long after course content has faded from memory. In sum, pedagogy is fertile ground for more effectively communicating a vision of Catholic higher education today.
This article proposes a pedagogy of caritas as a promising resource for a vision of Catholic education in our divided time. This argument unfolds in three parts: first, I outline Thomas Groome's shared Christian praxis pedagogy. Second, I consider how this approach may be considered a pedagogy of charity or friendship with God. Third, I suggest, with Bernard Lonergan's incisive aid, the relevance of this pedagogy for Catholic higher education today. By illuminating the inherent relationship of friendship, conversation, and transformation, a pedagogy of caritas builds upon the proposal of Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc in The Heart of Higher Education. Footnote 13 The authors argue for educational renewal emerging from new interpersonal relations and collegial conversations in the academy. I reclaim a theological understanding of friendship as particularly urgent in light of deepening divides on the campuses of Catholic colleges and universities. While the causes of division are myriad, this article highlights two chief instigators: the hyperindividualization of higher education's commodification and higher education's inadequate responses to its increasingly diverse demographics. A pedagogy of caritas creates the conditions for the possibility of ongoing intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. It is a spiritual exercise oriented toward self-transcendence.Footnote 14 Because interpersonal failure in the academy is not merely intellectual, this integral pedagogical approach strikes at the root of rupture within the university community. A pedagogy of friendship provides a heretofore unused resource in Catholic higher education's continual quest to more genuinely realize its mission in our fragmented world.
I. Shared Christian Praxis
Thomas Groome's shared Christian praxis approach is among the foremost contributions to the field of religious education in the past forty years.Footnote 15 It is revolutionary as a genuinely interdisciplinary approach that integrates seminal insights from the fields of education, philosophy, and theology. Groome summarizes shared Christian praxis as “a participative and dialogical pedagogy in which people reflect critically on their own historical agency in time and place and on their sociocultural reality, have access together to Christian Story/Vision, and personally appropriate it in community with the creative intent of renewed praxis in Christian faith toward God's reign for all creation.”Footnote 16 Shared Christian praxis has been implemented by religious educators around the globe in a myriad of social and cultural contexts. Groome's Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry is recognized as a modern classic in the field.Footnote 17
Groome highlights the innate relationship between an educator's anthropology and pedagogy: “Anthropology is the horizon that shapes every curriculum choice, the goal that evaluates all the means taken, the hope that permeates the entire enterprise. Educators’ operative anthropology is likely the greatest influence on how they fulfill their teaching vocation.”Footnote 18 For example, John Dewey understood learners as active participants, and his concern for community and societal transformation expressed itself in education as democracy.Footnote 19 His pedagogy calls attention to the primacy and quality of experience in education. He remarked, “The educator cannot start with knowledge already organized and proceed to ladle it out in doses.”Footnote 20 Maria Montessori emphasized the bodily dimension of human existence through an approach that engages the corporality of child learners. Her pedagogy invites learners through a process of self-discovery by means of sensory and tactile encounter with objects in play.Footnote 21 Brazilian educator Paulo Freire leveled a prophetic critique of “banking education,” which treats students as passive receivers of a “deposit” of information, because he held an anthropology in which learners are “agents-subjects” who can make history.Footnote 22 Educating for “conscientization” means employing a pedagogy that invites learners, particularly the oppressed, to take possession of their agency and bend history toward justice.
Groome advocates an anthropology that understands people as “agent-subjects-in relation” created “to live in ‘right relationship’ with self and others, with society and creation, and with their God.”Footnote 23 His “Pedagogical Creed” summarizes his anthropology as it relates to pedagogy in three central tenets.Footnote 24 The first principle is that persons are ‘“agent-subjects-in-relationship’ who reflect the image of God by whose self-communication they have their very ‘being.’” Pedagogy should therefore help participants to realize this understanding by educating people to be “free and responsible historical agents of their own becoming ‘fully alive’ to the glory of God.” The second anthropological conviction is that persons are “communal beings who are to grow in right and loving relationship with God, self, others, and creation.” Hence, “pedagogy should honor and help realize the conviction that at the heart of us there is a transcendent disposition that leads us out of ourselves and into relationship and interdependence; that ultimately our reach for relationship is to return us to eternal union with the relational (Trinity) whence we came.” The third premise is that persons are “capable of and prone to sin and … by God's grace, of freely choosing to do the good and true and of contributing within history to the coming of God's reign.” Thus, pedagogy should encourage a critical awareness of personal and social sin, and help develop habits that result in prophetic work of resisting evil and healing the world's brokenness with goodness.Footnote 25
Shared Christian praxis implements a “praxis to theory to (renewed) praxis” approach. Aristotle distinguished between three ways of knowing: theoria, praxis, and poiesis. Episteme, phronesis, and techne are their corresponding forms of knowledge.Footnote 26 This distinction reflects roughly what we might refer to as theoretical, practical, and artistic ways of knowing, with their outcomes being scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, and the knowledge to craft services or things. While Aristotle differentiated the three without the intention of separation, the distinctions subsequently evolved in Western thought into three divisions of largely unrelated enterprises, with theory exalted above the other two subordinates.Footnote 27 Postmodernity has attempted to topple this hierarchy. For example, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida deconstruct the totalitizing effects of “logocentrism” out of an ethical concern for the “other.” Levinas emphasizes alterity as defining interpersonal encounter, while Derrida champions hospitality as a destabilizing protest in the face of ahistorical and totalitarian forms of rationality.Footnote 28
Groome proposes a contemporary understanding of praxis that subsumes both theoria and poiesis and thus promotes episteme, phronesis, and techne in a “historically grounded and holistic epistemology.”Footnote 29 He reads Aristotle's praxis as a unity of reflection and action regarding life in the world. In fact, he understands a prioritization of praxis in Aristotle inasmuch as the philosopher continually insists that all knowing begins from the data of the senses and then, reflected upon, heads toward judgment and decision. Phronesis is a “wisdom way of knowing” that intends practice toward the good. Regarding shared Christian praxis, Groome states: “Praxis as the defining term of this pedagogical approach refers to the consciousness and agency that arise from and are expressed in any and every aspect of people's ‘being’ as agent-subjects-in-relationship, whether realized in actions that are personal, interpersonal, sociopolitical, or cosmic.”Footnote 30 Groome's use of praxis can be viewed and pedagogically engaged from active, reflective, and creative aspects, thus combining the meanings that Aristotle assigned to three distinct ways of knowing. A praxis epistemology suggests a holistic way of knowing that is theoretical, practical, and productive; it seeks truth, wisdom, and service.
“Conation” is the guiding educational outcome of shared Christian praxis. Conation, and its approximate synonym “wisdom,” enlarge pedagogy beyond the goal of knowledge typically meant by cognition. Education for conation captures “the holistic intent of knowing/desiring/doing that engages and shapes the whole ‘being’ of people as agent-subjects in the world.”Footnote 31 Pedagogy for conation in Christian faith sets the conditions for the possibility of ongoing intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. Bernard Lonergan's threefold description of conversion readily correlates to Groome's notion of conative truth.Footnote 32 In light of this outcome, shared Christian praxis is organized around a focusing activity and five movements.
The Focusing Activity and Five Movements
The focusing activity aims to engage people's interest and prepare them for active participation in the teaching-learning event. It intends to center a shared conversation on a generative theme. The “generative theme,” a term borrowed from Freire, is a concern of present praxis that invites participants to active engagement because of its meaningful import in their lives. An example of a generative theme is “friendship in our digital age.” The generative theme established in the focusing activity typically organizes the teaching-learning event throughout and is echoed in the subsequent five movements. There are a multitude of ways the focusing activity can be carried out, and it need not occur within the classroom setting. For example, service and immersion experiences may serve as a focusing activity inasmuch as they are integrated into the classroom in an intentionally pedagogical way. The focusing activity is grounded in the theological convictions that God continues to reveal Godself in history through ordinary daily life events, and that we can actively encounter and recognize God's self-communication by reflecting upon present action in the world.Footnote 33 Given the generative theme of friendship in our digital age, viewing Eric Pickersgill's “Removed” photography is an example of a focusing activity.Footnote 34 The haunting black-and-white images capture daily, mundane situations with cell phones erased from the possession of individuals in the scene. The resulting photographs eerily objectify the attention that small screens divert away from the immediate presence of others.
In Movement 1 (M1), the educator encourages participants to express themselves around the generative theme as they encounter it in their personal lives. The expression of present praxis may be mediated verbally, textually, dramatically, aesthetically, or by other modes of communication. The dynamic of this movement is a question or questioning activity that invites participants to “name” or express the generative theme as present in their lives. For example, “What is the role of digital technology in initiating and sustaining friendships?” Smaller conversations may help to clarify a participant's response to M1 questioning before entering into the larger conversation.
The intent of Movement 2 is to invite participants to reflect critically on their praxis as they described it in M1, and share this critical reflection in conversation as a community. Depending on the theme, critical reflection can engage reason, memory, imagination, or a combination of them. Such reflection is both personal and sociocultural. The invitation is not only to express a theme of present praxis but also to have participants critically examine their own interpretations of it. For example, “Do our virtual identities support or hinder the flourishing of authentic friendship in our lives?” The dynamic of this movement is to evoke critical and creative reflection so that participants can discern and understand “what's going on” in their lives as it regards the generative theme. The objective of this movement is that participants articulate their story and vision as an entryway into the Christian story and vision.
The pedagogical task of Movement 3 is to offer a “discerning hermeneutic” of the Christian story and vision as it intersects the lives of the participants. Groome comments: “I reiterate that the Story and Vision are to be made present in a persuasive way and as meaningful to participants. The Faith should connect with their souls, make sense to their minds, ring true to their experience, and be an enticing way to make meaning out of life.”Footnote 35 The educator discerns both what to make accessible and how to communicate it. For example, the story of the woman anointing Christ at Bethany (Mark 14:3-9) illuminates the role of undivided attentiveness and empathy in caring relationships. By preparing Christ's body for burial in advance of his arrest and crucifixion, she identified with his path to the cross and shared in his suffering ahead. Her empathy contrasts those who question the wastefulness of her actions (vv. 4-5). In fact, her act of friendship expresses a kernel of the gospel. Christ exhorts, “And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (v. 9, RSV). A lectio divina engagement with the story invites participants to exercise sustained attention with the text. Attentiveness and empathy are requisite virtues for authentic friendship. The Christian story is often enriched through dialogue and collaboration with other religious traditions by recognizing the “truth and grace” found in non-Christian mediations of meaning.Footnote 36 Following Gadamer's critique of the “prejudice against prejudice,” this movement invites educators to be aware of the pre-understandings they inevitably bring to the interpretive act and be mindful that all human knowledge is finite and historically situated.Footnote 37 Hermeneutics is at stake throughout shared Christian praxis, but its role is made explicit in M3. There is no shortage of historical evidence demonstrating distorted interpretations that underwrite racism, severe economic inequality, anti-Semitism, sexism, and patriarchy. All heighten the responsibility of the educator in presenting the Christian story and vision in a way that invites critical appropriation.
Groome proposes a hermeneutics of retrieval, suspicion, and creative commitment to aid educators in their interpretive task.Footnote 38 A hermeneutics of retrieval draws upon church resources, including the official church magisterium, the research of biblical, historical, and theological scholars, and the sensus fidelium. Regarding the sense of the faithful, liberation theologians have claimed a “hermeneutical privilege” of communities actively engaged in works of peace and justice that help bring about the reign of God in history. A hermeneutics of suspicion interrogates distortions that have become commonplace in accepted interpretations, and examines the possible errors in the educator's own interpretations. Johann Baptist Metz's use of “dangerous memories” highlights the positive exercise of suspicion in recovering the prophetic-mystical dimension of Christian faith that calls the faithful to ongoing conversion and social transformation.Footnote 39 A hermeneutics of creative commitment calls forth new interpretations beyond the present dominant understandings of the Christian story and vision. The “constructive” act of hermeneutics recognizes that the Holy Spirit continues to inspire the development of tradition throughout history; the Christian community continuously pilgrims “towards the fullness of divine truth.”Footnote 40
Movement 4 intends for people to make judgments for themselves regarding the truth, wisdom, and services of the Christian faith as it implicates their lives. The dynamic of this movement invites participants to place their own story and vision in dialectic encounter with the Christian story and vision. Here the pedagogical key is to encourage participants to discern how these two sources, Christian faith and their lives, mutually mediate one another. For example, “How does the loving display of empathy by the woman at Bethany serve as a foil to our digitally distracted interpersonal interactions?” M4 questions seek to articulate how understandings have shifted or broadened because of the dialectic encounter. Educators may raise questions that prompt participants’ thoughts, feelings, and sense of how they can respond to the wisdom made accessible to them.
Participants are invited in Movement 5 to choose and decide how they might live in response to their dialectical encounter with the Christian story and vision. The decisions may be cognitive, affective, or behavioral. Likewise, they may be made individually or communally. As with the previous movements, M5 takes the form of an invitation that respects the freedom and personal journey in faith of all participants. This is a “takeaway” movement that capitalizes the momentum of the previous movement's encounter and judgment with a summons to action at the level of the participants’ developmental and existential readiness. “What have you learned today, and how might it influence your life?” is a standard question for reflection and conversation at M5. Shared conversation often inspires others toward decision making. Concluding the example above is the question “What practices enable you to be more undividedly present to your friends in our digital age?” The practical intent of decision is not merely what to do but who to become.Footnote 41
Shared Christian praxis is not a lockstep process. While there is an obvious logic to the order of sequencing from one movement to the next, flexibility and adaptability abound as the pedagogical dynamics play out in real time. These five movements regularly recur, move forward and backward, and there is no necessity to run through all five movements in any given teaching-learning event. Shared Christian praxis is a “way” rather than a rigid educational blueprint. Groome explains: “Shared Christian praxis should not be reduced to the mechanics of the movements; it is more essentially a style of human encounter that honors and engages people as historical agent-subjects in partnership and dialogue about their lives in the world.”Footnote 42 The five movements of shared Christian praxis intend to inspire commitments in the lives of all those who participate in the teaching-learning event. This approach tends to rise and fall on the questions and questioning activity throughout the process of implementing its pedagogy. Similar to the spiritual pedagogy of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, shared Christian praxis welcomes questions as friends in an ongoing search to more deeply understand and commit to the gift of faith. In light of this brief outline of shared Christian praxis as comprised of a focusing activity and five moments, I now expound upon this approach as “pedagogy of friendship.”
II. Shared Christian Praxis as Pedagogy of Caritas
The first two movements leading participants to a critical appropriation of their present praxis may be understood in terms of the primary friendship with the self that Aristotle argues is the foundation of our friendship with others. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between self-love and self-interest. Self-love as friendship with the self is justified on the grounds that virtue emanates from the way that we relate to ourselves.
For they say that a man should love his best friend most. But a man's best friend is the one who not only wishes him well but wishes it for his own sake (even though nobody will ever know it): and this condition is best fulfilled by his attitude towards himself—and similarly with all the other attributes that go to define a friend. For we have said before that all friendly feelings for others are extensions of a man's feelings for himself.Footnote 43
The gospel echoes the link between self-love and loving others: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31; Matt 22:39). Movements 1 and 2 of shared Christian praxis invite participants to exercise self-friendship by initiating a dialogue with the self regarding the generative theme in present praxis. Undoubtedly, this interior conversation is often clarified through “friendly” conversation with others. Sharing in pairs, following time to think alone, is an often fruitful exercise during the first two movements.
Friendship with self exercised in critically appropriating present praxis readies participants to enact a dialectical hermeneutical encounter with the Christian story and vision in Movement 3. Friendship is an apt analogy to describe this encounter between the subject-agent and the text or source. Groome's use of the Hegelian dialectic emphasizes our “being-in-relationship” without the expectation that the second movement of the dialectic is necessarily negative.Footnote 44 Movement 3 hermeneutics include an aspect of affirming or accepting; an aspect of questioning and possibly refusing; and a “moving beyond” that sublates the first two as the participant is transformed because of the encounter. The nature of questioning at this stage of the teaching-learning dynamic invites participants to articulate how their understanding has been impacted because of the dialectical interaction and to arrive at a judgment in accordance with that transcending understanding.
That acceptance or generosity leads the hermeneutical encounter in Movement 3 is critical to Groome's pedagogy of friendship. Aristotle understands friendship as mutual relations of benevolence motivated by concern for the other's good. “But in the case of a friend they say that one ought to wish him good for his own sake.”Footnote 45 The spiritual pedagogy of the Summa reminds educators that the Christian hermeneutical habitus is to presume the best in one's interlocutor. Aquinas employed the Scholastic medieval culture of the disputed question (quaestio disputata). He graciously welcomed his objectors in genuine conversation, because he was grateful that they helped him understand his position more clearly. That he takes great care to address the concern of each objector in turn following his respondio demonstrates well-wishing for his conversation partners. Such well-wishing builds upon Augustine's hermeneutics of love in De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Education) whereby the double love commandment is applied to the interpretation of Scripture. Augustine argues that the hermeneutical metacriterion is whether the interpretation builds up charity in the world.Footnote 46 Friendship well-wishing frames the “Presupposition” to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola:
In order that both he who is giving the Spiritual Exercises, and he who is receiving them, may more help and benefit themselves, let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to save his neighbor's proposition than to condemn it. If he cannot save it, let him inquire how he means it; and if he means it badly, let him correct him with charity. If that is not enough, let him seek all the suitable means to bring him to mean it well, and save himself.Footnote 47
Friendship includes Movement 4 judgment, but that judgment is based in charity following patient attentiveness and empathetic understanding. As is empirically verified by examining the contents of our own friendships, beginning with John Henry Newman's consent rather than Cartesian doubt leads to richer and deeper understandings of our interlocutors. This is not an abnegation of criticism or suspicion. On the contrary, criticism is all the more compelling when it occurs following generosity based in attentiveness and understanding rather than when suspicion is the native stance of the relationship. Aquinas describes “fraternal correction” as an effect of charity, but that judgment is exercised after a prayerful examination intended to purify the rebuker's motives.Footnote 48 Critique is an expression of well-wishing when carried out in humility born from the self-awareness of one's own shortcomings and biases. The practice of encounter in friendship expresses the exigency of Movement 4. Encounter is “meeting persons, appreciating the values they represent, criticizing their defects, and allowing one's living to be challenged at its very roots by their words and by their deeds.”Footnote 49 Charity-enlivened conversation is not confrontation averse. Presuming the best is completely compatible with the candid exchange and fraternal correction made possible from trust shared by friends of the good. “Community is not opposed to conflict. On the contrary, community is precisely the place where an arena for creative conflict is protected by the compassionate fabric of human caring itself.”Footnote 50
Literary critic Wayne Booth extends the Aristotelian notion of well-wishing to include a reader's relationship with the author of a text.Footnote 51 Booth contends that books offer different kinds of friendship, and the “company we keep” significantly informs who we are and who we become as readers. He calls texts “friendship offerings.” Avoiding the extremes of Don Quixote's uncritical acceptance or an “anesthetic” reading that deflects the transformative power of fiction, Booth proposes a “two-stage kind of reading, surrendering as fully as possible on every occasion, but then deliberately supplementing, correcting, or refining our experience with the most powerful ethical or ideological criticism we can imagine.”Footnote 52 In sum, he applies the golden rule to literary hermeneutics: “Read as you would have others read you; listen as you would have others listen to you.”Footnote 53
Movement 5 invites participants to decision in accordance with their judgment based upon the dialectical hermeneutics of Movement 4. While goodwill is an aspect of friendship, it does not constitute friendship alone.Footnote 54 Aquinas follows Aristotle's lead in insisting that a certain mutua amatio is also needed. Friendship loving is reciprocal, and that reciprocity is demonstrated in the sharing of concrete goods and deeds. The common consciousness of friends is actualized in a life together.Footnote 55 Aristotle therefore concludes that humans cannot be friends with the gods because of the radical asymmetry. However, Aquinas understands the “sendings” of the Spirit and the Son as constituting the very communicatio that relates us to God as friends.Footnote 56 The Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit relate us to God as God is related to God—a community of friends. Frederick Lawrence remarks: “God's communication transforms human persons inwardly by the new quality of a permanently given form. If there is such a communication, then mutual loving follows, and so there is friendship. By the gift of charity God acts in us and by our natural capacities we act in relation to our neighbor and the world.”Footnote 57 The mutually mediating encounter of Movement 4 invites understanding determined judgment that produces transformative action in Movement 5.
The expansion of a common consciousness and conscience is a function of the shared dimension of Groome's pedagogy of friendship throughout all five movements. “The word shared points to this approach as one of mutual partnership, active participation, and dialogue with oneself, with others, with God, and with Story/Vision of Christian faith.”Footnote 58 Gadamer observes how friends function as a privileged source of self-understanding. “Through exchange with our friends, who share our views and intentions but who can also correct or strengthen them, we draw nearer to the divine, which possesses continually what is possible for us humans only intermittently: presence, wakefulness, self-presence in ‘Geist.’”Footnote 59 Lonergan notes that friendship enables education to liberate us from the limited viewpoint of the present.Footnote 60 Friendship and education are inextricably linked in the reality of a liberal education to which Lonergan's “beloved Newman dedicated his life, and which was enshrined in the Jesuit ratio studiorum: the ideal of friendship with the authors of the great books and friendships based on a common reading of those books.”Footnote 61 Shared Christian praxis, pedagogy of friendship, sets the conditions for the possibility of such friendships to emerge and flourish.
Shared Praxis on the Way to Emmaus
The story of the risen Christ and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) is archetypal of shared praxis pedagogy.Footnote 62 Christ appears as a fellow traveler and consoles two discouraged disciples on their journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Jesus encounters them while they are engaged in conversation about “the things that have happened there in these days” (v. 18, RSV). He meets them at the level of their grief, anxiety, and confusion, and he continues to walk alongside them—with them. The travelers welcome the addition of the new companion, although “their eyes were kept from recognizing” his identity (v. 16). Remarkably, Jesus didn't introduce himself. Rather than telling these disciples what to see, he invites them into a teaching-learning event that leads them to see for themselves. No one more than the risen Christ knows of “the things that have happened there in these days,” yet he inquires, “What things?” (v. 19) Jesus encourages Cleopas and the other to reflect on the content of their own lives, to critically appropriate their present praxis (Movement 1/2). They recount the loss of their friend, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” and they explain that other disciples had found the tomb empty (v. 19). This loss of hope becomes the generative theme situated within the lives of the disciples. The risen Christ first draws out their own story (reflection on praxis) and shattered vision.
Christ then makes accessible to them “in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27), interpreting his life as the fulfillment of God's promises through the prophets (Movement 3). He explains that the Messiah “should suffer these things and then enter into his glory.” The two travelers have thus been invited into dialectical hermeneutical encounter between their horizon of hope and the messianic promise fulfilled in the risen Christ. They had hoped for a political messiah to set Israel free, but he describes a suffering servant one, thus establishing a dialectic within their hopes. Even though they haven't “seen” the one in their midst yet, Jesus refrains from telling them. They invite Christ to remain with him as the day is nearing its end. Christ accepts the offer of hospitality and joins them in breaking bread together. It is in the taking, blessing, breaking, and giving of the bread that “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (v. 31). This moment of “seeing for themselves” is precisely the intent of shared praxis (Movement 4). Having arrived at judgment for themselves, the two decide to return to Jerusalem to share and live the good news. They decide in favor of the true judgment of value given in the breaking of the bread. The two have been transformed and return to their friends in renewed praxis (Movement 5). “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v. 35).
Shared Christian praxis, pedagogy of friendship, is operative throughout Christ's conversation with the two on the way to Emmaus. Martha Nussbaum's observation about friendship may be used to summarize the risen Christ's encounter with Cleopas and the other, a woman by ancient tradition:
The Aristotelian view stresses that bonds of close friendship or love (such as those that connect members of a family, or close personal friends) are extremely important in the whole business of being a good perceiver. Trusting the guidance of a friend and allowing one's feelings to be engaged with that other person's life and choices, one learns to see aspects of the world that one had previously missed. One's desire to share a form of life with the friend motivates this process.Footnote 63
Key to the story is the disciples’ reflection, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That their hearts were on fire indicates the indwelling of the Holy Spirit while the incarnate Word was in their midst. As a consequence of being in love, action (inviting Jesus to stay) reveals true judgments of value (Jesus has fulfilled the promises of Scripture) and then informs experiencing a post-Easter world (sharing the good news). Christ's remarkable restraint in revealing himself to the two reveals that the teaching-learning event entails seeing for oneself or appropriating what has been given in faith. Lonergan remarks, “The divine secret, kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed (Rom 16:25), has been conceived as the self-communication of divinity in love. It resides in the sending of the Son, in the gift of the Spirit, in the hope of being united with the Father.”Footnote 64
In the light of faith, friendship with God is caritas. Aquinas improves on Aristotle's account of friendship by making explicit that objective lovableness involves an absolute good. Lonergan observes that “it is only in a tendency towards an absolute good that one can transcend both egoism and altruism; and such transcendence is implicit in the Aristotelian notion of true friendship which has its basis not in pleasure nor in advantage but in the objective lovableness of the virtuous man.”Footnote 65 The cooperative missions of the Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit in charity initiate and establish our participation in divine friendship—an absolute good. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). While in human friendships authenticity is ever a withdrawal from inauthenticity, by grace our sharing in divine friendship reverses decline and redeems us.
III. Pedagogy of Friendship in Catholic Higher Education Today
That shared Christian praxis originates in the field of religious education raises the inevitable question of its wider applicability to the variegated intellectual life of the modern university. Within the classroom one can readily imagine the adaptation of a shared praxis approach in other humanities disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy and even the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, and the field of education itself. The Christian story and vision may be replaced with a source drawn from the relevant discipline that has its own wisdom for life. There may still be a focusing activity around a generative theme that specifically engages learners as agents-subjects in the teaching-learning event and invites participants to critically appropriate their present praxis toward wisdom for life. Critically appropriated present praxis may be placed in mutually mediating conversation with the relevant source of the discipline. Learners may then be invited to make judgments and arrive at cognitive, affective, or behavior decisions—as their learning outcome. Such an adaptation may be more challenging in math and the so-called hard sciences, but even then the five movements may help educators structure a teaching-learning event that incorporates the foundational dynamics of a shared praxis approach.
Interiority and Shared Praxis
The five movements of shared Christian praxis draw upon the dynamic structure of Lonergan's hermeneutics of cognitional and existential interiority.Footnote 66 Shared Christian praxis may therefore be viewed as a spiritual exercise that sets the condition for the possibility of authenticity as self-transcendence. Lonergan audaciously claims at the onset of Insight: “Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening all further developments of understanding.”Footnote 67 The shorthand precepts: be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible—and loving is the product of accepting a personal and decisive invitation to self-appropriation. Self-appropriation is the existential decision to examine, affirm, and live accordingly to the recurrent, related operations and dynamic structure of one's consciousness.Footnote 68 The realization of this self-possession is heightened in a context of authentic friendships.
The focusing activity and the first pedagogical movement of naming the present praxis invite participants to attend to the data of their own historical situation. The second movement of critical appropriation of present praxis encourages participants to arrive at some understanding and judgment based upon on the data from their lives. The third pedagogical movement of accessing the Christian story and vision invites participants to pay attention to and understand the truth and wisdom of the Christian faith as relevant to a generative theme in their lives. The fourth pedagogical movement of dialectical hermeneutics encourages persons to arrive at true judgments based upon the mutual mediation of the Christian story and vision and their own story and vision. The fifth pedagogical movement of making decisions in light of Christian faith invites participants to live in steadfast loyalty to their critically appropriated truths and values.
That the pedagogical movements of shared Christian praxis structure the teaching-learning event in a way that is faithful to Lonergan's heuristic for authenticity suggests that it may be enacted in a myriad of university settings and across academic disciplines. Shared praxis pedagogy is not restricted to the classroom or to themes of Christian faith, but is relevant to any teaching-learning event and any particular theme. Haughey's survey of faculty at Catholic universities suggests that Lonergan's account of interiority reflects an implicit spirituality animating an ever-increasing pluralistic community of scholars. Haughey held twenty-one faculty workshops at various Catholic colleges and universities. He repeatedly provoked faculty with the question “What is the good you are seeking to accomplish in your academic career?” Haughey observed the common emergence of particular wholes that the faculty were seeking.Footnote 69 As a multidisciplinary cohort of scholars examined the heuristic character of their knowing tending toward wholeness, they identified a native eros operating in their consciousness urging them to seek the good. Furthermore, the scholars noticed how insights emerge and supply light to understanding. The Catholic intellectual tradition identifies this light as a participation in uncreated light, which is God.Footnote 70 By grounding his approach to Catholic identity in cognitional theory, Haughey accounts for and transcends subjectivity.Footnote 71 Education for self-transcendence is not merely the task of theologians or campus ministers at a Catholic university. Moreover, it is the personal development of educators, most of all, that is in question. Lonergan remarks that there are “basic theological questions whose solution depends on the personal development of theologians.”Footnote 72 The foundational role of personal development extends to all educators wrestling with the basic solution to the problem of human living.
PULSE as Pedagogy of Caritas
An example of shared Christian praxis as pedagogy of friendship may be further illuminative. Boston College's PULSE Program for Service Learning is an option for students to fulfill their core requirement in philosophy and theology. PULSE is a twelve-credit, yearlong interdisciplinary course entitled Person and Social Responsibility, including twelve hours of weekly community-based service. In addition, students attend a weekly, hour-long discussion session that integrates critical reflection on their service placements with the class material. The carefully curated field placements include health clinics, housing programs, HIV/AIDS services, corrections, homeless shelters, domestic violence programs, youth work, after-school programs, and other areas that invite students to forge relationships with marginalized populations. The course engages select classical works in philosophy and theology (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Augustine) as well as modern works (e.g., Arendt, Foucault, Lewis). Readings also include books from the Bible and personal narratives of injustice.Footnote 73 The goal of the course is to foster critical consciousness for personal responsibility in contributing to the common good and working for a just society. That roughly 350 students fill fourteen sections each year indicates the cultural impact of PULSE on the undergraduate experience at Boston College. PULSE is not an acronym; it symbolizes the life-giving experience born from encounters with others in contexts markedly distinct from the well-manicured campus green in Chestnut Hill.
PULSE's unique emphasis on the inter-irrigation of service praxis and academic reflection is evident in two decisions made at the inception of the program nearly fifty years ago.Footnote 74 First, students receive credit for their off-campus field projects (six credits per year) coordinated with tailored academic classes (six credits per year). Second, the field education placements are selected based upon the criteria of social service and social action instead of preprofessional training. This approach distinguishes PULSE from an internship model, which awards credit for nonacademic or preprofessional experience. Patrick Byrne, founder of PULSE, explains: “We were motivated by a conviction that there is an intrinsic connection between theory and practice—that careful study of intellectual and religious traditions can inform and transform practice in profound ways, and that appropriately structured forms of praxis can add depth to the comprehension of theoretical issues.”Footnote 75 This founding conviction challenges a major tenet of the modern research university—that the university is primarily concerned with intellectual development, and every other function is relegated to an ancillary status. PULSE's integration of theory and service praxis produces transformative effects in the lives of students. Russell, a PULSE student, remarks: “It's not that an idea taught in the classroom cannot be as profound [as learning through an experience]; it is simply that when you live through the principles discussed in class, they become imprinted in you, and become more integrated and permanent in your life. I now see that philosophy is not something that should only be learned in special experiences like the classroom or the homeless shelter where I volunteer. Philosophy should be learned everywhere you go, and applied to everything you do.”Footnote 76
Although the PULSE faculty does not receive formal training in shared Christian praxis, the structure of the curriculum reflects the pedagogy's fundamental life-to-faith-to-new-life (in faith) dynamic developed by Groome. In this case, the field education serves as the focusing activity and the source of the students’ current praxis. The weekly discussion sessions invite the participants to critically reflect on their encounter with others within a context radically distinct from their gated campus home. The class texts provide wisdom old and new centered on seminal themes of the common good and a just society. The students enter into a mutual mediating dialectic with their critically appropriated praxis and the insights of thinkers ancient and modern. The result of that conversation is a new praxis or transfigured life. A pedagogy of friendship highlights the interpersonal and societal dimensions of this way of education. PULSE student Mei Ling remarks: “Growing up I've always had an individualistic way of thinking, but now the class makes me think more communally. . . . It really helped me think that whatever I'm going to do in the future … how we all need to grow as a society together.” Vicky similarly feels “so much more connected to the community and the world.” She explains, “Now I know that we're all kind of in this together. . . . My decisions are not only about whether or not it's good for me, but also whether or not it's good for everybody.”Footnote 77 The PULSE Program maintains community partnerships with over fifty agencies throughout Boston, including Boston Health Care for the Homeless, the Catholic Worker's Haley House, the Italian Home for Children, the Dorchester Neighborhood Service Center, the Pine Street Inn, and Nativity Preparatory School. These placements provide students with the opportunity to encounter others who do their knowing and loving in horizons markedly distinct from their own. When friendships emerge from these encounters, students become more able to see the world through the transfigured perspective of alternate vantage points. Moreover, PULSE participants begin to understand their role in contributing to the common good. As mentioned above, the best pedagogy naturally intuits a shared praxis approach. The value of shared Christian praxis, in those instances, is the objectification of pedagogy for increased self-reflection and even greater appropriation.
While service learning abounds at universities religious and secular, a pedagogy of friendship sheds light on a distinctive way of proceeding in which praxis informing theory produces new praxis—and love sublates reason. The grand synthesis of faith and reason is the heart of a Catholic university. Moreover, a pedagogy of caritas adverts to the interpersonal situation of education as bearer of the university's mission and identity in addition to explicit religious content in the curriculum. Educators working in diverse intellectual, moral, and religious contexts across the campus green can appropriate a shared praxis approach. The result is collaboration in mission that extends well beyond the religious bastions of the theology department and campus ministry. A pedagogy of caritas provides educators with a structured conversational approach reflecting the conversational constitution of the triune God whose personal communication of the Word and the Spirit in history invites us to participate in divine friendship.Footnote 78
In How College Works, Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that long-lasting friendships with fellow students and sometimes teachers are a major result of the college experience.Footnote 79 According to their research, friendships play an integral role in learning and are often the central mechanism and daily motivators of the student experience. Alumni frequently report that friendships are the most valuable result of their undergraduate years. Chambliss and Takacs write, “This pervasive influence of relationships suggests that a college—at least insofar as it offers real benefits—is less a collection of programs than a gathering of people.”Footnote 80 Programs matter, to be sure, but friends matter more. Friendship is crucial for students, but having a large number of friends is not. Most students need only two or three good friends, and one or two great professors to have a rewarding and even wonderful college experience.Footnote 81 The extensive research of Chambliss and Takacs conducted at Hamilton College, a small, rural, and elite liberal arts college in New York, confirms the monumental role of education's interpersonal dimension. Their research can be summed up in a single sentence: “What really matters in college is who meets whom, and when.”Footnote 82 College is most effective when it is not primarily about programs or technology but about meaningful human interaction that can shape student choices, increase motivation, and lead to greater overall satisfaction with the college experience. College “works” when people are committed to learning together. While the idyllic, cloistered context of Hamilton College does not stand in for all of contemporary higher education, Catholic or otherwise, the research suggests that the role of friendship may be at the heart of successful education everywhere. A pedagogy of caritas initiates, encourages, and sustains the integral role of friendship in education.
Friendship amid Commodification and Diversity
The commodification of higher education poses a fundamental challenge to a culture of friendship by encouraging hyperindvidualism.Footnote 83 The cost of tuition, room, and board at certain elite, name-brand Catholic universities resembling all-inclusive country clubs has swelled to $70,000 a year. Such exorbitant price tags breed a consumer-first culture in which higher education is viewed as transactional—the means for the recapitulation (and even exacerbation) of class stratification. Students facing crippling debt are understandably fixated on earning potential when discerning their vocational path. James Keenan, in University Ethics, writes: “The real issue of commodification today is … how pervasive and reductive the mindset of students and administrators, staff and trustees, and faculty are when they consider the goods of education as marketable commodities. It's as simple as that, the new, all-inclusive bottom line.”Footnote 84 Education propelled by commodification values productivity and efficiency above friendship's benevolent “uselessness.” Building genuine relationships, regardless of the campus setting, takes time. The authors of The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, lament: “The values of productivity, efficiency, and competition have time as the common factor. Productivity is about getting a number of tasks done in a set unit of time; efficiency is about getting tasks done quickly; and competition, in part, is about marketing your achievements before someone else beats you to it. Corporatization, in short, has sped up the clock.”Footnote 85 Faculty and students manifest symptoms of what medical doctors call “time sickness,” an obsession with the scarcity of time. Jane Tompkins remarks: “Nobody has time. . . . You can't put a good conversation in your vita” and therefore “there's no intellectual life left in universities, or precious little, because people are too busy getting ahead professionally … to stop and talk to each other.”Footnote 86 Conversation is the genesis of friendship and the engine of intellectual development. Derek Bok observes how faculty efficiency anxiety overrides concern for the learning processes of their students: “The most common method that instructors use in conducting their classes is the lecture, a method repeatedly shown to be one of the least effective means of developing high-level thinking skills or helping students to achieve a deep comprehension of challenging subject matter. The catch is that students retain very little of what they hear.”Footnote 87 The pressures of a productivity-obsessed and time-sick culture mount a formidable challenge to friendship well-wishing and reciprocity.
Because it is primarily motivated by concern for the other's good, friendship praxis may embolden Catholic educators to defy the instrumental rationality and managerial ethos that dominate higher education today. A Catholic university animated by a pedagogy of friendship may more readily resist the lure of prestige envy within a North Atlantic culture of aspirational shoppers whose purchases—including higher education—reflect social status anxiety.Footnote 88 Newman understood friendship as foundational to liberal arts education as learning for its own sake in contrast to education primarily concerned with utility or professional training.Footnote 89 Marian Díaz remarks, “Besides a basic curiosity and desire to know, students and faculty must root their desires in a passion for relationships that grounds themselves in a deep sense of benevolence toward others.”Footnote 90 A pedagogy of caritas schools the desiring of its participants in loving as in knowing so that self-seeking anxiety may be displaced by disinterested concern for the other's good. Benevolence is the affective antidote to a self-referential consumeristic approach to education. A pedagogy of friendship promotes affective therapy and thereby encourages members of a Catholic university to contest the tide of commodification and its hyperindividualism in our day.
An increasingly pluralistic student body challenges Catholic higher education to embrace diversity and inclusion as central to its identity rather than as threatening to it. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), Jesus’ answer to “Who is my neighbor?” interrupted deep-seated divisions between Jew and Samaritan and anticipated the unity of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5). In this unity there is “no inequality on the basis of race, nationality, social condition or sex” (Lumen Gentium, §32). Catholic higher education, like the church, owns a dialectical history of confronting and generating racism.Footnote 91 In 1838, the Jesuits at Georgetown sold 272 slaves in order to keep the financially fledgling college afloat. Today the university offers “preferential admissions” to descendants of those slaves. Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, offered racially integrated Saturday extension programs in the 1930s, and the school welcomed its first full-time African American students in 1954, well in advance of other southern universities. Meanwhile, the Knights of Columbus–sponsored fraternity at Loyola University New Orleans hosted blackface minstrel shows, and major donors funded anti–civil rights talk radio out of Loyola's campus station.Footnote 92 Racism persists in Catholic higher education today as it thrives in American culture in unconscious and insidious ways. Bryan Massingale explains: “In brief, ‘unconscious racism’ connotes how race can operate as a negative—yet not conscious, deliberate, or intentional—decision-making factor, due to the pervasive cultural stigma attached to dark skin color in Western culture. Race functions as a largely unconscious or preconscious frame of perception, developed through cultural conditioning and instilled by socialization.”Footnote 93 Diversity in higher education is a multilayered and complex topic deserving far more attention and nuance than space allows for here. Race is one dimension among others, including ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. While the focus below is on race, the relevance of shared praxis pedagogy stands in any cross-cultural learning context. David Burrell, in Friendship and Ways to Truth, reflects on the practice of friendship as key in fruitful ecumenical dialogue.Footnote 94
James Keenan cites a recent study finding that undergraduate students at American universities become less interested, on average, in promoting racial understanding the longer they are in college.Footnote 95 This trend is a scandal at Catholic universities linked to the venerable tradition of Catholic social teaching insisting that “racism is not merely one sin among many, it is a radical evil dividing the human family.”Footnote 96 Researchers Jesse Rude, Gregory C. Wolniak, and Ernest T. Pascarella observed that racial attitudes shift in a negative direction over the entire four-year undergraduate period. Their study overturns a basic assumption of higher education that simply mixing students together naturally produces a liberalizing effect with increased appreciation for racial diversity. On the contrary, a focus on curriculum apart from addressing the overall learning ambiance leaves students less inclined toward racial diversity. Rude, Wolniak, and Pascarella explain: “An implication of these findings for postsecondary institutions with racially diverse campuses is that efforts to broaden students’ racial views should extend beyond multicultural course requirements. Colleges that can take steps to promote environments conducive for cross-race friendship and other forms of positive interaction may have an even greater impact on students’ racial attitudes.”Footnote 97
A pedagogy of caritas sets the conditions for the possibility of interracial friendships in a variety of campus settings. A teaching-learning event cultivating genuine friendship enables participants to empathize with others who have done their knowing, deciding, and loving in markedly distinct horizons from their own. (Granted, this teaching strategy presupposes a racially diverse campus—a formidable obstacle at most American Catholic universities.) In Enfleshing Freedom, Shawn Copeland appropriates Lonergan to theorize skin as horizon and racism as a racialized horizon imposing bias.Footnote 98 Lonergan proposes horizon as “a maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint.”Footnote 99 Our fields of vision are limited by knowledge, interest, care, and concern. Individual, group, and commonsense biases rule out information or data from consideration based upon perceived self-referential concern.Footnote 100 Copeland explains: “Uncontested, the limited and limiting standpoint of skin as horizon reassures and is reassured in bias. Thus, insofar as the skin, the race of the ‘other’ differs from my own, a racially biased induced horizon hides the ‘other’ from me and renders the ‘other’ invisible.”Footnote 101 Racism as a bias includes intellectual and affective scotosis or blindness. A pedagogy of friendship promotes intellectual and affective healing so that participants may overcome the restrictions of self-referential biases and do their knowing, deciding, and loving more authentically.
A pedagogy of caritas reveres diversity by inviting participants to critically appropriate their personal praxis in conversations with others and in mutually mediating dialogue with the Christian story and vision. For white students, encountering the praxis of minoritized students may reveal the privileges of white skin color and how race functions in their own lives, which is often taken for granted. For minoritized students who cannot take race for granted, friendship praxis may encourage them to share their passions, visions, and commitments with openness, which is curtailed when they otherwise feel compelled to hide in plain sight. The critically appropriated praxis of minoritized students may disclose distorted interpretations of the Christian story and vision that assimilate what Peter Selby calls an ideology of victory and defeat. He comments: “Your self-understanding and mine, corrupted as they are by our involvement in the processes and the ideologies of victory and defeat, have to be turned around so that we come to see them alongside the defeat of Jesus as the world's ultimate friend, so that the world is befriended by its defeat, and not by victory achieved at the expense of other people's defeat.”Footnote 102
A pedagogy of caritas also honors unity by grounding the five movements in cognitional and existential interiority revealed in the exigencies of our knowing and loving. The challenge of diversity and inclusion is a problematic of the one and the many. Friends identify with each other as “another self.” They celebrate each other's successes and joys and shoulder their trials and sorrows. At the same time, friends retain their distinct subjectivity as their freedom unfolds through successive contingent decisions in history. Kathleen Talvacchia, proposing a spirituality of multicultural teaching, argues that “empathy for another's experience cannot be an excuse to appropriate that experience and make it our own.”Footnote 103 A shared praxis approach invites transformative interpersonal encounters that may produce mutual understanding and racial solidarity.
A conversational, friendship-based pedagogy holds promise for multicultural education in a variety of settings. Burrell remarks, “We can become transformed vicariously in the transformation of those whose lives have become intertwined with ours.”Footnote 104 In the light of faith, our lives are transfigured by friendship not as an achievement but as a gift received and cooperated with collectively. That it is not primarily the work of our own hands means that friendship is not a panacea. Moreover, Aristotle's typology of friendship recognizes that utility, pleasure, and the good sometimes overlap and compete in friendships. Motivations are more often than not mixed. Burrell adds, “We can celebrate how each of us can present to another the face of ‘the good’—not, certainly, because we ourselves can be said to embody that good, but because we reflect how we have learned to journey towards it, together.”Footnote 105 Similar to questions and insights, friendships either occur among a community of learners—or they do not. That we do not merit the gift is a reason why friendship often arrives with joy and surprise. A pedagogy of caritas aims at increasing the probability that authentic friendships emerge through the act of education.
Friendship Transforming the University Polis
Aristotle's Ethics begins by discussing the relationship between morality and politics, but it culminates in an exposition of friendship. It is not just the virtuous person, but also the virtuous community that is the goal of the moral life. Moreover, while the aim of ethics is the virtuous polis, each person needs the good company of others to encourage, support, and sustain the individual's journey toward the good life.Footnote 106 Aristotle's proposal for the Athenian dilemma of failed politics is that small pockets of intimate friendships may act as leaven in transforming the city-state. Aristotle affirms that friendship is a kind of virtue necessary for living fully. Aquinas’ theological appropriation of the Ethics through the vantage point of sin and grace enabled him to build upon friendship's breaking through the grasp of individual and group egoism. In this light, the interpersonal situation of friendship—as cooperating with grace—is the site of community transformation. Inasmuch as a shared praxis pedagogy animates the teaching and learning events at a Catholic university, it creates the conditions for the possibility of friendship to flourish across the campus green. As the Boston College PULSE Program demonstrates, friendship converts its participants to more authentic living, particularly when the friendship encounter occurs outside of one's native horizon. Therefore, while the commodification of education and racial discord in education significantly shape the polis of Catholic higher education, the interpersonal situation of friendship has the potential to transform the university's political situation so that university identity more closely approximates the mission.
Conclusion
The rupture of community at Boston College and other campuses across the country indicates a broken interpersonal situation in higher education. Catholic higher education is obligated by its mission to address community fragmentation, because the intersubjective context of learning is integral to its formational end. This context mutually mediates the individual with the political. Because interpersonal healing is not merely intellectual, the Catholic university urgently needs an integrative approach as an expression of its distinct identity. Teaching and learning events occur in a myriad of settings beyond the boundaries of the classroom walls. Pedagogy is a shared task binding diverse educators operating across the varied landscape of a university. It includes the ordering and health of interpersonal relationships informing the quality of the conversation that the university is—in addition to concrete teaching practices governing teaching-learning events.
A pedagogy of caritas appropriates Groome's shared Christian praxis approach, which is comprised of a focusing activity and five movements. The life-to-faith-to-new-life dynamic reflects Lonergan's hermeneutics of authenticity. A pedagogy of friendship adverts to the interpersonal dimension of learning as fundamental to content. Friendship's well-wishing promotes affective therapy that heals self-interested concern so that educators may more readily resist commodification and its hyperindividualism in higher education. In addition to well-wishing, friendship reciprocity enables friends to see and discern the world from another perspective. The possibility of this conversion is heightened when the “communication” or conversation occurs with a friend who does their knowing and loving in a markedly distinct horizon from one's own. Through well-wishing and conversation, the friend becomes “another self” without conflation. Friendship may therefore serve as the basis for more adequately approaching the one and the many problematic facing universities grappling with diversity and inclusion. A pedagogy of caritas is a spiritual exercise that sets the conditions for the possibility of friendships animating a Catholic university. Inasmuch as those friendships are mutually mediating and oriented toward self-transcendence, the community of learners grows in likeness of the triune, conversational God. By the gift of friendship with God—caritas—a Catholic university participates in the divine relations of friendship available to us in history through the Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
