2008 Woodie Awards
Ignatian Corner: Hope in a postmodern world
Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.
Issue date: 10/3/07 Section: Features
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I may be 72 years old, but fortunately, I have student friends who honor me by their friendship. They ask me into their dorms, apartments, discussions, and-a greater honor-into their minds and hearts. They tell me about their worldviews-about those values and convictions that give their lives order and meaning, or that give disorder and chaos. For some, life is ironic, painful, postmodern, with minimal hope and little long-term value. Some can just laugh in their pain.
Worldviews fascinate me, for they involve and express people's deepest hopes and fears. In my freshman course, Texts and Contexts, I study worldviews of the past-how people understood the world in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism-and in Honors and upper-division courses, I probe twentieth-century Modernism and Postmodernism. I find that my students are, of course, affected by today's fragile or shattered hopes. One freshman said, "Nothing surprises me," and for some students, laughter and parody offer the only answer in the face of absurdity, lost meaning, and lost belief.
Such shattered hopes affect me in many ways: as a person, a professor, a priest, and a Jesuit. Can I offer an alternative? Are there grounds for hope and order and meaning? Is there a spiritual world-even a hope beyond death?
For some students, such questions invite a discussion about whether there is a postmodern way of believing; with them, I'll gladly walk through such a discussion. But others may respond to my own-my Catholic and Jesuit-worldview and spirituality, a spirituality based on the Christian Humanism of the Renaissance, with provision for evolution and modern science. What is this worldview?
In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, sketches Jesuit spirituality-my spirituality-while speaking always within the framework of a loving Trinity: of the Father-Creator, the Son-Christ Jesus, and the Spirit-Sanctifier. In briefest form, this is the Jesuit worldview.
Worldviews fascinate me, for they involve and express people's deepest hopes and fears. In my freshman course, Texts and Contexts, I study worldviews of the past-how people understood the world in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism-and in Honors and upper-division courses, I probe twentieth-century Modernism and Postmodernism. I find that my students are, of course, affected by today's fragile or shattered hopes. One freshman said, "Nothing surprises me," and for some students, laughter and parody offer the only answer in the face of absurdity, lost meaning, and lost belief.
Such shattered hopes affect me in many ways: as a person, a professor, a priest, and a Jesuit. Can I offer an alternative? Are there grounds for hope and order and meaning? Is there a spiritual world-even a hope beyond death?
For some students, such questions invite a discussion about whether there is a postmodern way of believing; with them, I'll gladly walk through such a discussion. But others may respond to my own-my Catholic and Jesuit-worldview and spirituality, a spirituality based on the Christian Humanism of the Renaissance, with provision for evolution and modern science. What is this worldview?
In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, sketches Jesuit spirituality-my spirituality-while speaking always within the framework of a loving Trinity: of the Father-Creator, the Son-Christ Jesus, and the Spirit-Sanctifier. In briefest form, this is the Jesuit worldview.
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