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(3) TUDIES IN THE SPIRITUALITY OF JESUITS. The Languages. We. Use:. Talking about Religious Experience. J.. A. Appleyard,. BOSTON COLLEGE AP. 1987. PROPERTY. OF O'NEILL LIBRARY..

(4) THE SEMINAR ON JESUIT SPIRITUALITY A. group of Jesuits appointed from. The Seminar of Jesuits,. practice. Vatican. especially. American to. provinces the. to. the. in. spiritual. United. doctrine. and!. and communicates the This is done in the spir. Jesuits,. provinces.. the. recommendation. II's. pertaining. topics. members of. the. to. results. studies. their. religious. institutes. to. recapture. I. the. and to adapt it to the circun of modern times. The Seminar welcomes reactions or comments in red to the material which it publishes. original. The Seminar of the. Jesuits. of other. women. Hence not. exclusively. welcome. focuses. United. Jesuits. founders. of their. inspiration. States.. regions,. the. its. to. The. meant. life. and work of!. may be common also! religious, laity, men and/or American Jesuits, are them helpful are cordufl. especially for. who may. Others. on the. treated. issues. other priests,. Studies, while. them.. for. attention. direct. find. i. read them.. to. CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE SEMINAR Philip. Fischer,. C.. Institute. Donald. L.. SJ.. is. of Jesuit. Gelpi,. secretary of the Seminar and an editor at the. Sources.. SJ. teaches systematic theology at the Jesuit School of. Theology at Berkeley. Roger D. Haight, SJ. teaches systematic theology Jesuit. school. of theology in. McGovern, SJ. teaches philosophy and Program at the University of Detroit.. Arthur. John John. F.. W. Padberg director. Regis College, the. is. director of the. Honors. SJ. teaches systematic theology at Saint Louis University.. Mueller,. J.. at. Toronto.. SJ.. is. and editor. chairman of the Seminar, editor of Studies, and at. the. Institute. of Jesuit. Sources.. John Renard, SJ. teaches the history of religion, with special emphasis on Islam, at Saint Louis University. Paul A. Soukup, SJ. teaches communications at Santa Clara University and G.. director. Robert. of studies. Starratt,. J.. for. juniorate. scholastics. in. the. California. is j. Pr. SJ. directs the Center for Non-Public Education at. Fordham University. John M. Staudenmaier, SJ.. teaches the history of technology at Detroit. University.. L.. John. Topel,. SJ.. is. Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Seattle. University.. © Copyright, 3700 West. 1987 and Pine. Blvd.,. by The Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality,! Louis, 63108 (Tel. 314-652-5737). published St.. MO.

(5) J.. A. Appleyard, SJ.. THE LANGUAGES WE. USE:. TALKING ABOUT RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. 19/2. March 1987.

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(7) For your information. .. .. .. (November 1986) I described members of the Seminar and promised. In an earlier issue of Studies briefly the process of choosing. to describe later. what happens. next paragraphs will begin to. at a typical. fulfil. The Seminar members gather. Seminar meeting. These. that promise. five. times a year between Sep-. tember and May, from Friday evening until Sunday noon. This is a large commitment of time from men who already have a full week of work behind them and another to look forward to. With travel the commitment regularly adds up to more than fifteen days in nine months. Once or twice a year we meet in Saint Louis where the offices of the Seminar are located. The other meetings take place at the Jesuit community in one of the cities in which a member lives. This latter practice gives Seminar members and members of the Jesuit community in that city the opportunity to meet each other and to learn of common interests in Jesuit spirituality. At the informal Friday evening session we simply let each other. know. of our activities since the last meeting, our concerns. and hopes, our plans for the future. The whole of Saturday and Sunday morning are taken up with three regularly recurring activities. We work on the specific papers proposed for publication in Studies; we talk at some length on a more general topic in the spirituality of Jesuits which might eventually result in a paper; we discuss publication matters both short term, such as scheduling of papers, and long term, such as topics we think it important to deal with over the coming months or years. At two of the five meetings of the year we spend a considerable amount of time in preparing for the Jesuit Conference Board the list of men whom we. recommend. as replacements for the. three-year term.. On. members who. are completing their. Saturday evening before dinner. we. celebrate. on Sunday morning we reflect on how we accomplished, on what we might do better the next time, and after the meeting ends we often enough the Eucharist together. Late the sessions went, on what. have to hurry to the airport.. Where papers discussion of. come from, how we carry on the them, and how we decide on which ones we shall for Studies. publish will be the subjects of these remarks in the next issue.. John W. Padberg, SJ. Editor Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits.

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(9) CONTENTS PARTI.. THE PROBLEM. 1. Some examples 3 3. Hiring. Teaching 5. 5. Talking to one another. Symbolizing. The. central issue. PART II. THE GAP. 6. may be language 7. 9. The language The language. 10. of subjectivity. of scholarly discourse. Gaps even within. scholarly discourse. PART III. TRYING TO BRIDGE THE GAP Faculty weekends at Cohasset Telling their. From. own. stories. 12. 13. 16. 17. 18. diverse backgrounds. 19. PART IV. THE STRUCTURE OF COMMUNICATION Addresser 20. Addressee 21. Code 22 Contact. 23. Context. 24. PARTV. SOME CONCLUSIONS Works Cited 36. 25. 20.

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(11) THE LANGUAGES WE USE: TALKING ABOUT RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. J.. I.. A. Appleyard,. S.J.*. THE PROBLEM Pedro Arrupe once urged us as. Yet Robert Bellah and. doors.". Jesuits to live our faith "out of. his associates (in their recent. book. Habits of the Heart) find a serious gap between the language Americans use to talk about our private lives and the languages deal with public issues.. when we. try to talk. Do American. Jesuits experience the. this. problem.. rooms.. It. it. And. since so. acutely,. much. whether. seems to show up. the institutions where. of our. work. we. insist. an especially. on the. as Jesuits. use and. how we. we. is. to. be. are likely to. vivid way,. however, in. religious character of. work. by secular and purely professional. standards— in our colleges and universities.. we. we work?. in parishes or high schools or hospital. in. that others increasingly judge. languages. same gap. trying to talk about religion in a secular culture faces. translators of faith language in marginal situations,. experience. use to. about our religious experience with our col-. leagues in the institutions and public arenas where. Anyone. we. talk to. Would. focusing on the. one another help us to think. about the Jesuit and Catholic identity of these institutions?. *Author's address: Boston College, Chestnut. Hill,. MA. 02167..

(12) Though what the university, talk. I. follows here concerns mainly religious language in. think. we. about religion in our contemporary culture. By "we". Jesuits talking. among. does seem to be a matters than. Perhaps. this. ourselves and with our lay colleagues.. fact of life that. we used. we try to I mean we. face the wider problem wherever. we. And. much more about. talk. it. these. to ten or twenty years ago.. happens. and colleges. in universities. at least,. because so many of the circumstances which once gave a clear-cut. number of. identity to these institutions— the. Jesuits. working. in. them, their distinctive curriculums and student discipline, their unambiguous Jesuit administrative control, the conspicuous religious of the it. also. obviously changed in recent years. Perhaps. happens because so many of the people who now work. and Catholic. Jesuit if. campus— have so. life. in. universities are not Catholics themselves or,. they are, they often have no experience of doing their. in a religious educational institution.. own. even. studies. Whatever the causes, things. which used to be taken for granted now tend more and more to be questioned, rethought, perhaps even reaffirmed— in any case, talked about.. For. all. the talking that. we do-and two more. verbal groups. than Jesuits and professional academics would be hard to find— we. may. take the languages. we. are careless about language. Jesuits. as. and academics. much. use for granted.. The opposite. in general. I. is. do not mean. that. very likely the case:. probably honor precision and. as any users of language do.. we. clarity. But we may take language for. some prior stage of the communication situation, in the assumptions we bring to the conversation about what questions need to be addressed; about what the words we are using mean to the granted at. different participants; about. what tone. places and circumstances in which. we. is. appropriate; about the. talk;. and perhaps most pro-. foundly about what kinds of topics can be dealt with effectively in the languages. To. we. habitually use.. put the matter simply,. much. of the discussion about what. Catholic and Jesuit in the institutions where. we work. is. bedeviled. by the gap between the language we use to describe our personal experience of the meaning and value in our lives and the languages. 2. is.

(13) available to us for dealing with public, institutional,. questions.. The gap. experience, so that. our personal. we. aim of. it. language. caused by, and widens, a gap in. is. becomes more and more. with our public. lives. use, however,. in. may. and professional. lives.. difficult to. connect. Attending to the languages. suggest ways out of this impasse. That. the. is. this essay.. Some examples. Some examples may many. illustrate. how language. at the center of. is. seem so intractable when we think The four situations which follow are. of the problems which. about our work as Jesuits.. imaginary, but no one with any experience of Jesuit institutions these days will have. much. trouble thinking of parallel situations.. First example: Hiring. The Physics Department's appointments committee is discussing hiring a new faculty member. After the members agree that the candidate should be a new Ph.D., the best available specialist in particle physics,. and qualified. to direct the research of graduate. students as well as to teach undergraduate majors, Professor B.. wonders aloud whether they ought. There. is. an awkward. silence.. to consider "hiring a Catholic.". Someone. asks what being a Catholic. has to do with a candidate's qualifications as a physicist. There are. nods of agreement from others. Professor B.,. some. of whose colleagues. know. that. he belongs to. a faculty prayer group, says that perhaps being a Catholic exactly. what he means, but someone with. the kind of university that. knows. this is. has been. we. are.". He. he. not. "religious values-given. adds apologetically that he. not something they ordinarily talk about, but that. more and more on. his. mind.. "How can we. Catholic university and present a religious view of dents,". is. asks,. "if. we. religious questions?". hire faculty. "But surely,". call. life. it. ourselves a. to our stu-. members who are indifferent to someone else says, "that's for the. theology department to worry about, or the philosophy department,. and anyway can we. really say that this university. is. Catholic any-.

(14) more, in that sense?". Professor. L.,. a veteran departmental diplomat,. intervenes to say that the identity of the institution. is. of course an. important matter, to parents and students for instance, and one that. needs discussion, but. this is. not the place for. He. it.. suggests that,. other criteria are met, the department would be happy. if all. chosen candidate were a Catholic, but they can hardly in. the. if. spell this out. advance as a qualification. The discussion ends there.. Months finalists. asks one of. winnowed. the candidates have been. are brought to the. He. dean.. later, after. campus and interviewed by the. them whether she would. Jesuit. feel comfortable teach-. ing in a Catholic university, and she says that, though she. Lutheran, she would probably feel right at. which identified. itself as. home. in. an. Catholic because she went to. an undergraduate and she has always thought that contemplative and religious aspect to. The other candidate. all. is. a. institution St.. Olaf s as. study has a. it.. says that, as a matter of fact,. friends in the graduate school. out, the. some. of his. where he has been studying have been. warning him that he might not be free to teach what he wanted to in a Catholic university.. imagine. this. When. the dean assures. him. that. he cannot. happening, the candidate says that he has "no problem". with the university's Catholic identity, but adds that he cannot see. any connection between physics and religion anyway because for him science ought to be "value free." laincy has. The dean mentions. that the chap-. been organizing forums on nuclear disarmament and he. alludes to the. U.. S.. Catholic bishops' letter on the subject and. wonders whether there might be more of a connection between these and the candidate's. issues. field. than he sees. The discussion. is. incon-. clusive.. The second candidate communicates. his misgivings. interview to department members, and there. is. talk of. protesting this "violation of academic freedom," but. ment votes. to offer. qualifications,. him the job because of. about the. an open. when. letter. the depart-. his superior research. he accepts, the dean approves the appointment, and. the controversy dies down..

(15) Second example: Teaching In a freshman English class Professor G., a Catholic layman. who. has been teaching for twenty years,. discussing Joyce's Portrait. is. of the Artist with his students, specifically Stephen Dedalus's attitude towards the Catholic Church, which a student has asked him to. He knows. need a. clarify.. Professor G. feels uneasy.. certain. amount of sheer information about Ireland and the Catholic. Church. at the turn of the. that his students. century before they will be able to grasp. Stephen's state of mind. But he also suspects from previous questions. much. that the students are interested at least as. in their. own. relig-. ious views as they are in those of Stephen Dedalus or Joyce.. Professor G.. is. an avenue into the. not reluctant to use his students' interests as. but he feels that his job. text,. an increased awareness of. more. write. beliefs.. He. clearly about is. how. it,. come. seem. and. and how to. because presumably. this,. He. even wistfully recalls his. religious sense of a teaching "vocation," its. which did not. heavy emphasis on textual. literary history.. Oddly enough, he would. own. to. to this Catholic university expecting to find. to survive graduate school, with. analysis. them. not to help them clarify their religious. a religiously oriented education here.. own almost. to lead. to think about literature. somewhat uncomfortable about. the students have. is. religious experience,. like to tell his students. once much. like Stephen's,. about. how. his. has changed. over the years, and suggest to them that perhaps this was part of the reason Joyce insisted on readers. book a is. portrait of the artist as. remembering. that. he called. his. a young man. But he decides that. probably better not to get into anything like. this,. it. so he answers. the student's question as factually as he can. Afterwards he has the. nagging sense that the class was not one of his better ones.. Third example: Talking to one another. There. is. a meeting of the Jesuit community before dinner in. the Jesuit residence.. About. forty people are present.. logian has delivered a conference. and. MA. 5. visiting theo-. on the relationship between prayer. social justice. In the brief discussion. unordained Jesuit doing an. A. program. which follows a young, in religious. education says.

(16) that. from talking. to his fellow students he has. conscious of the injustice that. many women. he has been struggling. for example.. An. increasingly. experience in the Church and. in his prayer to. own response should be—to an. become. understand what his. issue like the ordination of. women,. older priest, a retired theology professor, speaks. next and says emphatically that. is. it. young man's response should be:. very clear to him what the. He. should acknowledge the teaching. of the Church and of the Holy Father, and meditate on that, because. obedience. The. is. what being a Jesuit. rector recognizes. about.. is all. someone. else,. whose remarks go. in a. The young scholastic, angry at being put down man, carries on the argument in his head; later, having. different direction.. by the older. a drink with two close friends, he jokes about the older man's tude.. The. older. lastic personally,. man. too. is. silently angry,. not so. much. atti-. at the scho-. but at the whole direction the theology department. has taken, the religious-education program especially,. at the training. of scholastics these days, and at the crazy ideas about prayer and. obedience their spiritual directors. let. them. get. away. with.. He. too. some headshaking about the younger room. The rector, alone for a moment at. finds his friends afterwards, for. men. standing across the. the edge of the gathering, wonders what he should suggest after dinner, at the meeting of the committee which plans. community. meetings.. Fourth example: Symbolizing. The. staff of the Office of. disciplining the dormitories. it. Student Affairs. There. is. is. concerned about. on paper, but. a judicial process. tends to deal effectively only with the most serious infractions of. regulations,. and proving. culpability. is. a time-consuming and often. frustrating business. In trying to find a better. way of. of the problem, the staff inserts into the contract. all. getting hold. resident stu-. dents sign a preamble obliging students to "respect the Catholic and Jesuit tradition" of the university,. whose goals are. students intellectually" and "to foster in. them. values and a sense of social responsibility.". "to. ethical. develop. and. They take. its. religious. this. language.

(17) from the mission statement of the. directly. by the board of. trustees.. In the following academic year there students' behavior in the dorms, especially situation city. is. newly approved. university,. is. increased criticism of. on. The. football weekends.. a complex one, because the university. is. located in a. with several other colleges and universities, whose students. come and go on each. other's campuses,. and because frequently the. troublemakers are not even college students but youths from the surrounding neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the administration. under. is. pressure from parents and faculty and neighbors to do something. about the disturbances. After a weekend with a record number of incidents, the. dean of students summarily dismisses from one. parti-. dorm some two dozen students who, he has are among the key disrupters. In the letter an-. cularly troublesome. reason to believe,. nouncing their punishment, he refers to the contract they have signed and says that their behavior has been incompatible with "the Catholic and Jesuit tradition" of the university.. The. student news-. paper, while acknowledging the overall problems of the the dorm, takes. up the defense of the dismissed. "lifestyle" in. students.. An. editorial. the dean's action a flagrant violation of the students' right to. calls. a fair hearing, and says that this kind of administrative injustice all. the. and. more. is. regrettable in an institution "which calls itself Catholic. Jesuit.". As. all this is. proofs of the. new. going on, the Admissions Office. who. cover, printed in halftone,. on. it,. reviewing. edition of the brochure which will be sent to. every high-school student. cross. is. is. applies to the university.. On. the. a drawing of a gothic tower with a. along with a color photo of a smiling priest talking to. two students who are. sitting at. the bottom of the cover say:. computer terminals. The words across. "A contemporary education. in the. Catholic and Jesuit tradition.". The central issue may be language Language. is. not the only issue in these four situations. Indeed. the participants might not perceive that language In a sense, they. may be. right;. is. an issue. at all.. misunderstandings, personality con-. 7.

(18) and other. private agendas,. flicts,. assume. that all these. may be involved. But let us members of the appointments com-. factors. people— the. dean and the candidates, the professor and. mittee, the. his students. discussing Joyce, the younger and older Jesuits, the dean of students,. the newspaper editor, and the admissions staff-are. own. lucid It. What. authentic experience.. ficulty, I think, arises. from the. way? The. gets in their. language. fact that. is. modifies the relationships. power. to. communicate he deep. our willingness and. this point. we have in. may. to. one another.. expresses, validates,. and. one another. The roots of. its. who we are and each other. From. our experience of. share this with. ability to. of view, language. to. it. dif-. not simply a. medium through which we communicate messages. also constitutes us as communities;. in. honestly. and feelings which come out of. trying to express points of view their. all. well be the central issue in these. four troublesome situations.. Consider some of the ways language. fails. periences these people are trying to deal with. ferent expectations about. to mediate the ex-. They may have. dif-. what should be part of the discussion.. Thus, in the appointments committee Professor B. introduces a topic. which. freshman English. class. want to. lems, but the instructor. Or. and the students. his colleagues consider irrelevant;. they. may. is. talk. about their. own. in the. religious prob-. from the. reluctant to get too far. text.. lack a language to connect their personal religious. experience with their professional roles. Professor B., for instance, struggles unsuccessfully to articulate. why. a religious view of. should be germane to hiring a physicist; and structor does think of talking about his. own. when. life. the English in-. faith to his students,. he does not know of an appropriate language to use. Or they are not really listening to each other. In the Jesuit community meeting the younger and older. men. have different experiences and different. languages for expressing them; they can talk with friends, but in public discussion neither hears the other very well.. Or. they. make. problematic assumptions about what each other means. For example, the dean's interview with the physicist from St. Olaf s goes well. enough, but their assumptions about what each other means are untested;. if. probed, they might not really coincide. Conversely, in. 8.

(19) the interview with the other candidate, disagreement arises out of. quick assumptions about what each other means, whereas their positions. might actually have been acceptable to each other. mal way. if. in a mini-. Or. they could have been communicated successfully.. participants use words for their symbolic force but with. crete meaning. In the housing-contract dispute. little. the. con-. the parties use. all. the words "Catholic" and "Jesuit" as labels, but these labels cover. mean. such a wide spectrum of meaning that in practice they can quite different things to different people.. The admissions. office. is. doing the same kind of labeling, but the rhetoric of advertising. is. commonplace. in institutional publicity that the staff. be surprised to have. When. it. language. would probably. questioned.. fails,. the result. is. not communication but "noise.". This can happen anytime people talk to one another, and suggesting that. and. is. it. universities.. so. a problem only for Jesuits. who work. I. am. not. in colleges. But these four sample situations suggest that talking. about religion in a university setting today creates peculiar emergencies of language,. which weigh heavily in the debate about the iden-. of institutions which claim a religious character. If. tity. talk effectively. about that. identity,. then perhaps. we could find ways of would mean that we had made. it. is. we cannot. not effectively. real to us. If. talking effectively about. that. it. we work our way is. out of this impasse of language?. How. One way. can. to begin. by examining what seems to be an underlying and fundamental. split. II.. real for ourselves.. it,. between two. different kinds of language. we. use.. THE GAP. A talks. retreat preacher. I. heard years ago constructed a series of. around the words of a trainman on the London Underground. whose job. it. was. to. warn passengers. as they stepped. from the car. onto the platform: "Mind the gap!" The gap which Bellah and his colleagues focus on. is. the gap between the psychological language of. individual fulfillment, which. most Americans today use 9. to talk about.

(20) their private lives,. and the various fragmentary languages, rooted. in. Puritan biblical religion or in the Jeffersonian ideal of citizenship,. we. with which. seems to. talk to. each other about public. and. life,. it. shows up. about religious matters in the university.. need describing. in slightly different. The language of. subjectivity. On. Amerwhen we try to. one side of. gap. this. vividly. Its characteristics. terms from Bellah's, though.. a language which. is. more. or less suc-. ceeds in expressing the affective and cognitive dimensions of nificant personal experiences. Bellah calls. and certainly the pervasiveness personal fulfillment has. form of. and. gap. similar. exist in the discourse of Jesuits today, especially of. ican Jesuits in academic talk. A. issues.. it. made. trying to. grow. which interior experience. "therapeutic" language,. our culture of the psychology of. in. increasingly acceptable.. it. has had a long history and. women. it. But one. particularly familiar to. is. in their religious lives: the. is. sig-. men. language in. formulated and analyzed. With the revival. of directed retreats in the past thirty years, the increasing frequency of regular spiritual direction, and the growth of small communities. and prayer groups and faith-sharing has. become more and more. situations, this kind of. habitual as a. way. large. language. numbers of. Jesuits. deal with a considerable part of their experience.. Here tion. is. one contemporary example, an excerpt from a conversa-. between a. priest. and. his spiritual director, taken. and Connolly's The Practice of I. had. just. of mine, a .. .. .. When. cause. I. Spiritual Direction (pp. 76-77):. come back from. woman I. the funeral of the sister of a friend. in her early thirties. got back to the house. wanted. to. I. pray during the day.. wanted. And. from Barry. I. to. I. who had. died of cancer.. picked up the Bible be-. pray— I hadn't had a chance to. turned to Psalm 139. I've used 139. very frequently but this time as. I. God probing me and my resting places. read about. and knowing me, knowing my journeys and shaping my life, I found myself getting more depressed. I had a few distractions and then became a little curious about what was happening because the distractions didn't concern things that were really of interest to me. I realized that I might be avoiding saying to the Lord what I really felt, so I 10.

(21) found myself saying to him that he's taken woman who is doing very valuable work, living a good and happy life. And I found myself saying that he had taken my addressed him.. own. Agnes, just eight or nine months ago. ... forgotten how strong and fresh my feelings still were. sister,. What vocabulary. are the characteristics of this kind of language?. The. the language of everyday speech.. is. this. I. ized narratively, as a story. whose. I. had. The. details are organ-. parts unfold chronologically.. But. they are also organized by the purpose of the narrative, to explore. them. the speaker's feelings and ultimately to subject. to discernment.. In this open-ended process the arrangement of details. is. not logical. and subordinative; they are added as they occur to the speaker.. would be. difficult to. It. formulate a thesis for this speech. Focused on. the attempt to articulate a feeling,. it. acquires. accumulation of details which gradually. force from the. its. clarify the feeling.. This might be called the language of subjectivity, in the obvi-. ous sense that the speaker describes his. own. interior experience, but. he. also in the sense that in the struggle to express his feelings. own. achieves a greater sense of his. guage. is. "agonistic," to. use a term Walter. from. Literacy) to oral as distinguished. up to. faces. his situation. communicate the about. facts. moments. significant. wanted. I. depressed. and then became a. .. happening. ... .. .. .").. I. to.. realized.. The speech rhythms,. .. .. .. .. I. .. I. of this lan-. applied (in Orality. and. The speaker. print language:. and. identify. of the experience.. which come as surprising discoveries. it. .. Ong. and wrestles with himself to. Bible because .. The tone. identity.. ("I. He. notices. picked up the. found myself getting more little. curious about what was. found myself.. I. .. .. had forgotten. the abrupt transitions, the frequent short. sentences (even in this presumably edited version) mirror this struggle.. This effort would be implausible were. tions. and. on which. this. sincerity, the. kind of language. it. relies,. not for certain assump-. about. its. empathy and trustworthiness of the. the shared faith in God's action in their lives which. of the conversation. Note also that, though. it. version of subjective talk, this language, since gle. user's. candor. listener, is. and. the context. looks like an extreme it. puts personal strug-. and sympathetic assistance into the foreground, not only counts. 11.

(22) on but point. actually builds. Ong makes. up a sense of community between. its. users, a. about oral language generally.. The language of scholarly discourse. On. the other side of the gap. lies. the academic version of. Bellah's public language, the language of scholarly discourse. sider, for. Con-. example, a paragraph of academic prose, taken almost at. random from an. article in Theological Studies. It occurs. beginning of the essay, where. near the. defines one of the important terms. it. the author uses to discuss Catholic social teaching in the years after. Vatican. II.. Roman. Catholic social teaching of the. last. twenty years. may be characterized, then, as a strong sort of egalitarianism. Of course, such characterizations are only approximate. But, in general, strong forms of equality. do two. things. First, they. tend to require economic and social institutions which attempt to approximate equal allocation of resources as a. norm. By. comparison, weak theories of equality tend to allow more for. competing principles of. tract,. or. utility),. to permit. room. justice (e.g., inherited rights, con-. more. exceptions in the. name. of the. general welfare or special interest, and require less in the. way. of institutional support and readjustment to realize the equality of persons in society, stressing equality of opportunity and. formal procedural. justice. Secondly, strong. forms of equality. tend to require more in the way of substantial redistribution of material goods, establishing guaranteed welfare floors, socio-. and the like, than the weaker conceptions. In other words, strong forms of egalitarianism tend to hold that justice requires redistribution of wealth from rich to poor towards a mean.. economic. rights. The two most obvious abstract terminology. characteristics of this kind of language are. and. its. removed from any appeal. logical organization.. The words. its. are far. to the sensory or the experiential as a. basis for understanding them; they. demand. careful reflection. they assume a background of philosophical thinking.. and. The argument. tightly structured; the relationship of the propositions. could easily. be diagrammed, since qualification and subordination are important. 12. is.

(23) features of this kind of language. Thesis/evidence/conclusion structure of the. An tific,. whole. essay.. important feature of. dispassionate, rational.. values. it. shares with. It. open. part of. tone), that they will. and esteem it. kind of language. this. makes. assumes that. It. task. its. tone: scien-. certain assumptions about the. to persuasion (though "persuading". expertise.. is its. readers: that they too are searching for. its. truth, are its. the. is. be convinced by. is. definitely not. logical. argument. might be called the language of is. to disclose truths. objectivity;. and evidence about an. order of things which unbiased observers will acknowledge. This. is. primarily a written language;. show up most. visibly in the scholarly. its. distinctive features. book or. article.. But they. appear too in oral forms of academic discourse-the lecture. most obvious example.. And. I. is. the. suggest that the assumptions which. undergird this kind of language—about evidence, organization of. argument, vocabulary, and tone-become normative for academic talk generally.. The higher. levels of anyone's education. how. largely of learning. to read. habits have. worked. surprising that. its. and talking as. well. Jesuits are. whose professional. studies have. inevitably learned to. guage, in both. its. Gaps even within There are. and write. this language;. their. way. it. cannot be. into our thinking. no exception, and been. today consist. Jesuits especially. in secular universities. be proficient practitioners of. have. kind of lan-. this. written and oral forms.. scholarly discourse. limits,. of course, to talking about this as one lan-. guage. Different disciplines speak since the early nineteenth century. we know today came. it. in specialized forms. Indeed,. most of the academic. into existence. disciplines. by detaching pieces of subject. matter from their parental disciplines and developing languages suited to analyzing them. ingly. ogy,. These languages deal with subject matters increas-. remote from one another, describe them. in technical terminol-. and are more and more untranslatable from one. to another.. Like the languages Bellah finds Americans using to discuss public issues, they. in. no longer deal very. effectively with. common. experiences. terms the whole community can understand. Paradoxically there13.

(24) though the general features of scholarly language-its abstrac-. fore,. tion. from particular experiences,. sionate objectivity, clear thinking ics. its. logical organization,. its. argumentation—embody. evidentiary. dispas-. ideals of. and exact communication, the actual languages academ-. use are more and more opaque to each other, less and less. ligible to. ophy and the. common. broad. identity. itself. origins of the ideas. it. divorces. deals with. Ex-. it. identity,. and we are apt to picture. it. to our-. images and symbols. The language of the academic. from. ciplines abstracts. all this,. and achieves. expense of experiential richness. "strong". that, in aspiring. is. concrete, affectively toned, context-related, an aspect of. our whole subjective selves in. institutions.. limitation of this language. from the experiential is. such as the educational philos-. and objective mode of communication,. scientific. perience. issues,. and purposes of our. Another serious be a. intel-. anyone except experts, and therefore of limited usefulness. in dealing with. to. its. Its. clarity. and order. dis-. at the. broad categories (such as. and "weak" forms of egalitarianism) help the reader concepnuances of actual social programs would disap-. tualize the issue, but. pear into the either/or form of the distinction. The. first. kind of. language can render the highly concrete quality of personal experi-. ence but can't easily formulate a thesis about. guage achieves categorical actual experience.. It. clarity. it;. this. kind of lan-. by ignoring the irregular shape of. prescinds, ideally,. from the persons who use. the language, the contexts in which they speak, the feelings they. have about the subject or one another. content of the message leaves out. much. it. It. focuses mainly on the. wants to communicate. Unfortunately. of what matters to the people. who. this. are communica-. ting.. What In practice. are. we. to. make. we probably. of the gap between these two languages?. struggle along inside. it,. most of the. as. speakers do in the four examples above. But they do not handle this intermediate kind of language very well. They the other; they. fall. slip to. back on the language which. one side or. tries to articulate. inner experience descriptively or symbolically, or on the language. which attempts to deal with ideas. analytically. Each of these languages seems indispensable 14. and. categorically.. for a part of our lives,.

(25) and. if. we were. not trying to profess explicitly the religious dimen-. work perhaps we could go on compartmentalizing. sion of academic. our private experience and our professional. The modern. university,. lives in this. way.. however, does not allow us the luxury. of private accommodation. Northrop Frye, in The Critical Path, points. out the tension between the primary mythology (of "concern," he calls it). by which we organize our. our place in it-primary because. vision of a coherent world. it is. and of. both older in our history as a. people and more basic in our development as individuals-and the. secondary mythology (of "freedom") which leads us to analyze and interpret our beliefs rationally. and. scientifically.. The. creates. first. the imagined world where belief reconciles desire and fear; the. second leads us to it. criticize. our mythological conditioning, to subject. to the scrutiny of reason. expresses. itself typically in religious belief. "freedom" expresses. and. itself in. modern times. in. and empirical. its. verification.. and. "Concern". religious language;. philosophical and scientific language,. natural. home. is. the university.. Frye's point of view underscores the need for both a language. which originates in belief about and experience of the ultimate meaning of one's. life. and a language which originates. subject this experience. But. it. calls into. spoken in the. and belief to rational. in the impulse to. criticism. and. study.. question whether these two languages can both be. university;. indeed. it. implicitly challenges the. idea of a university with an overt religious identity. If the disparity between these two languages, then. we. we must. whole. accept accept that. in a university belief is relevant only to the personal lives of indi-. viduals,. and. that. what. is. studied and taught can only be treated in. the public language of critical inquiry.. Or we must. assign belief. concerns only to certain parts of the university— to the theology. department and the chaplaincy, for example—and absolve the the university of any responsibility for them. to find. The. rest of. only alternative. is. ways of making clear what the connections are between. religious experience. Frye,. it. is. true,. and academic. inquiry.. does not distinguish these two attitudes in. order to force them apart; for him their mutual tension. makes them. fruitful.. He. insists that in the "existential. 15. is. what. gap" between.

(26) the mythical and logical languages a transforming act of choice. we. available to us precisely because tension,. grasp the significance of the. an opportunity to construct imaginatively a society out of. our criticized beliefs (104-105).. that beliefs. may be. he. one of the unavoidable. show by example. says, "to. held and examined at the same time" (109). But. in practice is this to. be done?. the critical evaluation of belief sity. It is. clearly. "It is. responsibilities of educated people,". how. is. much more. is. why. easy to demonstrate. It is. central to the. work of the. univer-. demonstrate why the experience of. difficult to. believing should matter to the project of critical inquiry. Hardest of to devise a language. all is. Yet. if. we. don't. we. which successfully holds both together.. are fated to live with the polarizing and paraly-. zing consciousness of this gap in our claims for a university with a religious identity. I. find. would. about one attempt. ways of talking about these matters.. cause. it. because. III.. like to report. illustrates the difficulties. some. suggests. it. I. I. think. we have been. am it. familiar with to. instructive be-. considering and. useful lessons about what might work.. TRYING TO BRIDGE THE GAP The. ocean. at. Jesuit. community. at. Boston College has a house on the. some twenty miles south of Boston, a /ambling with a large stone fireplace which makes the main. Cohasset,. old structure. room cozy even on. a winter evening.. It. has long served for. summer. vacations and retreats and, increasingly, for winter meetings of. community, province, and national Jesuit groups and occasional dent and staff groups from Boston College. Those to pitch in their. own. and make dishes; the. of 1983 the Jesuit administrative-staff. their. beds, do the cooking, and. atmosphere. community members,. weekend discussion of which. own. who go. is. lay. there have. wash. exceedingly informal. In the. invited. and. some Jesuit,. stu-. fall. twenty-five faculty and. men and women,. for a. their experience of "working in a university. identifies itself as Catholic. and. Jesuit.". Over the following. two academic years, eight more of these discussions were held, and 16.

(27) nearly 180 laypeople and Jesuits had taken part in. them by the. spring of 1986.. Faculty weekends at Cohasset. We did not. began these meetings because of a sense. know how. we had. tract, self-conscious,. study in the early 1980s. to. Boston. at. it. seemed. dated, abs-. a one-way statement by Jesuits to others in. the university about the university's identity.. had more. we. put together a statement about. the Jesuit apostolate at B.C., but increasingly. each other about. work. to carry the discussion of our. College any further. In 1974. that as Jesuits. got a fair. common. number. A. community. self-. of Jesuits talking to. problems, but the substantive outcomes. do with tangible needs such as finances and building. repairs than with issues involved in working in a "Jesuit" university.. Talk about our work was only satisfactory when friends. and. in the small. weekends of the. reflection. community. communities, especially. and. as a whole,. it. occurred between. when. they met for. faith-sharing. In larger Jesuit groups, in it. And. was almost nonexistent.. in public. forums, such as university-wide planning groups, the language available to discuss the Catholic and Jesuit character of B.C. particularly. cumbersome,. that this discussion. cliched,. and impoverished. One factor was. seldom brought Jesuits and non- Jesuits together. for real conversation, except at either ties:. with close friends or in. There had been 1970s the Jesuit. when. efforts to. were. teaching, at a country inn at faculty only. At. series of. and a the. talk. late. about some. same time. weekend. the academic. discussions. on. Andover near Boston. These were. and focused on structured agendas which had. with curriculum and classroom matters, but style. bodies. a series of "Jesuit Evenings,". invited to dinner. was sponsoring a. possibili-. widen the discussion. In the. aspect of Jesuit history or spirituality. vice-president. extreme among the. official university. Community organized. lay colleagues. seemed. it. to. for. do. turned out that the. and the setting encouraged wide-ranging discussions,. people often talked rather personally about their. own. in. which. experiences of. teaching and invariably got on to the question of B.C.'s Catholic and Jesuit identity. This. seemed a promising phenomenon 17. to follow up, so.

(28) when we began. we. the discussions at Cohasset. ways of. tried to find. allowing people to talk, not about the idea of a Catholic or Jesuit. about the good and bad experiences they had had. university, but. working. in one.. own. Telling their. We. on the device of beginning the discussion by asking. hit. several people, to tell their. stories. first. own. a Jesuit and then three or four others, simply. stories. about their work. conversation never seemed to need any. Boston College. The. at. more priming than. this.. People talked candidly and often movingly about experiences which symbolized for them the extent to which their work gave expression to,. or sometimes frustrated, the values which meant the most in. their lives.. For most of us. much. this. was a new experience. Few of us had had. practice in talking to colleagues about our. work from the. point of view of the beliefs which motivate us at the deepest level of. our. And few. lives.. doing. this. of the Jesuits,. with non- Jesuits. At. was going on,. it. was tempting. I think,. No. they say. it. became. at. we. others are. doubt there. understand what. to interpret this aspect of the discus-. more. Some. people. reticent. some truth that more is. is. clearer, I think,. style of talking.. that. it,. in trying to. first,. sion as a matter of personal style:. and are good. had had the experience of. and general. to this.. in. But as time went on,. involved here than just a. This kind of discussion makes real the community. than communicate a message about an issue;. it. weekends talked. this. we. started to talk.. way, and not. experience religious, but. many. all. who. did called this shared. did so quite explicitly, and. the discussion, however inchoate and halting,. what matters experientially ships of. in. our. lives,. empathy and understanding of. And when. the discussion. is. inclusive. 18. re-. Not everyone on these. these people were from quite different faith backgrounds.. when. more. builds an intersubjec-. which changes the way we existed and the way we. lated to each other before. that. what. share in theory. Talking about our deepest selves does. tive reality. way. like talking this. is. some It. of. seems. about. new relationwhat we have in common.. it. puts us into. enough. to admit the religious.

(29) dimension of people's experience, tity". we can. of the institution that. people said that. this. becomes an aspect of the. it. talk this way. In fact, several. kind of conversation. we. identity. may be what. most. is. Boston College.. characteristic about a university like. However, the shared. when. discovered. talking ex-. and. perientially about the personal wellsprings of our convictions. commitments was prone quality of. dorm. riculum, and even. to fragmenting. hiring procedures,. life,. "iden-. more so when we. when we. talked about the. and the content of the cur-. how we. talked about. should deal. educationally with the central societal issues of our day: nuclear. armament, economic and. more contentious and. and the. justice issues, abortion,. like.. A. adversarial tone entered the discussion. People. reverted to familiar positions, trotted out from. them on well-known. hobbyhorses, brandished their analyses of problems.. Why?. I. suspect. we are used to dealing with these subjects in language much more like the language of scholarly discourse than the language which reveals inner experience. This is the language we normally that. in faculty gatherings,. committee meetings,. the public world at large. in this language,. and. it. We. alters the. perceptibly the relationships. From. cannot. in. our academic writing, in. resist dealing. with. some matters. tone of the discussion and. among. use. shifts. those involved in the discussion.. diverse backgrounds. The faculty and adminhomogeneous institution such as. This should not have been unexpected. istrative staff of. even a relatively. Boston College come from quite diverse backgrounds, and our values have been formed by experiences of family and place and culture. which often overlap but seldom coincide completely. Even among Catholics this issues. makes. is. increasingly the case, as public debate about current. clear.. added expertise. To. these predictable differences education has. in quite specialized areas, so that. authorities about something. we. all. tend to be. and to speak languages which do not. readily translate into the dialects of other disciplines. This. true. the. no matter what we were. more. true. when. talking about, but. the two poles. we. it. is. likely to. be. all. are trying to connect are the. personal experiences, religious or otherwise, with which 19. would be. we. identify.

(30) our most deeply. felt values,. and the abstractly formulated philosoph-. of institutional and cultural. ical issues. inquiry—with. its. life.. The language. precise and abstract terminology,. its. of critical. canons of. empirical evidence and logical argument— translates poorly the existential experiences out of. IV.. and love grow.. highs and lows of the Cohasset discussions. explicable. if. we look. nication, especially. to. faith. THE STRUCTURE OF COMMUNICATION The. is. which. said but. on the. if. closely at. we. what goes on. focus not so. in. much on. become more. any act of commuthe content of what. structural elements of the situation. go unnoticed. Any one of these may. in fact. which are apt. be more central to. the success or failure of the communication than the message. Seen together they force us to attend to. just. simple acts of communication actually are.. known useful. itself.. how complex even. Roman. Jakobson's well-. analysis of these pragmatic aspects of languages offers a. schema. for sorting out. some. of these factors.. ELEMENTS OF A COMMUNICATION ACT context. addresser. -. message. addressee. contact. code. Consider. first. the two most obvious elements of the communica-. tion situation, the parties involved. If. we encounter. we. focus. on the. ADDRESSER,. the "emotive" aspect of any communication,. how. it. ex-. presses the speaker's feelings. This involves what writers often call "tone," the attitude. toward the subject and toward the audience 20.

(31) which a communication conveys. In sensitive. situations, with subject. matter that carries heavy emotional weight, the tone of a communication can be crucial.. The. community. older Jesuit in the. or perhaps the appointments-committee. member who. discussion,. questions what. being a Catholic has to do with being a physicist, stops discussion before. it. can even. start,. Cohasset meetings. significant. On. and negative.. feelings are strong at the. with a tone which says that the speaker's. meaning. the other hand, the. who spoke. in their. work or. it. in their religious lives estab-. easier for others to follow them.. the discussion. than what. it. is. is said,. conceivable that the tone. when. people. personally about experiences of. lished a tone which invited sympathetic listening. of making. first. At. and had the. effect. certain points in. may be more. important. the expression of the speaker's feelings. is. the central fact of the communication.. Focusing on the. ADDRESSEE. emphasizes the "conative" function. of a communication. Persuading, commanding, imploring, and so forth. may. all. be the primary focus of the message. This. the starting. is. point of traditional rhetoric, the strategy of using language designed to affect a hearer.. No. message, however innocent,. is. without a. rhetorical character, but suspicion of an explicitly rhetorical intention. often colors the. way a message. is. received, so that the relationship. of addressee to addresser often bypasses the message itself and. becomes the likely to. central issue in the communication. This. happen when a speaker does not. the message in. much. especially. spell out the content of. detail but has a very clear rhetorical inten-. tion—as, for example, in the. way. the different parties in the dor-. mitory-discipline controversy use the. One. is. words "Catholic" and. "Jesuit.". of the dangers in constantly using terms like these for their. symbolic force, unsupported by discussion of their concrete meaning, is. that addressees sensitive to the inadequacy of the terminology. may. focus cynically on the intention of the addresser, and that. becomes the substance of the communication. What the speaker judges the listener's state of mind or feelings to be can have a. determining effect on what. is. communicated.. And. the addressee's. assumptions about the speaker's attitude toward the addressee can also govern the nature of the communication. Prejudices. 21. and stereo-.

(32) types are very obvious dangers in both directions.. seemed. cribing the conditions which. discussions at Cohasset. freedom to say. had. At these. it.. best. moments. the "conative" aspects of. himself or herself the object of. felt. what Jakobson. calls. a. a crucial but often unnoticed. itself,. CODE,. a particular system of meanings. which the addresser and addressee refer to. and. interpret, to. in order to formulate. encode and decode, the message. itself.. A. code. on shared experiences and shared assumptions about the. rests. icance and value of these experiences.. and key images learned by. its. Consider. users.. It is. embodied. signif-. in a vocabulary. users over time, and probably in a. story they share about themselves.. who. were genuinely. consider the structural elements which constitute the. meaning of the communication is. most successful. else's rhetoric.. When we one. that people. of des-. and wanted to give them the. to say. communication were low; no one anyone. to result in the. would be to say. interested in what others. One way. Church members are great code-. how much meaning. certain phrases imply for those. wield them ("authentic magisterium," "the people of God," "theol-. ogy of. liberation," "being slain in the Spirit," "ecclesia. how. reformanda") and. who do. little. semper. significance they convey to listeners. not share the code. Academics love codes too, in their. own. disciplines ("intertextuality," "countertransference," "negative entropy,". and so. forth). and. promoting the mystique of their business gener-. in. ally (try to assign a. determinate meaning to "liberal education" the. next time you see. in a mission statement).. it. Codes are helpful. to their users in proportion to the. they enable them to leave unsaid.. They are dangerous. amount. for precisely. same reason. Code failures may not even be noticed, and speakers may incorrectly assume that they are using words in the same way. The dean and the candidates, the physics department's hiring committhe. tee, the all. English professor, and the parties to the dormitory dispute. seem. to have their. university. is.. What. own. versions of what a "Catholic" and "Jesuit". the younger Jesuit. as unintelligible to the older Jesuit as is. to the younger. problem. man.. in a rapidly. A. means by. "prayer". is. probably. what he means by "obedience". particularly troublesome version of a. changing institutional setting. 22. is. to take for. code.

(33) granted a code once widespread, as someone. who. has been around a. Catholic college for a long time might do in talking to a newcomer.. These examples suggest how pervasive codes can be. Our. of belief.. religious sensibilities are deeply rooted,. in the area. formed out of. childhood lessons, ceremonies, hymns, customs, and perhaps years of. The language code which accompanies. schooling.. often so ingrained that. more. influence training. is. eludes our conscious attention, and. it. of our discussion than. we suppose. can. it. or desire. Jesuit. a particularly vivid instance of an education in a code,. and we can. we. this sensibility is. fall. commonplace. into instances of code-language so. We. scarcely notice them.. often talk to our colleagues about. seem. things like our "apostolate" or our "ministry," which. we do from. guish what. where other people. that. mere. their. jobs.. We. one another.. just talk to. to distin-. "share" (intransitively). And we. face problems. they presumably do not, such as "inculturation" and "collaboration." "Faith-and-justice". is. now an. all-purpose. noun and. adjective,. and. become a verb if needed; it is much handier than the "men for others" and the vestigial "whole man." These. could probably. now. sexist. terms flourish because they are handy shorthand formulas for larger ideas, but they if. that. depend on a shared agreement about. agreement cannot be counted on, the language becomes an. obstacle to genuine communication.. When. code. example, "What does. This suggests one thing. we. how we. A. all. lot. the communication. hear. me. is. of time. the devices by which. well enough?"),. likely to be.. learned over and over at Cohasset about. is. Some. some. we. historical. and. going to have to be spent. understand the terminology. the act of communication.. itself. word mean?"). The more problematic. Another aspect of any communication. CONTACT,. for the initiated.. messages often become. whose codes come laden with heavy. experiential baggage:. finding out. this. succeed only in giving. on the language of the code. more metalingual. discussing topics. may. difficulties are recognized,. metalingual, focusing explicitly. the code, the. It. whose messages are. the impression of a mandarinate. (for. their meanings;. we. situation. are using.. Jakobson. calls. establish, prolong, or discontinue. of these are strategies ("Can you. are ritualized formulas ("Hello?. 23. How.

(34) are you?"),. some are ways of. you see what. mean?". I. sustaining or confirming attention ("Do. "Uh-huh.").. In a wider sense, contact might be said to involve such matters as the setting. and atmosphere. in. which communication occurs, since. these clearly have a bearing on the psychological relationship of. addresser and addressee.. Does the. discussion about the Jesuit identity. of the institution occur during a committee meeting about. new. ap-. pointments? Over lunch in the faculty dining room? After dinner in. room? The. the Jesuit community's recreation. between the. participants,. involvement and interest, This. is. quality of the contact. and the perceptions each has of the other's will often turn. on circumstances. like these.. one of the central lessons of the history of discussing. the Catholic and Jesuit identity of Boston College over the past few. The document. years.. issued by the Jesuit. a certain level of contact. talks. on. The. community. in. 1974 achieved. dinners of the late 1970s, with then-. different aspects of Jesuit history, put this contact. The weekends. face-to-face basis.. at. on a. Andover, though they were not. sponsored by the Jesuit community, provided the atmosphere and. some of. the leisure necessary to get a. little. matters. But a distinctively different step. meetings.. When. you. invite. deeper into substantive. was taken. at the. Cohasset. people into your home, cook dinner for. them, and begin the discussion by talking frankly about your work, what has cheered and distressed you about it. and demonstrate. will turn out,. others talk about their tially different level. own. that. you are. it,. own. how you hope. willing to listen to. experience, then you talk at a substan-. of contact than. when you argue. in a. committee. meeting or exchange polite conversation over drinks.. Another of the is. the. CONTEXT,. constitutive factors in. a term Jakobson uses for the "referent" in a mes-. sage, the thing (idea, word,. about.. Numerous messages. to their subjects,. much to. be. and so. forth). which the message. is. in daily life are oriented unproblematically. and then the element of reference does not need. Talk about religion in the university, though, can be. attention.. problematic in. an act of communication. this respect.. at issue is. In two of the cases above, what seems. what kind of subject matter can be appropriately. talked about in a university which calls itself Catholic and Jesuit.. 24.

(35) Professor G. does not. know how and. students' religious beliefs. his. far. he ought to go. own. religious experience. And. subject matter of class discussion.. in letting his. be the. the physics-department hiring. committee, indeed the dean and the prospective candidates, in a sense find themselves similarly at odds over the kinds of subject. matter that can be admitted to their conversations. Clearly, whatever. agreement may have been operative as to what could and should be talked about in this kind of setting in this kind of university has. broken down. Such a breakdown may be an important factor on a. number is. of levels of academic. talked about (when. and what. is. life,. some of. formal and informal, where what. the parties think. not talked about (when. some. think. good many. issues. and. silent factors affecting a. it. should not be). it. should be). relationships.. may be The. seemed unconstrained by any. best of the discussions at Cohasset. assumptions about allowable subject matter; indeed the expectation. was established most personal professional. even ought to be, about the. that the talk could be,. religious experience. and the most public. issues of. life.. What can be this analysis of the. learned from the discussions at Cohasset and from. problems of talking about religious experience. in. the university? Perhaps the following propositions can serve both as. a temporary conclusion of this inquiry and as a set of. who wants to continue his own experience.. dations which anyone. might. V.. test against. kind of discussion. SOME CONCLUSIONS 1.. try. this. recommen-. We. cannot avoid facing the problem of language when we. to talk about religious experience in. our work.. It. forces itself. The Jesuit version of Bellah's gap is that the professional languages we speak in our work often do not communicate the religious meaning of our lives, while the language we use on us too. insistently.. to describe our personal experience of in the professional exists. more. worlds. we move. meaning does not function well. in.. In the university the problem. acutely because the specialized languages of each dis-. 25.

(36) opaque. cipline are increasingly. of institutional success are. one another, because the standards. to. more and more defined. by professional and economic considerations, and. terms dictated. in. especially because. the traditional code in which the religious identity of the institution. was formulated no longer convincingly communicates a large. or. numbers of colleagues who do not share our. who have no. reality to the. religious beliefs. personal experience of educational institutions which. claim a religious character. Jesuits might plausibly feel that they represent a vanishing. does not crisis, is. exist,. though,. the language to talk about something. reality. If. perhaps the thing. may be. today— in our culture. does not. exist. anymore. The. a healthy one to work through. In any case. The. not peculiar to us.. itself. it. characteristic feature of using any language. church communities, in. at large, in politics, in. universities—is that terms have to. be questioned, presuppositions. analyzed, propositions agreed on, conclusions tested against experience.. It is. not necessarily a reason for discouragement that an easily. available public language for talking about religion does not exist. anywhere, even inside the Catholic community.. As Frye. suggests, the. gap also creates an opportunity, to find for the university. linguistic. a language which does justice to both belief and critical inquiry.. group of people convinced that something trying to find. making. it. we work. ways of talking about. A. a reality.. it,. corollary of this. language. at inventing the. ious identity of the institutions. important,. is. A. who keep. are likely to succeed in first. we need. we work. in,. conclusion might be:. If. to talk about the relig-. we. are likely to discover. that this identity really exists.. There are. 2.. which we. may. realities. still. hidden. recover.. in the. languages we already speak,. At Cohasset one of the. participants said. to the Jesuits, "The Spiritual Exercises are the source of your spirituality,. but they are a hidden treasure.. about them from you.". When. Society in the 1950s and 60s, Society's spirituality novitiate. think about. seems. to. me. would. like to. my own that. we absorbed. the. living the highly structured life of the. The way we. taught to pray. hear more. education in the. and the scholasticate than by getting very deeply. Spiritual Exercises.. we were. more by. it. I. We. talked, dressed, acted,. may have been 26. into the. and the way. the externalization of the.

(37) fundamental principles of the Exercises— I daresay anyone thought about. it. would have said. so,. and probably many. who in authority. did—but the actual annual retreats were often formalities to be gotten through rather than occasions of dramatic personal spiritual. growth.. The changes, indeed. structured exterior religious leled,. the disappearance of this collective,. life. and early 70s paral-. in the late 60s. however, the revival in the practice of giving the Exercises. one on one, the spread of. interest in spiritual direction,. and the. study and teaching of spirituality and particularly of the Ignatian tradition. It is as though, without the richly structured externals. which supported religious clarity of principle. life. in the 50s. and. was needed-perhaps so. earlier,. we could find new moment offers a. that. and work. The present. structures for our lives. a compensating. similar situation in the religiously identified university.. seems to be:. When. people can happily. The. institutional life is highly structured live. it. rule. and. stable,. without having to scrutinize and verify. the principles very deeply in their. own. experience, but. tional life changes dramatically, individuals. about their intentional commitments. But. need. when. institu-. to. be clear-sighted. we have. diverse commit-. ments because we have been formed by diverse experiences and we about them in languages which. talk. Furthermore,. we have. languages. own. we have. authenticity as. And. to. make. make. different claims. on. us.. the working assumption that the. learned to use in our professional lives have then-. ways of formulating. realities in. human. experi-. we would insist that the language of the Spiritual Exercises also has its own authenticity as a way of formulating our experience. There is a profound vision there of what true human ence.. freedom put. is,. to. It. certainly. and of what worthwhile purposes. was not meant. to. that. freedom can be. be a private treasure, though. Our pres-. ent situation challenges us to uncover the realities concealed in. all. these languages which have formed our experience, to translate our religious vision into terms intelligible in the secular in. academic culture. which we work. 3.. The men and women we work with face the same problem. we do of lives.. clarifying the spiritual. Jesuits. may be. a. little. dimensions of. their professional. more nervous about 27. articulating a.

(38) public rationale for our work, but the need for a spiritual vision of. one's. life. would seem. to. be a. universal. After. all,. our colleagues. have also experienced the collapse of the traditional codes which. once undergirded the values of so many. among them. And many. institutions, universities. work with us. of them clearly chose to. because an educational institution with a religious identity was congenial to their. own. any case,. ideals. In. all. of them, whether explic-. interested in the religious dimensions of education or not, are. itly. by changes. affected. in the institutional life of a university. does claim to have a religious orientation. In. and with the very small number of single college or university,. it. Jesuits. kind of situation,. this. who now work. many. any. in. ought to be clear that Jesuits are no. longer in sole control of the terms of the discussion that. on about the. which. identity of these institutions. It. is. going. is. a conversation with. and there. voices, speaking out of diverse experiences,. is. no. point in downplaying the possibility of real disagreements. Nevertheless,. seems to be a lesson of our discussion. it. especially at Cohasset that that. we. we communicate. at. best. Boston College and. when we assume. are going to find areas of agreement. Jesuits should recog-. nize this as a version of Ignatius's "presupposition" at the beginning. of the Spiritual Exercises, that everyone should be "more ready to. condemn it." Faith commuemphasized what separates them from each other,. save his neighbor's proposition than to nities. have often. but this attitude. is. not very effective in pluralist cultures or in. pluralist institutions like the. who. ally. contemporary. Those. university.. especi-. study any subject ought to be interested in what they can. learn from others' experience of. it.. This tolerance. as relativism or indifference, though.. Nor. is. is. not the. same. simply reporting personal. experience a substitute for the hard work of clarifying the languages. we. use to talk about. one another. is. a. But the assumption that we can learn from. it.. mark. of a certain religious maturity.. James Fowler's. description of spiritual development, in The Stages of Faith, clear that there says, "I. ferent. own. won't. is. is. a kind of adolescent relativism which in effect. criticize you, if. the tolerance of. beliefs are. makes. you don't. criticize. me.". Quite. dif-. someone who knows how hard won. and assumes. that the. 28. same. is. his. true of others and.

(39) therefore. them. is. interested in what part of the truth he can learn. mean many. (186-187). "Collaboration" can. challenging kind as the genuine. The. 4.. perience.. may be. to accept our colleagues' spiritual experience. best starting point for the discussion. personal ex-. is. Concrete experiences have an irreducible. not have had them or. They evade easy striking facts. in his. that. felt. categorizing,. abstract analysis. work,. quality, a validity tells. me. about. cannot say that he should. I. way about them. They are. facts.. and are often illuminating and peris. was one of the most. not. This. about the Cohasset discussions. Academics are far too. and. skilled at talking glibly. reach; what. When someone. be argued away.. happy or painful experiences. where. The most. things.. complement of our own.. that cannot easily. suasive. from. analytically. none of us does enough of. about every issue within is. talk about. what we. really. believe about our lives, at least not often in a tone which invites. the other participants in the conversation to do the same. Jesuits do. not do this. much even among. lay colleagues.. some. at. Still,. we do. themselves;. it. even. less with. point the discussion will languish. cannot connect personal experience with the public issues,. we. tional or cultural, that. live. if. we. institu-. with and are used to dealing with in. our specialized languages. Which leads to the following conclusion. 5.. We. cannot avoid the work of deliberately scrutinizing the. codes and languages we habitually use. well in one group. may. not be understood at. hear them. This. is. not work at. all,. or. Languages which work very. all in. may be. another.. The codes may. misunderstood, by those. who. true of both the language which develops out of. religious experience. and the language academics use to. talk. about. we want to untangle the puzzle of talking about university, we cannot be afraid of calling these privi-. their disciplines. If. religion in the. leged languages into question. Indeed, few things characterize con-. temporary culture more clearly than the debate about the conditions. and even the. women do ests.. possibility of. communicating;. not join this discussion,. it. will. if. religious. men and. be shaped by other. inter-. This study and criticism of language and the experiences they. deal with belongs properly in the university, because. know. a lot. more about. we need. to. the histories of the particular religious and. 29.

(40) we. disciplinary languages. use,. where they. originated,. verged from one another, what connections they. how. themselves,. how. them,. still. how. they. di-. have among. they shaped the experiences which gave rise to. they modify our understanding of our. own. experience. now, what they enable us to say and what they prevent us from saying.. And. language. these kinds of questions cannot be dealt with only by. they need the attention of scholars in every. specialists;. discipline.. But study and research are not a substitute. sion. just as the discussion. itself,. testing in the lives of. them. out, patiently 6.. this. The. and with whatever. identity. of a. characteristic of. not a substitute for. men and women who. are committed to working. effort. it. takes.. have. religious university is precisely to. From one. kind of discussion.. more. is finally. for the discus-. point of view, nothing should be. an universitas than the presence of people of. widely different backgrounds and quite specialized expertises and. ways of talking about them. Nor should. it. modes of. justice to the lived experien-. analysis will not. ces at the center of their. do complete. lives.. be surprising that. So perhaps what. of a university with a religious identity today. is. is. most. distinctive. not that. repre-. it. sents the doctrine of a particular religious group, but that. and values precisely the kind of discussion where ence. is. all. many. not as one of the. it. faith with. things that might. go on. its. characteristic interest.. in. commu-. a university, but as the central activity which the university nity thinks of as. sponsors. religious experi-. brought into dialogue with "secular" knowledge,. critical inquiry,. their. Rather than be a matter. of private concern, or the business of a few specialists, the dialogue. of religion and culture should stand in the foreground of our attention. Clearly this. cupied with. it.. does not. A. mean. university. is. that everyone needs to. be preoc-. not a church. All sorts of inquiry go. on there which do not need authenticating from a religious point of view. But perhaps it is not a bad shorthand formula to say that in a pluralist. and overtly secular culture a. which keeps open the faith,. lines of. religious university. is. one. communication about the meaning of. keeps finding better languages in which to carry on the discus-. sion. If. an authentically Catholic or Jesuit voice. discussion, then. it. is. is. prominent. in the. plausible to identify the university as Catholic. 30.

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