This Currents feature presents the perspectives of two member school presidents on a religious, social, or cultural topic. In this issue, they discuss the appropriate role that one’s individual beliefs should play in his or her public actions for social change.

Michael Sweeney, O.P.
President, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

 
The problem in contemporary society is that many people are acting for social change, but at cross purposes: the social remedies proposed by some strike others as the best means for assuring the culture’s demise.  Our society is polarized, not so much because of conflicts due to competing faiths, but more because of a sort of cultural amnesia.

Our society has largely forgotten that every modern institution has its roots in a faith tradition.  Schools, universities, hospitals, political institutions at every level, guilds, unions, even corporations, were all expressions of a deep conviction concerning human dignity and responsibility before God.  We will never understand our own institutions until we grasp their history and development.  Any discussion concerning the direction that social change should take must take into account both the roots of our institutions and ideas and the faith from which they proceeded. People of faith have, therefore, a crucial role to play in discerning the ends and means of social change.  Our place is not at the periphery of the conversation, but at the center.  To disown our faith convictions for the sake of an artificial objectivity would be to betray the society that was founded upon them.

Part of our contribution to the discussion will be found in a proper understanding of what is secular.  In the Church’s understanding, “the secular sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world” (Lumen Gentium, 36).  The very notion of the secular is Christian in its origin, and expresses the necessity to recognize the difference between things that are ordered to God directly (our worship, for example) and things that are ordered instead to man and woman (education, economics, political institutions, the arts and sciences, etc.).  Faith always obliges us to a double competence: to understand and assert the dignity and proper independence of the principles which govern secular pursuits and to understand and assert the dignity and responsibilities of the human person who is accountable to God. In the words of Paul VI, enlightened by faith we are to become “experts in humanity.”  A society such as ours, not only pluralistic but polarized, very badly needs that expertise.

Donn F. Morgan
President, Church Divinity School of the Pacific

 
Here at the Graduate Theological Union, with its focus on theological education in a post-modern world, the almost involuntary role played by our individual beliefs is important.  With our concern for communal educational formation and our lifting up of the particular, we are already taking public stances on social issues.  In one sense, then, a bit of introspection, or the boldness to ask colleagues and friends to be a mirror for what we are already doing and what we cannot help but do, is often very much in order.

On the other hand, we are constantly being asked to go further, to make firm and public commitments to one cause or another. Regardless of where I stand on an issue, regardless of what action I choose to take, I am aware that there is a pedagogical dimension involved—that I will be teaching and modeling to others, even as I hope and pray that I will be learning as much as they. 

We must recognize those times when we are called to witness to a particular truth or value. In these situations, where dissension and difference are highlighted and where potential conflict arises, the GTU has been especially important for me.  With its valuing of diversity and with a chorus of strong commitments to a number of important social issues, I have found a series of overlapping communities (from staff meetings to classrooms to trustee groups to the Council of [GTU] Presidents to…), which have provided both counsel and support even as they have challenged me to take a stance, to make a decision. 

In ways both involuntary and intentional, and always with a focus on learning and being faithful in a communal context of multiple faiths and commitments, the GTU has provided me with a multivalent model for relating individual belief to public action.  It is a model providing much needed service through the particular folks it helps to form and shape.  It is also a model that lifts up and teaches powerful educational values and ways of living in and with diversity to the wider church and society.