Teaching and Living Practical Reasoning:



Teaching and Living Practical Reasoning:

The Role of Catholic Social Thought in a Catholic University Curriculum

Todd David Whitmore, University of Notre Dame

My task is to address the role of Catholic social thought in a Catholic university curriculum. Stated in brief, my response is that the role of Catholic social thought in such a setting is to provide a tradition-centered context within which students can learn and engage in practical reason. Now, that sounds very erudite, even stuffy. However, I submit that it concerns even the smallest and seemingly mundane of our actions in everyday life. In what follows, I aim to show how this is the case.

I will do so first by giving a brief account of a tradition of practical reason that extends from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas to modern Catholic social teaching. This is the tradition-centered context that is most fitting for Catholic universities. Then I will set out what I think are the primary obstacles to this tradition of practical reasoning being engaged at Catholic colleges and universities. This will allow me, in the final section, to discuss avenues of programmatic and pedagogical response that might overcome or at least partially offset the obstacles to practical reasoning.

I. The Aristotelian-Thomist Tradition of Practical Reason

It may seem odd to begin by talking about a mode of reasoning when addressing Catholic social thought. Most persons have in mind a constellation of substantive concepts like the common good, human rights, and the option for the poor. These concepts are indeed crucial.

I would argue, however, that to teach and learn Catholic social thought at any but the most superficial level requires teaching and learning practical reasoning. Without the engagement of the concepts via this way of thinking, the substance of Catholic social thought can only be sustained via ecclesiastical and curricular fiat, and we have seen the negative repercussions of such an approach with regard to the sexual teaching.

It is best to begin with the distinction between theoretical or speculative reason on the one hand and practical reason on the other, which is foundational in Aristotle’s thought.5 Speculative reason involves demonstrative knowledge of things that do not change through analysis of first principles or causes and deduction from such principles. Practical reason seeks to guide variable human practice or action (praxis) through a mode of analysis which is more dialectical in form and does not have the same precision (akribeia) as theoretical reason.6 The primary audience of practical reason is the ordinary educated citizen who is involved in the various fields of civil society, and the mode of reasoning takes account of this fact. Dialectics both traces and addresses the patterns of political and economic conversation in civil society far better than the demonstrative syllogism. The task of civil society -- the polis -- itself is to facilitate lives of arete – variously translated “goodness,” “virtue,” and “excellence.”7 Much of Aristotle’s Politics is taken up with the identification of which regimes – which patterns of civil society – best contribute to the practice of virtue. In short, practical reason is that form of reason best suited for reflection in civil society on how to arrange society itself such that persons and society can flourish.

Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas also distinguishes between theoretical or speculative and practical reason. Speculative reason regards “necessary things, which cannot be otherwise than they are,” and its conclusions “like the universal principles, contain truth without fail.” Practical reason, in contrast, “is busied with contingent matters, about which human actions are concerned.” In “matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the general principles.”8 Thomas also engages practical reason to pose the question of which forms of civil society foster the practice of virtue.9 Where Thomas differs from Aristotle is in his location of the quest for goodness in the theologically interpreted neo-platonic context of exitus et reditus, all things coming from (created in the image of) God and returning to God.10

Pope Leo XIII made Thomas the official theologian of the Roman Catholic church in Aeterni patris (1879). With Rerum novarum (1891), Leo is also responsible for initiating what is commonly referred to as “modern Catholic social teaching,” and it is primarily in the social documents that he continues the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason. Shifts towards a more dialectical model in the teaching since Leo has brought with it even greater felicity to this tradition.11 One finds all of the identifying marks of practical reason. The aim is to direct human praxis. In Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987) John Paul II recalls words uttered by Paul VI in Populorum Progressio (1967): “The social doctrine has once more demonstrated its character as an application of the word of God to people’s lives and the life of society, as well as to the earthly realities connected to them, offering ‘principles of reflection,’ ‘criteria for judgment,’ and ‘directives for action.’”12 The reasoning in the social documents addresses areas of life that are subject to change and to less precision than speculative reason, areas of life where there is, in John XXIII’s words, a “pronounced dynamism” such that the “requirements of justice is a problem which will never admit of definitive solution.”13 Like Thomas, modern Catholic social teaching sets practical reasoning in the context of the quest for the good society -- one that facilitates the practice of virtue -- understood in terms of all things being created by and returning to God. In Pius XI’s words, “Society is for man, that he may recognize this reflection of God’s perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the creator.”14

Obstacles: The Eclipse of Practical Reason?

The next question is that of what obstacles there might be to integrating Catholic social thought and teaching into the curriculum. My comments here reflect the experience of two programmatic efforts that I direct. The first is the University of Notre Dame’s own Program in Catholic Social Tradition.15 In 1994, a small group of faculty began to meet to discuss the possibility of developing a program. Our concerns were twofold. First, Notre Dame, too, was marked by the lack of knowledge of the tradition. Second, Notre Dame graduates go on to assume positions of significant power and authority. Such positions include National Security Advisor, Secretary of the Interior, congressional representative, Judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, New Mexico, and Attorney General of California. There are also Chairs, Presidents and/or CEOs of numerous companies, including Texaco, Motorola, Bank of America Illinois, Haggar Company, Leo Burnette Advertising Agency, Mobil Corporation, and Dean Witter. The question which concerned us was this: How do our graduates understand their public responsibilities?

In 1996 the faculty group asked me to direct both the effort to see the program proposal through the necessary university committees and the program itself once approved, and I agreed to do so. The center of the program is a fifteen credit interdisciplinary minor or “concentration.” We are now in the second year, and have twenty-six students committed to the program and twenty-one more that have indicated serious interest. At this growth rate, we will soon be one of the three largest interdisciplinary minors at Notre Dame.16

The second programmatic effort that I direct is a project, funded by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, titled “Teaching Catholic Social Teaching.” The aim of the project is to facilitate the development of programs in Catholic social teaching at twelve Catholic colleges and universities. The project had fifty-one serious inquiries and thirty-seven applications for the twelve openings. In addition to quality, I selected participants based on diversity with regard to region, location (urban, suburban, rural), ethnic and racial make-up, wealth of the school, size, charism (for instance, Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian), and academic discipline (e.g., sociology, psychology, law, political science, business administration, and economics as well as theology). The schools are representative of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States generally. Persons applied by submitting proposals of the programmatic efforts they plan to undertake at their own schools. Villanova, with a proposal from Jack Doody and William Werpehowski, is a participant.17

The Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project is built around two summer meetings. The first, held in summer 2000, consisted of discussion of the just-mentioned proposals. In 2001, we will gather again to discuss which aspects of the proposals worked well and which did not, and attempt to discern if there are any patterns that can be addressed in a directed way. The primary outcome of the project will be the programs themselves, but I, in consultation with the participants, will write a white paper detailing our findings that will be sent to the American bishops and made available to educators at Catholic colleges and universities across the United States.

Already in the first meeting of the project participants, patterns of both problems and possibilities began to emerge. In what follows, I will draw upon what I have said thus far about practical reason to provide an interpretation of the key obstacles to the teaching and learning of Catholic social teaching in Catholic higher education. Here, I hope to show how resistance or non-responsiveness to the introduction of Catholic social thought and teaching into the curriculum is more a matter of competing modes of reasoning than the specific substance of that teaching. I organize the obstacles typologically: practice without reason, reason without practice, and practice for the wrong reason. No school is a pure type; indeed, there are universities that combine the types.

– Practice without reason: Unlike early Catholic primary and secondary schools, many Catholic colleges and universities served not only to provide a separate school system, but also to facilitate Catholic assimilation into American public life by training students for specific professions. The modes of reasoning taken on were the modes assumed by the professions. Segments of these schools taught and continue to teach what ancient Greek philosophy called techne, where the concern is technical accuracy, sometimes at the expense of a broader civic mindedness.

The University of Notre Dame was an early participant in the formation of such professional schools and remains active in it today. It therefore provides a helpful lense through which to provide a bit more detail on this type. The Colleges of Engineering and Business are good examples both for their similarities and for their differences. The engineering majors are so extensive in the number of courses they demand that, depending on the precise major, once students have completed general university requirements there is insufficient room in their curriculum to do an interdisciplinary minor if the student wishes to graduate in four years.18 There is, to be exact, one elective left once university and major requirements are met. This is in contrast to majors in the College of Arts and Letters. There are Arts and Letters students in the Catholic Social Tradition interdisciplinary minor who are double majors. There are also students who are pre-med -- that is, in the College of Science -- in the CST program. There is one pre-med student in Notre Dame’s “Arts and Letters Pre-Professional” program who plans to work with the poor and has crafted a self-designed major in “Social Justice and Poverty Issues” by supplementing the Catholic Social Tradition interdisciplinary minor with courses in economics on the causes of poverty.

Much of the design of the engineering majors comes from external pressure in the form of accrediting boards. If the role of the College of Engineering is simply that of the assimilation of students into the way that engineering is understood and practiced in the United States, then the demands of the accrediting boards remain unquestioned. In Notre Dame’s case, however, there is more than pressure from external agencies. Indeed, the accrediting boards are re-examining their requirements and asking if, in light of the importance of a broad education, they need to be so extensive. In Notre Dame’s case, the university’s requirements exceed those of the accrediting boards. At the request of a student who wanted to do the Catholic Social Tradition minor, I met with a dean in the College of Engineering to determine if there is any give in the requirements of the major, either in the case of this particular student or more generally in the future. He responded that there is not because “excellence” as an engineer requires more courses than the accrediting boards demand. He described interdisciplinary minors as “extra-curricular,” that is, “like marching band.” What I believe we have represented in this conversation is the internalization of the external values to such an extent that it outstrips even the original recognized representatives of those values. It raises the question of whether this is the result of a larger pattern of a Catholic drive to succeed on American terms, in this case by exceeding what those terms require.

When classical thought refers to “excellence,” it means arete, which, again, is also translated as “goodness” or “virtue.” This kind of excellence requires active knowledge of and participation in the life of civil society. When excellence is reduced to techne, then the question of the broader “goodness” of the student -- even the student as engineer, asking, for instance, where and for whom to build bridges and rockets -- becomes irrelevant, even intrusive. For Spring 2001, of the five majors in engineering, only one offers a course in the ethics of the profession. Chemical engineering offers the elective, “Corporate Ethics and Values.” The other majors do not even offer an elective. Classical philosophy has a term for the person who spends so much time learning techne that he has no time for learning phronesis or “practical wisdom”: idiot. The term idiotes translates both “private person” and “ignorant person.” An idiot is a someone who has so little knowledge about the way society functions that he is unable to be an active citizen in the polis. This is technical assimilation without civic participation. It is practice without reason. In the tradition of practical reason, techne is crucial for professional performance, but it must be subsumed under phronesis.19

When techne rules in colleges of business, cost-benefit analysis, profit maximization, Pareto-optimality, and the calculation of supply and demand dominate to the exclusion of other questions. Notre Dame’s College of Business is an interesting case because, under the direction of Dean Carolyn Woo, there has been a concerted effort to introduce normative inquiry not only through specific courses, but throughout the curriculum. There is a core of faculty that takes ethical questions quite seriously. The College hosts an annual “Ethics Week” that brings normative questions to the fore. Unlike in the College of Engineering, the requirements of the majors allow room for students to do interdisciplinary minors. Business Week ranked Notre Dame number one among business schools regarding the teaching of ethics.

Examination of the Schedule of Classes for Spring 2001, then, is sobering. Of the five majors in the College, only one -- business administration -- offers courses in ethics, and at present these are electives. The other four majors do not appear even to have courses with normative content. An ad placed in the university student newspaper announcing the ethics courses -- one course each for sophomores, juniors, and seniors -- leads with the heading: “DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!! ETHICS COURSES FOR SPRING 2001."20 What this indicates is that the effort to create a professional school culture that subsumes techne under phronesis is a demanding one in the American context even when there is administrative leadership.

It should be pointed out that it is not only the richly endowed schools that have this problem. On the contrary, there is a pattern where less well-off schools are expanding their professional studies curriculum and enrollment in order to survive financially. Regis University is a case in point. Regis University is also a participant in the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project, and I quote from their proposal:

“Regis presently educates over 11,000 students (7,000+ undergrads; 4,000+ grads) in three academic schools: Regis College, the School for Professional Studies, and the school for Health Care Professions. In the early 70's, Regis was a small (1,000 students), primarily residential co-ed Catholic undergraduate college facing serious financial problems. Since that time, we have experienced explosive growth both in complexity of schools and programs and in the numbers of students. We officially became a university in the early 90's, but remain primarily a teaching institution. Regis College, which still serves around 1000 traditional-aged college students with a full-time Ph.D. faculty and a fairly standard array of disciplinary and pre-professional majors, is the residential core of the university. The School for Professional Studies began in the mid-70's as an undergraduate degree-completion program for working adults staffed primarily by an adjunct faculty of working professionals. It has grown to serve more than 9,000 students in undergraduate and graduate (professional MA) programs at several campuses in Denver, regional campuses (in Colorado, Wyoming, and most recently in Phoenix), and through distance (TV & on-line) programs. It also has partnership arrangements (sharing its model of adult, professional education) with more than twenty other (primarily Catholic) colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad (in Asia and Latin America). The School for Health Care Professions began in the late 80's as Regis took over an undergraduate nursing program when Loretto Heights College (the only other Catholic college in the region) closed. It has grown to serve almost 900 students in undergraduate nursing programs as well as graduate (Masters) programs in nursing, physical therapy, and healthcare management.”

A number of things are worth noting here with regard to the question of the state of practical reasoning. The primary area of growth has been in the School of Professional Studies. In addition, the SPS is “staffed primarily by an adjunct faculty of working professionals.” This latter fact has both promise and limitations. The promise is in the fact that the teachers have experience in the field. Practical reason requires an experiential base for critical reflection; these teachers would bring that fund of lived knowledge to the course. The fact that students are older than traditional students is an advantage as well because of the promise of experience. Aristotle notes that ethics ought not be taught to the young because of their relative inexperience, a point to which I will return later.

The limits for practical reason given Regis’ expansion begin with the fact that the faculty are adjunct in a widely dispersed university. This means that direct contact with students is minimal – limited to class time in a single course – or even non-existent, as is the case in the TV and on-line programs. Particularly for the young, learning practical reasoning depends much on modeling oneself after exemplars, and this is difficult to do when there is little or no contact with the professor. Moreover, experience alone is inadequate for practical reasoning, which must be done in light of a good more comprehensive than technical ends, and it is unclear at best what frameworks for reflection the adjunct professors bring to the classroom. I suspect that concepts like the common good and option for the poor as part of a worldview for considering market economics does not receive much mention. The mere size ratio of School of Professional Studies students to those in the College – 9:1 – suggests that techne may well be outrunning the ability of phronesis to provide context.

– Reason without practice: Schools that have been successful financially now aspire to be successful academically as well. The University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University are cases in point. The key threat here is the assimilation into a mode of reasoning that considers normative questions of practice to be beyond the bounds of academic study. It is noteworthy that Aristotle includes under politike or “practical studies” the three disciplines of politics, economics, and ethics. In the modern era, however, we find the effort to give politike the same exactitude that Aristotle and Thomas reserved for the subjects of speculative reason -- science and mathematics. The result is the birth of the “social sciences.” Political theory becomes political science, economics becomes almost exclusively quantitative, and ethics is displaced by sociology, anthropology, and the study of religion. The apogee is when Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which reigns in post-World War II American departments until the publications of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, declares moral utterances to be “meaningless.”25 The view expressed in such developments can be summarized by philosopher F. H. Bradley’s comment, made as early as 1884, that practical reason “has been placed on the shelf of interesting illusions.”

There are two dangers that follow from the “reason without practice” type. First, with regard to the pedagogy internal to universities, the emphasis on research leads to the reduction of courseloads for professors. This results in the enlargement of class size so that the schools can offer the necessary number and kinds of courses. However, the interchange required for the teaching and learning of practical reason depends on small class size. The presence of discussion sections with teaching assistants (usually graduate students) is an attempt to make up for this shortcoming, but having such sections function truly as arenas of dialectical conversation depends on the training of the assistants. Such training takes time, which is precisely what the professor and university are trying to save by having the large course in the first place. More often than not, the role of the assistant is simply to assure that the students are absorbing the lecture and reading material for the course and to grade papers and exams. The proposal passed for the interdisciplinary minor in Catholic social tradition at Notre Dame stipulates that the core seminar must be no larger than fifteen students. If there is more demand, then the university must provide more offerings of the seminar.

The second danger of the “reason without practice” type pertains to its relationship to wider society. In trying to emulate the exactitude of speculative reason, the social sciences become less and less relevant to the kind of discourse necessary for a flourishing civil society. The philosopher David Wiggins warns that “Aristotle’s account [of rationality] is informed by a consciousness of the lived actuality of practical reasoning. This is an actuality which present-day studies of rationality, morality, and public rationality ignore, and ignore at their cost.”26 The result is that without persons putting forward intelligible comprehensive frameworks for contextual reflection on civil society, the practice of politics and economics becomes less accountable to any idea or sense of the common good, and ethics reduces to “what is true for me.” Political exchange is displaced by economic might. Academic abdication of the responsibility, in keeping with practical wisdom, to participate in the dialectical exchange on the good society contributes to this state of affairs.

Within Catholic higher education, the “reason without practice” type views programs in Catholic social teaching as best located in campus ministry, reinforcing what is already a divide between academics and student life. Service, experiential, and community-based courses are often looked upon as at best second-rate modes of teaching and learning -- that is, as “interesting illusions.” This is in contrast with the tradition of practical reason where, again, experience in the field in question is a prerequisite for critical reflection.

Programs, centers, and institutes of peace and justice need to take care that they do not abet the “reason without practice” type when they stress a form of community-based learning that involves unidirectional service to extra-university communities to the exclusion of other forms of experience. Unidirectional service to extra-university communities keeps the question of practice out away from the university where the “reason without practice” type of professor wants to keep it. Moreover, the practices of the university itself remain masked such that, say, there might be persons doing academic studies of the municipal or international living wage movements while entering staff salaries at the school fail to meet the poverty line for a family of three. Finally, unidirectional service fails to meet the requirements of dialectical interchange with the persons served.

A participant in the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project who teaches as Loyola University of Baltimore commented that it is sometimes said at his school, "There is a lot of Loyola in Baltimore, but not much Baltimore in Loyola." What he meant was that students and others at Loyola did a significant amount of service type volunteering in the wider community -- a lot of going into Baltimore's "home" and helping out -- but that there was no real reciprocity, no invitation to the community of Baltimore to come to Loyola and witness to the university and therefore no real lessons learned beyond the general ones that poverty is a harsh reality and that many who are poor struggle mightily to change their circumstances.29 These are indeed important lessons, but if they are the only ones and if volunteer service in the city is the only way that the university relates to the city, then, another project participant added, we are left with a kind of paternalism that is inadequate as a model.

Notre Dame may well follow a similar pattern in some respects in its interactions with South Bend. There is a genuine role for service to the community. When I started with Big Brothers/Big Sisters of St. Joseph County nine years ago, I was told that the majority of volunteers were Notre Dame students and that the organization could not flourish in the same way without them. In addition, the university leases the Center for the Homeless building to the Center for a dollar a month, providing a real financial service that few people know about. But students also often describe Notre Dame as "safe" over against the "dangerous" South Bend. Under this rubric, South Bend is a place for Notre Dame students to serve, to be served (beer), and in both to risk possible bodily harm from city residents.

– Practice for the wrong reason: In response to the problematic forms of assimilationism in the first two types, a few schools have attempted to preserve Catholic identity by insisting on uniform practice under a form of reason that mimics speculative or theoretical reason. Such reason, rather than facilitating dialectical interchange, stresses the deduction of truths from first principles in order to secure immunity from challenge. Again, Aquinas describes the conclusions of speculative reason as containing “truth without fail.” So, like the “reason without practice” type, it models itself after speculative reason, but with some key differences. Whereas the “reason without practice” type seeks exactitude that allows it to ignore the normative question of practice, the “practice for the wrong reason” type seeks certitude so that practice can be tightly controlled – that is, not allowed to enter the exchange of dialectics.

I have made the case elsewhere that this view builds on mistaken readings of both Aristotle and Thomas.32 For now, it is important to note that in institutional settings, the hierarchical magisterium becomes the sole body “divinely authorized” to articulate this “unconditionally binding law,” as the deductive form of reasoning and the top-down institutional chain of command become mutually reinforcing. Dialectical exchange becomes unnecessary, and is even viewed as “ungrateful,” and thus is suppressed.33 In keeping with the dominant motif of obedience to law, schools of this type seek to attach themselves to the hierarchical magisterium first and foremost in juridical ways.

What the “practice for the wrong reason” type ignores is that in the tradition of practical reason, external critique and problems of internal incoherence can lead to the needed reconsideration of traditional affirmations. Such has been the case with slavery and religious establishment.38 The desire for certitude in a pluralistic world has led proponents of the “practice for the wrong reason” type to jettison the very tradition they claim to embrace.

The Franciscan University at Steubenville and the Catholic University of America might be the purest examples of this type. With regard to the latter, a particular incident is perhaps informative. Applicants to the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project had to obtain a letter of support from the relevant administrator -- for instance, a dean or provost -- at their school. In all cases except for Catholic University, administrative letters were enthusiastic and even expressed gratitude that members of their faculty were wanting to take up the effort to start a program in Catholic social teaching at their school. The administrator at Catholic University refused to write a letter of support. There could be any number of reasons for this refusal, so what follows is conjecture: I wonder if, due to the institutionally structured dominant mode of reasoning there, the Catholic University administrator understood the meaning of such a letter differently than the other administrators. In the latter’s letters, it was clear that support of their faculty’s proposals did not mean approval of all the details and that any proposal would have to go through the process of university committee and council conversation – that is, dialectics – in order to be approved as a program. I wonder if the speculative model of reasoning and the emphasis on certitude and control of practice in the “practice for the wrong reason” type was not functioning in the Catholic University case such that support for the faculty member’s proposal was interpreted to mean immediate and unconditional approval of all of its specifics (Again, for Thomas, speculative reason has “truth without fail” even in “matters of detail.”). That is to say, it seems to be the case that the letter of support was viewed as a kind of imprimatur. When the administrator was later informed that support did not mean approval of all details – and that he was the only one of thirty-seven college and university administrators to refuse support of a proposal – he sent a short letter.

It may well be that a particular university is a mix of types. We have seen, for instance, how, depending on which college or school within the university is in question, Notre Dame exhibits traits not only of practical reason, but also of both the “practice without reason” and “reason without practice” types. It could be argued that on certain issues generally placed under the rubric of sexual morality – for instance, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, contraception, and abortion -- the university seems to take on qualities of the “practice for the wrong reason” type. Such might be the case in the administration’s banning of ads in the university newspaper, The Observer, for gay and lesbian organizations not recognized by the university. A much longer argument would need to be made than I can give here, but it raises the question of whether dialectical interchange was not only narrowed, but in fact cut off altogether. The issue here is not whether there ought to be some limits on discourse, but whether in this case the limits set actually eclipse altogether any exchange that might be called genuine conversation. In general, the university is quite careful to protect dialectical exchange in the classroom, as is evidenced in President Edward Malloy’s response to Ex corde.39 It seems, then, that in those instances when Notre Dame ceases to engage in practical reason, it manifests the “practice without reason” type in the case of the professional schools, the “reason without practice” type in the College of Arts and Letters, and the “practice for the wrong reason” type with regard to the administrative structuring of student life on a certain range of issues.

III. Programmatic and Pedagogical Responses: Retrieving Practical Reason

The fifty-one inquiries and thirty-seven applications to the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project indicates that there is certainly openness to incorporating Catholic social thought and teaching into the curriculum. As indicated earlier, applications required letters of support from the relevant administrators. Virtually all of the accepted applications cited university documents stating the centrality of the concerns of Catholic social teaching to the school’s mission.

Let me reiterate, however, that introducing Catholic social teaching into the curriculum does not guarantee engagement in practical reason. Although I think it is appropriate to speak of Catholic social teaching as “doctrine,” one of my concerns with this usage is that here, too, the idea that such doctrine develops as a result of conversation will be denied or suppressed. It is important, then, to integrate Catholic social teaching into the curriculum in ways that facilitate the kind of interchange described by the term “practical reason.”

In what follows, I will set out programmatic and pedagogical models for retrieving Catholic social thought and teaching as forms of practical reasoning. In each case – the programmatic and the pedagogical – there are inherent attending problems that cannot be eradicated, only addressed, and I will discuss these as well.

There are two basic options for programmatic response: infusion of the substance of Catholic social teaching into the university-wide core curriculum and development of a distinct program. The Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project has a mix of both models. Each has corresponding strengths and liabilities. The strength of the infusion model is the breadth of its contact with students. Everyone has some introduction to the key concepts of the teaching. The liability of this model is its brevity, and therefore, perhaps, its shallowness. My experience directing Notre Dame’s program -- which is of the distinct program model -- confirms that of Carnegie teaching scholar Bill Cerbin when he writes that “radical knowledge restructuring” is “difficult to achieve in a single course or a single semester.” Given that other modes of reasoning are institutionally deeply reinforced, Cerbin’s reference to knowledge “restructuring” and identification of such restructuring as “radical” does not seem excessive. The strength of the distinct program model is precisely that it provides a deep countervailing restructuring -- or, more accurately, an intensive countervailing community of discourse -- because the students engage the tradition and each other over a longer period of time. The liability of the distinct program model is not only that it reaches a limited number of students, but also that is can – and at Notre Dame, I think, sometimes does – communicate that Catholic social teaching is fine for persons attracted to such things, but is not a necessary part of education at a Catholic university.

There is no reason to suppose that the infusion and distinct program models are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they can be combined such that university core courses serve as gateways to more intensive programs. The key is that classes remain small so that dialectical interchange can take place. There are tremendous economic and other kinds of pressures against small class size, but if colleges and universities truly want the social teaching to be a core part of their Catholic identity, practical reasoning in the social tradition has to be indeed practiced, and only small, writing and speaking intensive classes are adequate vehicles for such a process.

Given the forces driving the increase in class size, practicing practical reason in the social tradition will have to become an administrative priority if it is to move from mission statement to lived reality. As indicated earlier, both programmatic and pedagogical responses to the obstacles to practical reason have built-in ongoing problems that cannot be eradicated, only addressed. In the case of programmatic responses, the inherent problem is that of keeping practical reasoning in the social tradition a priority of administrators. All programs require the four necessities of time, space, money, and personnel, and programs in Catholic social teaching are no exception.40 Obtaining the four necessities is an ongoing problem because there are other programs competing for the same resources. It is not quite a zero sum game in that different donors may be willing to give money to both a Catholic social tradition program and, say, a center for entrepreneurial initiative – or, better, to do the hard work of building an entrepreneurial center that is in conversation with Catholic social teaching. However, resources are not limitless, and it is the job of the college or university administrator to make decisions about these resources in the midst of multiple claims on them.

In the background are the competing understandings of reason. The Dean in the business or engineering college under the rubric of practice without reason has the pressure of assuring appropriate credentialing of students. With limited resources, the Dean of Arts and Letters under the rubric of reason without practice must decide whether to hire the high-powered quantitative macro-economist from Princeton who has published in all of the major journals or a political-economist who has been arguing that Catholic social thought provides a better framework for international development than competing theories, a form of argument that would not find its place in the key journals of the discipline as practiced in the United States. It is clear, then, that whether the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason as instantiated in Catholic social thought and teaching is incorporated into the curriculum or goes into eclipse is in large part up to the priorities of college and university administrators.

If administrators do make and keep practical reasoning in the social tradition a priority, then professors have three main pedagogical choices for presenting the material in the classroom. The first is what I call the dominant model. This is where the worldview of the Catholic social tradition is used to interpret the entirety of the course – for instance, all of political or economic theory. In some courses, where the specific content of the course is explicit and up front, a version of this approach may be appropriate. For example, a course on the documents of the Catholic social tradition itself, or “A Catholic Approach to Business Ethics,” or “Catholic Health Care.” Even here, however, students can deepen their understanding of the Catholic social tradition if it is brought into conversation with other traditions of thought.

If the course is not a “Catholic approaches to...” offering, but is rather a general core course in the humanities or is a basic introduction to a discipline, whether political theory, business administration, or health care management, the dominant approach becomes a triumphalistic approach and has significant liabilities. The first is that it tends not to read other options in their own terms. In Catholic theology and philosophy prior to transcendental Thomism, such misreading led to the point where the term “Kantian” functioned as an invective where students felt no need to read -- and in fact were strongly discouraged from reading -- for instance, the Critique of Practical Reason. Second, such triumphalism is precisely the model that some professors fear will be required when they hear about Catholic social teaching being incorporated into the curriculum. One faculty concern is that such infusion necessarily involves a heteronomous encroachment on their discipline, which they seek to preserve as autonomous. Although some claims to autonomy are set in the problematic “practice without reason” and “reason without practice” types detailed above, not all are. When the dominant model becomes triumphalistic, it makes professors’ fears concerning heteronomy real.

The second model is what I would call the parallel approach. This approach sets out the Catholic social tradition side-by-side with other options, but does little to bring them into conversation with each other. For example, a course in political theory might set out liberalism, classical republicanism, and Catholic social theory, but do little comparative analysis between them. The liability of this model is that there is no real engagement between the different traditions. It is a form of academic tourism. One gets that, “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Catholic social teaching” feeling. However, this approach does have some benefits as an interim model when it is necessary -- due to the host professor’s lack of knowledge of the Catholic social tradition -- to bring in a guest speaker. This is one of the main services I provide at Notre Dame. True, it is a kind of “air-drop” model, but it is better than not having the Catholic social tradition presented at all. The more curious student mind will want to seek out comparisons and contrasts between the options in any case, and the more intrigued professor will want to develop over time sufficient expertise in the tradition to present it herself, and do so in a way in keeping with the exchange that marks practical reasoning. It has become evident that in addition to the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project to help professors already knowledgeable in the tradition to build programs at their home school, there needs to be a “Teaching the Teachers” project to facilitate faculty learning if this tradition of practical reasoning is to have any significant impact on learning at Catholic colleges and universities.41

This brings us to the third option, which I call the interlocutor model. Here, the various options, frameworks, or worldviews are set out and then brought into conversation with each other to highlight their similarities and differences and the strengths and weaknesses of each. An illustrative example works best to convey the model in action. The question of the nature of property is one that can be addressed in courses on political theory, economics, law, or business. Such a course might look at the theory of private property and its limits as explicated in the writings of, for instance, the Catholic social tradition, John Locke, and Adam Smith.

In Rerum novarum, Leo XIII set out the natural right to private property based, among other things, on the idea that when a person adds his labor to land, that land becomes his. Forty years later, Pius XI makes explicit a distinction that is present in Leo’s thought, but not highlighted: the distinction between the right to private property and the correct use of that property, which is circumscribed by the common good.42 Later Catholic social teaching would refer to a “universal destination” of created goods to convey that the goods of the earth and of society are intended by God to be for the benefit of all people. This sets a social limit on what amount of one’s earnings or wealth one can use for oneself. John Paul II would call this claim on wealth a “social mortgage” on private property.43 John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government argues in a way quite similar to Leo XIII that land becomes one’s property when one adds one’s labor to it. Locke also set limits on the accumulation of property, arguing that one can claim only so much property as 1) one has worked, 2) will not spoil or go to waste, and 3) will still leave enough for others. Adam Smith claims, however, that the right to private property gives a person “the sole claim to a subject, exclusive of all others, but can use it himself as he thinks fit, and if he pleases abuse or destroy it.”44

We can bring these three – Catholic social teaching, Locke, and Smith – into conversation. In a classroom setting that emphasizes dialectics, one pedagogical possibility is to have students take specific viewpoints in roleplay. The conversation might go as follows:

CST to Smith: It is immoral to let a person do as he wishes with property, even be destructive (Locke nods in agreement).

CST to Locke: Your theory is not much better; the three limits on property don’t hold up in practice [There is a debate on this point.45].

Smith replies: You are both allowing your moralism to blind you concerning the well-being of the poor. In a commercial society where the restrictions on the accumulation of wealth are lifted, there is greater production of wealth, so the poor are better off even if there is a greater gap between rich and poor.46

CST to Smith: That only holds, if it holds at all, in the best of economic circumstances. In the United States, after over a decade of economic growth where the salaries of corporate heads have increased over 500%, the wages of the middle and lower classes have only begun to rise slightly; until then they stagnated and even declined in real wages. Moreover, the consumerism that drives such a gap is itself a spiritual malaise.

Smith to CST: You want the living wage, and yet you also want measures that would stifle the production of wealth that makes a living wage possible.

CST to Smith: An economy driven by production and not by consumerism, and a culture where persons lived simply, would allow for a living wage for all...

The conversation could go on and is typical of the kind that takes place in the core seminar of Notre Dame’s Program in Catholic Social Tradition. The interlocutor model is based on setting out the various options and setting up the classroom so that the conversation takes place, whether in the professor’s initial presentation of the material, in the student’s papers, or verbal exchange.

The precise shape of this model may well vary, and appropriately so, from discipline to discipline. My sense is that in the disciplines normally located in Arts and Letters -- for instance, economics, government, and philosophy -- much time is spent on setting up the various theoretical frameworks and detailing their nuances. Here, there should be attention to specific concrete cases to illustrate, but such cases are, for the most part, illustrative. For example, with regard to the property theme in Catholic social teaching, Locke, and Smith, a professor could ask a class how each option illuminates the present debate on inheritance taxes. In an ethics of warfare case, one could ask what, for instance, Hans Morgenthau’s realism, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, and Catholic social teaching’s just war theory each bring to light about the intervention in Kosovo. Whatever the particular case, the professor looks less for a specific answer (a particular worldview can and often does lead to more than one consistent answer to a case) than for facility with the reasoning with regard to the framework and case in question in relation to the other possible options. In my classes, I tell students that a ‘B’ paper is one that presents all positions fairly and with insight and an ‘A’ paper is one that does so and then anticipates and replies to likely objections to one’s own position.

In disciplines that are oriented towards description -- for instance, history, psychology, and sociology -- there appear to be two key tasks. The first is to provide accounts of how religion and religious beliefs are factors in the subject of their discipline. In history, for instance, the task is to show how churches and religious movements have been – for good and ill – agents in the narrative of events. Many books on, for example, the New Deal, do not take sufficient account of the role of Msgr. John Ryan – the “Right Reverend New Dealer,” and many writings on the success of the solidarity movement in Poland do not give sufficient attention to the role of John Paul II and the worker priests in the country.47 This is not to say that one ought to teach triumphalistic history, but rather teach fuller history – again, the good and the bad – that takes into account religious actors and religious motivations. To not do so is, on the discipline’s own terms, bad history. It is to leave out some of the key interlocutors. Similarly, psychology is often blind to or inept at tracing the ways religious belief shapes a person’s worldviews and actions. I recently did a psychology literature search of the religious indicators in men who abuse women and found nothing in the scholarly literature. This lack of sources was confirmed by a scholar who has done key research profiling the belief systems of rapists.48 The second task, related to the first, is to be alert to how the worldview or social location of the scholar shapes the writing of the discipline. Here, a helpful exercise might be to have students write an account of a particular historical event or psychological trauma from different theoretical -- including theological -- perspectives or social locations.

In the disciplines associated with professional studies of any kind, such as business or health care, there still needs to be significant attention to setting out the various theoretical options. The “practice without reason” type presupposes rather than explains the worldview that guides the logic of a course. From an interlocutory perspective, this pedagogy fails. Still, here less of the semester’s time is spent on the theoretical frameworks than in the College of Arts and Letters and more on the specific cases. Cases are not merely illustrative of frameworks; rather, the cases are the “stuff” for reflection, and the theoretical frameworks enhance that reflection. For example, in a course on peace and war that I teach, about one-third of the students are in ROTC. Therefore, I spend less time on the detailed history of the traditions of warfare than I otherwise would and more time on specific cases of warfare and peacebuilding. The difference in emphasis between theoretical frameworks and specific cases is one of foreground and background; in general, in Arts and Letters courses, the frameworks are more prominent, in professional schools, the cases are, but both aspects are always present.

Also, in the instance of disciplines associated with professional studies, it is important to move beyond “what would you do if” cases to address the overall shape of a life that undertakes a particular profession. How we respond to cases is in large part a function of who we become when we take up a certain way of life, and it is important to teach students how to be discerning about the shape of their life in their profession and in their life as a whole. For instance, an article by Patrick Schiltz, himself a lawyer, discusses law not through case examples like whether a particular action taken by a lawyer should be counted as a billable hour to a client, but through the example of an associate attending a catered party hosted by a senior partner. Schiltz prefaces, “Complying with the formal rules is the easy part...Acting as an ethical lawyer in the broader, non-formalistic sense is far more difficult...Because a lawyer’s life is filled with the mundane, whether she practices law ethically depends not upon how she resolves the one or two dramatic ethical dilemmas that she will confront during her entire career, but upon the hundreds of little things that she does, almost unthinkingly, each and every day...What this means is that an attorney will not practice law ethically -- cannot practice law ethically -- unless acting ethically is habitual for her...Here’s the problem though: A young person who begins practicing law today will find herself immersed in a culture that is hostile to the values with which she was raised (unless she was raised to be rapaciously greedy), for the defining feature of the legal profession today is obsession with money...The pressure is usually not direct. No one takes a young lawyer aside and says, ‘Jane, we here at Smith and Jones are obsessed with money.’ Instead, the culture pressures young lawyers in more subtle ways to replace their values with the system’s.”

To illustrate, Schiltz goes on to describe -- as one who has been there -- the catered “barbeque” at the senior partner’s home. “The associate will drive up to the senior partner’s home in her rusted Escort and park it at the end of a long line of Mercedeses and BMWs and sport utility vehicles. The house will be enormous. The lawn will look like a putting green...Somebody wearing a white shirt and black bow tie will answer the door and direct her to the backyard...In a corner of the yard, a caterer will be grilling swordfish. In another corner will stand the senior partner, sipping a glass of white wine, holding court with a worshipful group of junior partners and senior associates. The senior partner will be wearing designer sunglasses and designer clothes: the logo on his shirt will signal its exorbitant cost. He will have a tan – albeit a slightly orange tanning-salon enhanced tan. After a couple hours, the associate will walk out of the front door, slightly tipsy from the free liquor, and say to herself, ‘This is the life.’”49

Professional schools that incorporate Catholic social teaching via practical reasoning into their curriculum need to carry out these kinds of exercises, what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “thick descriptions” of the culture of the profession in light of the social teaching. Doing so is what I call “ethics as pastoral ethnography.”

In mathematics, engineering, and the sciences, questions often arise: “Is there a Catholic chemistry? A Catholic theory of quantum mechanics? A Catholic way to build a bridge? A Catholic version of WordPerfect (one that confesses when the program crashes, and of its own accord makes amends)?” As indicated earlier, the greatest challenge is that the increasing amount of expected specialized knowledge in each of these fields is squeezing out space in the curriculum for broad social analyses of the field a whole. Majors in mathematics, engineering, and the sciences need to be structured such that, 1) students have the ability to follow an adequate program of courses in the liberal arts that focuses on broad social analysis, 2) there is a requirement, as part of the major, of at least one course in the philosophy and sociology of their discipline – in other words, a course on how their science is used and what the worldviews are that shape such uses, and 3) insofar as is possible, each course is framed in broad social analysis. If 1 and 2 are followed, then 3 need not take too much of the course’s time: “We will be studying organic chemistry this semester. Here are some of the ways that this knowledge is put to use; and here are the worldviews and frameworks that guide such use.” It is at this point that a specifically Catholic perspective can enter the conversation.

Just as there is an inherent and thus ongoing difficulty with developing programs in practical reasoning in the Catholic social tradition – namely, again, that of becoming and remaining an administrative priority – there is an inherent and ongoing difficulty with pedagogy in practical reason in higher education: the traditional student generally lacks the experiential base necessary for active critical reflection on praxis. At Notre Dame, where the vast majority of undergraduates are in the 18-22 year old age group, we have developed three means of response. First, the core seminar of the interdisciplinary minor in Catholic social tradition involves not only close reading of the official documents of the social doctrine, but also field placements in settings of the students’ anticipated professional vocations. Students keep journals – pastoral ethnographies – where they reflect on the interactions within the setting in light of the social teaching. The difficulty here is that most settings that accept field placements are of the service variety – for instance, legal aid clinics. Workplace administrators often resist the kind of time commitment and scrutiny that a placement involves. One student, who wants to be a corporate lawyer, was denied by three firms. While this raised interesting classroom conversation about whether corporate law is a profession open to influence by Catholic social teaching, it also meant that the student was unable to secure a placement. We are generating a list of placements to be made available to students, but a broad list representative of the professions will take some time to develop.

In the meantime, we have developed a course called “Profiles in Catholic Social Tradition,” which brings professionals to class to speak about their experiences in attempting to embody the social teaching in their work. Speakers have come from the fields of architecture, health care administration, law, business, science, mental health, and parish ministry. The virtue tradition, with which the tradition of practical reason intersects, requires exemplars so that youth and young adults can get a living picture of what constitutes the practice of, for instance, solidarity. In this way, the experience and reflection on the students’ parts can be supplemented and guided by the experience of other, more seasoned persons. Insofar as is possible, we have invited persons who are graduates of Notre Dame to enhance the sense that someone can come out of this particular setting and lead a life of professional virtue. Our plan in the long run is to develop an alumni contact list for students.

Finally, we are developing full-fledged internships, which are more intensive than the field placements in the core seminar. These can take place either over the school year or during the summer. Many are already offered through other auspices and all that is required is to meld them with the aims of the Program in Catholic Social Tradition. Here, often all that is needed is agreement by the advisor of the student’s major that the written assignment for the internship be one that incorporates Catholic social teaching. More difficult is the process of developing internships from scratch, because this involves both the identification of sites and, often, support funding for the student. In both augmented and new internships, oversight requires considerable commitment from the program. Any extensive use of internships, in my judgment, requires an administrator who has such oversight as her specific task. Here is an example of where the priorities of the college and university administrators is crucial: Practical reasoning requires an experiential base; internships involve an unmatched level of experiential intensity for traditional-aged college students; adequate internship programs require the four necessities of time, money, space, and personnel; college and university administrators determine the allocation of the four necessities by setting priorities both within existing budgets and in the pursuit of development funds.

Conclusion: Risking Practical Reasoning

I have given an account of a particular tradition of practical reasoning, and traced the three main types of obstacles encountered when attempts are made to bring that tradition into the college and university conversation. I then provided some concrete programmatic and pedagogical ways to support the kind of give and take that practical reasoning requires. Proponents of the “practice without reason” and “reason without practice types” might raise the concern that introducing a specific tradition of practical reason runs the risk of an intellectual hegemony. This is indeed a risk, and it ought not be dismissed lightly. The existence of the “practice for the wrong reason” type provides plenty of reason for concern. I have tried to show how a particular pedagogical model -- the interlocutor approach -- avoids intellectual hegemony by offering a fair account of each tradition and by requiring the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason – of which Catholic social teaching is a part – to enter into critical conversation with the other options so as to highlight the strengths and weakness in each tradition, Catholicism not excepted.

I would answer the “practice without reason” type that although introducing Aristotlean-Thomist practical reasoning into the curriculum risks intellectual hegemony, the virtually exclusive emphasis on techne in most of our professional schools masks the normative presuppositions that underpin, say, a business management or chemical engineering class, thus guaranteeing intellectual hegemony because the presuppositions remain unquestioned. I would reply to the “reason without practice” type that its approach to academics masks the sometimes questionable institutional practices that support the academy as it presently exists. The practice of a university that does not pay its graduate assistants a living wage, for instance, is a concern intrinsic to a discipline shaped by the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason, whereas “reason without practice” academics would consider it, if they did at all, a matter extrinsic to their professional concern.50 Further, I would answer both the “practice without reason” and “reason without practice” types that there is no understanding of reason, practical or otherwise, that does not find its expression through particular traditions. While there may be considerable noteworthy overlap between traditions, there is no generic practical reason. The only way to introduce practical reasoning into the curriculum is through specific traditions.

All this back and forth might make the “practice for the wrong reason” type concerned that practical reasoning as I have described it might make students indifferent to Catholic doctrine. Dialectical interchange may make it appear as if the claims of other traditions are set on the same level of truth as Catholic doctrine. This is indeed a risk. By now, the narrative of the student who goes to college and loses his faith is a common, even clichéd one. My response is twofold. First, as indicated earlier, Catholic social doctrine has in fact developed, and uncritical obeisance to what it presently claims makes it quite likely that one is affirming things that ought not to be affirmed. Second, Catholic teaching must make its case on the strength of its arguments and by the practice of the people who affirm those arguments. If it cannot stand the test of fair and genuine argument (and if its adherents do not live it out), then it fails as a compelling worldview and way of life. I would argue that, in contrast to the “practice for the wrong reason” type, practical reasoning shows significant confidence that the Catholic tradition has the rigor to hold its own -- and the humility to develop when appropriate -- when engaged in dialectics with other traditions. In the lives of young adults, faithlessness also often follows upon an overly juridical command-obedience understanding of the tradition. I conclude, then, by returning to my opening point: without engagement via practical reasoning, there will be no authentic ownership of the substance of Catholic social doctrine.

5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.5.1140a24-b12. My treatment of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason will be brief here because I have set it out at more length elsewhere. See Todd D. Whitmore, “Practicing the Common Good: The Pedagogical Implications of Catholic Social Teaching,” Teaching Theology and Religion, vol. 3, no. 1, (Winter 2000), 3-19.

6 The conclusions of the dialectic can then be demonstrated in syllogistic form, but the mode of engagement, particularly when regarding specific cases, is that of interchange more than deduction.

7 Aristotle, Politics 3.9.1280a23-81a6.

8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, qu. 94, a.4.

9 Thomas Aquinas, De Regno, II.3; II.4; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, I, Lect. 1, n. 4.

10 For more on this point, see Marie-Dominique Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1964).

11 Cf. Whitmore, “Practicing the Common Good,” op. cit., 10-11.

12 John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 8.

13 John XXIII, Pacem in terris, 155.

14 Pius XI, Divini redemptoris, 29.

15 See the website in note 2 above.

16 Peace Studies and Gender Studies are the other two.

17 In addition to Notre Dame, the participating schools are Calumet College of St. Joseph, DePaul University, Dominican University, Iona College, Loyola University of Baltimore, Regis University, Sacred Heart University, St. John’s University (New York), St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia), St. Peter’s College (New Jersey), Seattle University, St. Thomas University (Texas), and Villanova University. Careful budgeting allowed the participation of a thirteenth school.

Of the thirty-seven applications, around thirty were of sufficient quality to qualify. Selection for the final schools was therefore also made on comparative quality and diversity of representation.

18 Students can do the engineering degree in five years, but this involves another $25,000+ in tuition and other costs.

19 Not explicitly subsuming techne under phronesis results in a hidden value system that still impacts society. Two frequently occurring key elements to this value system involve, first, what I call the “Oppenheimer syndrom,” that is, the willingness to bracket normative questions under the rubric that the motivation is simply the pursuit of “pure science.” The second is what I call the technological imperative, that is, the claim that if something can be developed, then it ought to be. In a reversal of the philosophical dictum that “ought implies can” – that is, that there is no moral obligation whenever there is the inability to carry out what would otherwise be considered the moral act – the technological imperative reads “can implies ought.”

David Sikkink has researched public and private secondary schools and has found that students at Catholic schools are more involved civically. The question here, then, is whether the “practice without reason” type constitutes an instance of malformation for students who might otherwise be inclined to be involved in civil society. David Sikkink, “Are Private Schools Privatizing?: School Organization and Civic Participation (Unpublished paper, University of Notre Dame.

It should also be noted here that what is identified by the term “idiot” is not the person who through careful discernment of the shape of society determines that she cannot participate in various aspects of its institutions and practices. This kind of selective participation requires deep knowledge of the workings of civil society. In many cases, such persons form alternative or countervailing communities, and are hardly private. A classic text for this kind of response is John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1972).

20 “DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.” The Observer (November 1, 2000): 7.

25 Cf. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1952); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Camgridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).

26 David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980): 222.

29 One question that came up during the summer 2000 session of Teaching Catholic Social Teaching was that of whether the idea of (unidirectional) service learning is classist, presupposing a well-off college or university population and a poor population which the students serve. The participant from St. Peter’s College, a poor school -- both in the sense of the income of its students and their families and the endowment of the school -- in Jersey City, commented that the communities to be served were the communities from which the students came, and this altered the understanding of what was going on in service. The “they” being served is “us.” Also, in the poorer schools, there are more students working; thus there is less time for service. One option that surfaced was to have the students (of any school) have their work setting as their experiential learning site. This both helps to avoid the classism and facilitates the view that one’s work is an arena of Christian vocation. The participants as a whole favored the term community based learning to experiential learning (which can connote a lack of intellectual content) and service learning.

32 See note 5 above.

33 This is not to say that the dialectical approach of practical reason is, of itself, resistant to the idea of a hierarchical magisterium. The point here is that the understanding of the authority exercised by that magisterium is different. In a dialectical approach, authority ultimately rests in the relationships between persons rather than in a single person. The magisterium has authority – authentic power – to the extent that it facilitates these relationships such that persons flourish in virtue. For an account of authority in terms of social relationship, see Joseph Komonchak, “Authority and Magisterium,” in William W. May, ed., Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent (New York: Crossroad, 1987): 103-114.

38 The Pope recognizes such development when he writes of his own method in Centesimus annus. There, he offers what he calls a “re-reading” of Rerum novarum, a reading that is “an invitation to ‘look back,’” “an invitation to ‘look around’ at the ‘new things,’” and “an invitation to ‘look to the future.’” In short, he is entering into a dialectical conversation with the text of Rerum novarum and present options in political economy against the backdrop of an eschatological horizon. John Paul II goes on to state, “Today, at a distance of one hundred years, this approach affords me the opportunity to contribute to the development of Christian social doctrine.” John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 3 and 5.

39 J. Donald Monan, S.J. and Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., “‘Ex Corde Ecclesiae’ Creates an Impasse,” America, vol. 180, no. 3 (January 30-February 6, 1999): 6-12.

40 One bias that seems to be present with some administrators is the assumption that, because of their service orientation, programs in Catholic social teaching will cost less than, say, a program in literature in arts and letters or a program in entrepreneurship in the business school. This bias is sometimes reinforced by the very persons who are attempting to put into place programs in Catholic social teaching, persons who indeed have a selfless service orientation to their activity, and thus are willing, often unwisely, to try to run programs with inadequate resources. The result is often inadequate programs and burnout.

41 I am at present pursuing possibilities for a “Teaching the Teachers” project.

42 Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 45-47.

43 John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 42.

44 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jursiprudence, ed. by R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978): vol. i: 9-10. For a fuller interpretation of Locke and Smith, see Todd David Whitmore, “Strangers, Enemies, or Neighbors? American Restlessness and the Decline of Civil Society,” in Gary Gilbert, ed., The Papers of the Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology, Vol I (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996): 173-252.

45 For two different sides of the debate, see Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and J. Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

46 I interpret Smith’s economic theory in light of his theory of moral sentiments. See note 44 above.

47 For correctives, see Francis Broderick, Right Reverend New Dealer (New York: MacMillan, 1963); and George Weigel, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Although Weigel is excessive both in the credit he gives to John Paul II and in his projection of the democratic implications of the events in Poland, his book still can help serve as a corrective for accounts that leave out or discount the role of the Pope.

48 That scholar is Amy Holtzworth-Munroe of the Psychology Department of Indiana University, who confirmed my findings in conversation. For a representative work of hers, see Amy Holtzworth-Munroe and Gregory L. Stuart, “Typologies of Male Batterers: Three Subtypes and the Differences Between Them,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 116, no. 3 (1994): 476-497.

49 Patrick J. Schiltz, “Witness for the Prosecution,” Notre Dame Magazine (Autumn 1999): 18-24.

50 It is in response to the “reason without practice” type of academics that we get the popular phrase, “It’s only academic,” meaning that there are no practical public implications. For instance, Al Michaels of Monday Night Football will often say, “But it’s all academic now,” if a running back who makes a big gain is on the losing side of a lopsided game about to end. The running back’s numbers will go up, but there is no practical consequence for the team standings. It is another way of saying, “It doesn’t really matter.” There are good arguments that intellectual inquiry does matter for society, but the “reason without practice” type facilitates this kind of response to the academic enterprise.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download