Faith and Reason

Vistas and Horizons

Nigel Zimmermann, Sandra Lynch

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781498207812
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

What is the fruit of a searching dialogue between faith and reason? This book collects theological and philosophical perspectives on the richness of the faith-reason dialogue, including examples from literature, continental and analytic philosophy, worship and liturgy, and radical approaches to issues of racism and prejudice. The authors strongly resist the temptations to either disregard the faith-reason dialogue or take it for granted. Through their explorations and reflections they open up new vistas and horizons on a topic more necessary than ever.

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Mission Impossible?

Education and Formation in a Pluralistic Society

—Sandra Lynch

This chapter focuses on the mission of Catholic tertiary education in Australia and addresses some of the challenges faced by Catholic universities operating within a fundamentally pluralistic society, such as we have in Australia. It articulates the mission of Catholic education and explores theoretical concerns associated with the interplay of faith and reason, while also drawing attention to issues associated with experience and practice, and questions of value, virtue, and character. Its aim is to canvass possibilities for ensuring within universities whose members include both Catholics and non-Catholics that all members of the university community have some familiarity with the Catholic religious tradition, and its ways of knowing and communicating. Finally, the chapter uses the exploration of two particular challenges as a catalyst to discussion that suggests strategies for consensus building, identity sharing, and a communal appreciation of mission—a “mission possible”—for Catholic educationalists embedded within an overwhelmingly secular tertiary sector and society.

1. Mission and Consensus in Catholic Universities

Alasdair MacIntyre argues in God, Philosophy, Universities that “[p]art of the gift of Christian faith is to enable us to identify accurately where the line between faith and reason is to be drawn.” He goes on to tell his readers that this is “something that cannot be done from the standpoint of reason, but only from that of faith.”1 MacIntyre outlines a turn to Thomistic philosophy to guide us in this enterprise, but he acknowledges that the turn to Aquinas is an intellectually demanding one. There are no “stock answers” to complex questions and what is required, he argues, is constructive engagement with secular thought.

John Courtney Murray’s book We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition also deals with the challenges of constructive engagement with secular thought in the context of a modern pluralistic society. Murray, an American Jesuit theologian and philosopher, explores the idea of a civic consensus—a consensus that he accepts did not exist in the twentieth-century America he inhabited. He argues that a civic consensus allows a people to acquire an identity and sense of purpose and notes the inability of American universities to create such a possibility. As he puts it, “the American university long since bade a quiet goodbye to the whole notion of an American consensus—one that implied that there are truths we hold in common and a natural law that makes known to all of us the structure of the moral universe . . . .”2

However, he argues that the ethical and political principles drawn from the natural law tradition provide the basis for such consensus among Catholics, at least. His perspective on the question of consensus is relevant to those addressing the idea of institutional mission within Australian Catholic universities, not least because the members of staff and the students at these universities reflect the pluralism of contemporary culture. For example, the basis of consensus-building at the University of Notre Dame Australia can be found in the University’s Statutes, which state (not unexpectedly) that fidelity as a Catholic university is to be measured by commitment to the principles of the apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”), issued by St. John Paul II and promulgated in 1990.

But we must nonetheless recognize the diversity of beliefs on the campuses of Catholic universities in relation to religion and to the philosophical presuppositions of religion. Not all the staff and students of Catholic universities share or even appreciate the need for—and worth of—a common language with which to address questions of mission, identity, purpose, and formation. Murray and MacIntyre are useful in regard to addressing such questions in that they draw attention to different aspects of the challenges we face. This chapter focuses on two challenges in particular.

The first of these is that of engaging with those keen to explore how we might approach drawing the distinction or what MacIntyre refers to as the line between faith and reason and determining how the content of the curriculum or programs offered within the University might be influenced by Catholic intellectual and moral tradition. Here the question of the relationship between educational practices and formation arises. The second of the challenges addressed here is that of engaging with secular culture so that we begin a dialogue or sustain current dialogue with all members of the University community and particularly with those who have no faith commitments at all. The question of the possibility of authentically and consistently implementing our mission arises in relation to this challenge.

In addressing the first challenge, it is necessary to be clear about what we take the nature and purpose of university education in general to be, as well as to state what we take to be the nature and purpose of Catholic university education.

2. The Nature and Purpose of University Education

Professor Margaret Gardner AO, president and vice-chancellor of Monash University (2014–present) and chair of Universities Australia, in an address to the National Press Club of Australia in February 2019, stated that a great university education imparts not only foundational knowledge and skills particular to a chosen discipline or profession, but a broader and more profound set of skills for life. She referred to the skills necessary to being able to analyze, decipher, and interpret—to the employment of logic, reasoning, curiosity, and creativity. Professor Gardner argued that in addition to imparting these skills, university education contributed to a broader and more profound set of skills for life and consequently that it was crucial to the health of democracies and nations. Her address included reference to the views of Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, who argued (also in a speech to the Australian National Press Club in November, 2018) that the growth in the wealth of nations over the last 250 years was largely due to advances in two fields: (1) in science and technology and (2) in social organization, by which he meant the rule of law and the development of democracies characterized by sophisticated systems of checks and balances. Stiglitz warned that such development requires “systems of truth telling, of ascertaining, of discovering what the truth is, verifying the truth.”3 Gardner connected Stiglitz’s points about the importance of truth-telling institutions (in the independent media, the judiciary, and universities) with recent research indicating that Australians reported high levels of trust in university experts.

This emphasis on truth and the implication that universities must go beyond providing vocational or professional education is reminiscent of St. John Henry Newman’s views that universities should teach universal knowledge, presenting the widest and most philosophical systems of intellectual education and focussing on the truth of their principles. Newman recommends a liberal education for what it can achieve in relation to the cultivation of the mind by developing: “the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive, just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.”4

3. The Nature and Purpose of Catholic University Education

However, Newman’s focus on truth is nuanced, going beyond the discovery and verification of truth by rational means and any attempt to guarantee the development of a particular type of citizen: one with “a clear, conscious view of his (sic) own opinions and judgments, [and] a truth in developing them.”5 Rather, he holds the conviction that truth is an ally of the Catholic university and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith. Universities aim at the cultivation and enlargement of the mind of the “natural human being.” They are valuable institutions within which we are able to investigate and question beliefs, expand on prior knowledge, and make sense of what some take to be a paradoxical commitment to the role of both faith and reason. But the distinctive feature of a Catholic universit...