Getting our heads together:
Callahan, Sidney
GETTING OUR HEADS TOGETHER AN AGENDA FOR CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS SIDNEY CALLAHAN Today there exists very little activity that can be described with the exclusive term "American Catholic...
...Americans are born Utopians: The impossible only takes a little longer...
...A better way may be found...
...For a common intellectual life there must be more time for ongoing, face-to-face informal dialogues that can stimulate sustained thinking...
...The growth of television has made serious inroads on the written forms of communication...
...Another result of the internal reforms after Vatican II is internal pluralism and growth of the church beyond the orbit circumscribed by the traditional Roman European tradition...
...Intellectuals and the intellectual life seek just that general level of applied truth and relevant meaning that can question the status quo and all its operations...
...Catholics and Marxists once shared, respectively, one of the most favorable conditions for a lively intellectual life...
...All religion was a remnant of superstition and Catholicism was the very worst of all...
...Great changes and social movements have always started with mutant small groups pursuing goals different from those of the mainstream culture...
...Within the Catholic community there are other forces that further impede intellectual dialogue...
...But in other fields and non-fields there is no dearth of questions-issues, dilemmas, discoveries-now understood mostly or solely in a secular context, that await exploration and clarification from a faith perspective...
...As one secular savant accurately noted, "anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals...
...Leisure has disappeared from American society...
...But some segments and communities moved ahead while some did not and much conflict resulted...
...All we want in the end, of course, is to enlist the hearts and minds of all humanity in a mutual seeking of love, peace, justice, and truth...
...Many have noted that the secular liberal establishment is crumbling in its old certainties...
...After all, we can never go back to being a persecuted minority pressured into ideological cohesion, so it can only be onward, upward, and outward bound for us as a community...
...Literature, philosophy, and above all politics were considered fertile fields for combining religious commitment and intellectual work...
...Intellectual men, in and out of the religious life, may have more difficulties if they do not relate to the male-bonding rites surrounding sports...
...GETTING OUR HEADS TOGETHER AN AGENDA FOR CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS SIDNEY CALLAHAN Today there exists very little activity that can be described with the exclusive term "American Catholic intellectual life...
...My large family and circle of friends, almost all non-Catholic, are loving and supportive but not really much interested in my intellectual or professional or religious interests...
...A combination of a bottom-up, base-community approach and a top-down institutional tactic might make some headway...
...Educated Catholics have been assimilated into the larger culture and now find themselves subject to the same general social conditions that militate against all varieties of intellectual life in this country...
...It takes psychological energy to think and focus attention...
...Allan Bloom mentions that the sexual restraints of an earlier generation of students lent a romantic or erotic edge to higher education that heightened the life of learning...
...A project looking to intellectual renaissance could be sponsored in cooperation with Catholic educational institutions and Catholic magazines...
...Today, even priests and clerics no longer inherit the traditional bevy of free female labor to help them on their way...
...To overcome the present diversity, information overload, and specialization, it will take small groups meeting regularly to go deeply enough into a subject that addresses the fundamental challenges of interdisciplinary intellectual questions...
...English is the "lingua franca" of the interdisciplinary intellectual life, bridging the jargon of the two-and-twenty cultures of the day...
...Or perhaps we should say the time is ripe for many different Catholic moments, since the intellectuals in the church, being argumentative, are not speaking with one party line...
...Persecution, as it always does, engendered high morale, cohesion, and loyalty among those who did not fall away under the pressure...
...These would have to be broader than courses in Scripture or theology, or studies of the mystics, spirituality, and prayer...
...A great deal of general intellectual writing used to convey general ideas of importance to a similarly educated population, who shared common cultural concerns despite their different occupations, and who had enough leisure to converse...
...I am now in a small group of women in theology who read and discuss intellectual issues from a feminist perspective...
...Individuals can work to set up small groups with enough in common to recreate microcosms of past embodiments of coherent Catholic communities...
...Even the exploited adjunct faculty do not give a full-time department member more time...
...they have long recognized that one of the talents needed for building the kingdom can be a vocation given over to seeking to serve God as truth...
...friends have to collate their calendars to plan for a cup of coffee...
...An increase in population and affluence, along with a series of victories of various sorts, weakened the cohesion of a small semipersecuted community...
...The ban on artificial contraception produced intense pressures among educated Catholics, caught in contradictory aspirations-the solitude of the study versus the active labor of domesticity...
...Competitive professional fields are crowded with the results of the postwar baby boom's demographic bulge...
...they were trying to integrate their faith with the intellectual currents of the day...
...The crudest misunderstandings and antipathies could be encountered in Ivy League establishment circles, whose members were rigid in their own certainties that either Freud, or David Hume, or science had settled the God question forever...
...When a married couple manage to have common friends, in addition to work and family, their friends may not share their intellectual and professional commitments...
...Perhaps the NCCB, or the Paulists, or the Jesuits, or even the Knights and Daughters might fund a prime-time Bill Moyers-type series of intellectual Catholic conversations on TV to begin the great revival...
...Passion and ideology were united...
...Many programs I have attended-for instance on the family, on death and dying, on aging, on computer technologies, or the changing church-have brought in Catholic professionals from the local community to meet with the students, faculty, and guest speakers...
...Many men did not feel called to be priests but were eager to be professors...
...Perhaps modern Marxists are undergoing some of the same difficulties...
...it is tempting to skip those expenditures of energy that are not immediately necessary for survival-those things that are not "in my field...
...Our confusion is typical of the rapid growth of academic specializations across all fields and professions...
...o what happened...
...The dissenting scientists went off to start a new organization...
...In science, social science, and the humanities there are other intellectuals such as John Kenneth Galbraith whose work in economics and public policy addresses problems in an integrated way and thereby changes the ongoing dialogue in many different fields...
...As the intelligence service of the society, intellectuals have to be generalists geared to taking a larger perspective, constantly scanning the theoretical weather, the changing terrain, and the movements of different bodies of troops...
...Much energy was also spent on matters of internal church reform and liturgical renewal-an endeavor which was confirmed by the calling of Vatican II and its surprisingly dramatic unfolding...
...Few people, even in academia, have access to other people who share their specific interests or their values...
...In the turbulent sixties and seventies the numbers of educated and professionally successful Catholics grew and grew...
...In this scenario we successfully slog through the mire and mudslides caused by the chilling winter fogs blown in over the seas from Rome...
...The ecumenical movement was also in its infancy, so Catholics were subjected to suspicion, bias, and subtle pressures from their Protestant neighbors, as well as from the secular world...
...In that first flowering in the forties and fifties it would be appropriate to speak of the American Catholic intellectual community as fairly cohesive and homogeneous...
...The cultural range of believers and the spectrum of philosophical approaches among intelligent, educated, intellectual Catholics are large and increasing...
...But today's Catholics also need centered, integrated thinking...
...It counters selfish careerism and pushes the mind to grapple with large perspectives and distant horizons...
...In the current organization of work and professional life, narrow specialization and enormous expenditures of time are required and rewarded...
...The fax machine has finally finished off work-free vacations unless you can get out of reach of a telephone...
...Successful assimilation into mainstream professional and academic America produces a mixed blessing...
...After the council the goal of working for a reforming council was over...
...We expected 40 to 50 women...
...Christianity itself started with a small group, moved on to house churches, and may be headed home again...
...They could talk and argue with one another, but stayed united in order to gain support for the struggle with a sometimes hostile world...
...They love me despite the fact that I am an intellectual, have a professional career, and am a devoted Catholic...
...Jesuits take their turn at cooking and doing the dishes...
...Conflicts emerge over what we should do with cultural assimilation and pluralism within: Celebrate and go forward, or fight for more integralism and cohesion in the traditional mode...
...These efforts have also often been the brainchild of some creative retired religious sister on the faculty who no longer has to fight for tenure with constant publishing to update her curriculum vitae...
...Along with the competitive crowding there has been an information explosion...
...Politics as the common serious concern of all public citizens has become discredited by rampant corruption, political scandals, and recent campaigns designed for the media...
...Indeed, everyone in America is always rushing off somewhere-often to meditation, yoga, or stress reduction classes...
...I know less about the larger institutional approaches but I can at least imagine what might be done from what I have observed of creative efforts at some Catholic colleges and arch-diocesan programs...
...Looking back on that period in American Catholic intellectual life, I can see that the atmosphere of the community was charged with a great deal of sublimated erotic energy...
...they are one step removed from the battle, reflecting on the whys and wherefores of the war...
...A number of books and articles came from the endeavor...
...Three of us were asked to help plan and participate in an archdiocesan spiritual center's day for women...
...In an American Catholic spring a thousand flowers of free intellectual inquiry bloom and we fearlessly remind ourselves that the desire to know and understand is the work of the spirit of truth...
...But mere nostalgia will not restore the intellectual and spiritual liveliness of a simpler time, with its clear-cut verities...
...Analysis we have in abundance, synthesis is in short supply...
...During this period many educated, married Catholics were also unassimilated to the mainstream in their sexual manners and mores...
...We were particularly interested in the religious and value questions that were regularly left out of the professional literature...
...Perhaps a two-pronged effort could be envisioned...
...Intellectuals, as opposed to pure scholars, pure scientists, practicing professionals, or social activists, are engaged in reflective cognitive wrestling with contrasting ideas, current controversies, and opposing worldviews...
...But the larger culture may be ready to listen to diverse streams of the Catholic tradition in new ways...
...It was a very small group, its liberal wing sometimes labeled "Commonweal Catholics...
...Insight into the spirit of this earlier era can be had by reading Wilfrid Sheed's account of his parents, Frank and Maisie...
...These conditions are legitimated by a cult of productivity and ambition, and are imposed upon all aspiring candidates, who, in a tight labor market have been fairly desperate to succeed...
...In my most optimistic Utopian flights of hope I can imagine Newman's second spring of the church come to flower in America...
...But, as we now know, educated practicing Catholics can be going to work in the libraries, laboratories, and academic leadership positions, just as they go to work in the hospitals, law firms, and boardrooms of corporate America, without contributing an iota to Catholic intellectual life...
...These groups will have to be smaller and more tightly organized than the large formal associations that have heretofore formed-the Catholic guild of physicians or lawyers, or whatever...
...First and foremost, after the Kennedys and Vatican II there came a new assimilation and integration into a mainstream culture that was growing bigger and more complex...
...The crying need of educated Catholics is for sustained intellectual grappling with the challenge of integrating Christianity with their work and their worlds of secular thinking...
...Prominent intellectual converts were received into the church, and when they became Catholics they joined a well-defined faith, clearly demarcated, with its own distinct intellectual community...
...The prejudice and scorn that Catholics could meet, say in the Harvard philosophy department, would seem quaint today...
...A heightened existential erotic style of faith was idealized: it could be found in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene novels, and still can be seen today in Walker Percy's writings or John Paul IPs discourses on love and sex...
...I would see these problematic conditions in the ways leisure, work, professions, family life, and political and social communities are now structured...
...Many intellectual Catholics were attempting to live by a radically different sexual ethic, sans artificial birth control, aspiring to ideals of love and sacrifice through having large families...
...Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were a force unto themselves, who through publishing and frenetic lecturing single-handedly engendered much of pre-Vatican II intellectual life in Catholic America...
...Having many high tech machines on hand is no substitute for devoted slave labor...
...But there are growing tensions and hostilities toward Roman abuses of authority...
...Dorothy Day's work, along with that of the worker priests and Young Christian Workers, had been influential in persuading Catholic intellectuals that they must be committed to social justice and live a simple life devoted to sacrifice and love...
...Perhaps a national Catholic great books course or a university of the air as in Great Britain could spark such a movement...
...In academia and other professions, we see for the first time in history an affluent educated elite who follow slave-labor schedules and endure increasing stress from competition and overwork...
...Many things, almost all of them fortunate...
...Our educated classes are working extremely hard at work-and working equally hard at home...
...Their vocation was to fight the good fight, seek truth, and persevere in social reform efforts inside and outside the Catholic church...
...Our problem is how to cope with the complexity and departmentalization of our life and times in order to achieve a viable American Catholic intellectual life-or lives...
...Women, even educated, privileged women, have always done the "shadow work" of family, household, and culture, the maintenance work that made intellectual leisure possible for an elite group of males...
...Ideally American Catholic intellectual life can be renewed through the impetus of small groups addressing focused intellectual concerns as they interact with a variety of institutional initiatives...
...If Catholic educational institutions truly want to encourage the intellectual life as a search for integrated truth, they will have to provide institutional supports and rewards that can compete with the rewards offered by academic grants for narrow specialization and value-free inquiry...
...Such experiences make one realize the untapped potential for adult education in the American church...
...Meeting only once or twice a year at larger national professional meetings is not enough...
...And the more interdisciplinary one's interests, the more difficult it is to find those other persons...
...At the same time a larger campaign might be mounted to move Catholic institutions toward different goals that would address the cultural problems of overload, over-specialization, underformation, and isolation of so many educated Catholics...
...We feel both stimulated and deeply grounded in this like-thinking, nurturing, and non-competitive group...
...Intellectual life arises from the broad-ranging activity of reading, discussing, and responding to ideas and arguments devoted to the meaning of events, the interpretation of human experience...
...For better or worse, Catholics have now entered the American mainstream and must cope with assimilation, establishments, and internal and external pluralism...
...Such gatherings of Catholic intellectuals for study and mutual support were necessary because in general the intellectual and professional worlds of the time were fairly hostile to Catholics...
...Family life has changed...
...Christians have taken very seriously the command to love God with all their hearts and minds...
...we talk together almost exclusively about our personal and private concerns...
...Catholics were clearly different from others in their faith, in their thinking, and in their chastity, sexual practices, and commitments...
...The demands of justly-shared-out family maintenance tasks, or the demands of single parenting, further reduce the time and energy available for leisure, general intellectual reading, intellectual friendship, and ongoing dialogue...
...I have had some positive experience of such supportive intellectual inquiry groups, although never in my own discipline of psychology...
...The last word has not been spoken about the origins of life, the nature of nature, the mysteries of evil and of goodness...
...Intellectuals may also be scholars, professionals, artists, or activists, but when operating as intellectuals they are constructing and reconstructing their culture's paradigms or cultural maps...
...While intellectuals have come in for a lot of scorn and contempt over the course of history, especially in America, they are nowhere more hated and persecuted than in totalitarian regimes...
...Educated Catholics gathered in enclaves to study and discuss their faith...
...Being a sacramental, worshiping church with both a hierarchical structure and a long tradition of dissent within unity, we have held together...
...One small group that met in our living room to study Protestant theology at Harvard three decades ago consisted, among others, of Daniel Callahan, Sidney Callahan, John Noonan, Mike Novak, John Ratte, and Harvey Cox (our ecumenical gesture to Protestantism...
...Catholic colleges might start to fight back against the overspecialization of academia by starting interdisciplinary institutes and more public programs devoted to topics which meet the problems of Catholics in secular culture...
...Servants have disappeared, the extended family is no longer a practical support, and women have gone to work and may pursue their own demanding careers...
...I do not think this is either practical or Catholic, or that it represents a sound intellectual reading of the signs of the times...
...Counting Catholic CEOs, Who's Wooers, even Catholic deans or presidents of secular colleges is not the same thing as assessing the state of Catholic intellectual life...
...Single persons and vowed religious have their own difficulties in establishing communities of support, much less finding intellectual communities...
...The writers among them then persuasively communicate ideas to others in nontechnical language that everyone can understand, i.e., English...
...This may truly be "the Catholic moment" in America...
...In other words intellectuals have to be able to raise their heads from their own narrowly focused projects (and from their own careers), and think critically about what they see...
...On a more modest modern level-after all, not all intellectuals are geniuses-a work such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring launched the ecological movement...
...The potential of small groups is certainly not a novel idea...
...The present great revival of spirituality, complete with institutes and publications devoted to spiritual practices, presents a model for an intellectual revival...
...Within a society, the intellectuals are those thinkers making the maps and discussing the proper rules for making maps, rather than the people doing the detailed specialized drawings emerging in the research of lab, library, or the field...
...Among lay Catholics who became educated in large numbers after World War II, the sense of vocation or calling once limited to the religious orders was taken up with enthusiasm...
...Since so many professional relationships are competitive, instead of collaborative and nurturing, males, along with females now rising in the ranks, seem to suffer social and intellectual deprivation, despite their social advantages in the world of work...
...But, as is usual with small group efforts, ripple effects occur...
...Bridging the gaps between cultures, bringing news of the currents in a society to its members are important activities...
...Happily, at this particularly turbulent and hopeful time of realignments and reconsiderations in the postmodern world, in history, America may be ready to listen to new voices singing old songs with new verses...
...In those days the relatively small number of educated Catholics who were engaged in an intellectual life would all know one another, read one another's books and articles, and share a common faith and education...
...The commitment and integration of living a vocation to the intellectual life that combined abstract thought with intense liturgical practice, with erotic energy and intense family commitments-in the midst of social persecutions-produced an esprit de corps and an exciting sense of bonded community...
...Another productive, small interdisciplinary group I was in met together in the midseventies, studied the family for a year, reading and discussing the literature...
...to get it, small groups will have to be based near home...
...we all came away enriched in other ways, as well as determined to muster public support for the much-neglected American family...
...The leisure that Oxford dons once enjoyed was built upon the backs of various submerged and exploited populations-the servant classes, the toiling natives of the Empire, and women...
...Typically, in academia, requirements for publication, teaching, research, and service are simultaneously increased and enforced by financially pressured institutions...
...In my own professional life and work I rarely find compatible persons with whom I can fully share intellectual pursuits, this because of my interdisciplinary interests...
...My fellow psychologists are not much interested in philosophy, ethics, or religion...
...No matter how many papers Freud published in the scholarly medical journals, he could never have changed the map of the modern world but for his masterly prose and large syntheses of ideas...
...Communist cell groups, AA, the women's movement, group psychotherapy, and today's Christian base communities all understand the potency of sustained, focused, small-group interaction to support beliefs and goals...
...the Holy Cross spirituality is Benedictine, you know, and after dinner they are always rushing off to communal prayer...
...In my department for instance, there are twenty-two psychologists, all hired for their different specialties, all reading different journals-when they have any time left over from teaching four courses while commuting among five campuses...
...What has been called liberalism's "thin theory of the good" is breaking down...
...one writes and teaches and professes to further the kingdom, out there in the university and the real world, rather than in the monastery...
...Often good, highly intelligent people have little Catholic education or formation, so that there is a huge discrepancy between their secular achievements and education, and their religious knowledge...
...or, to put it more positively, a thousand flowers are blooming in the garden...
...Our intellectual task is to work harder at understanding how the good news we offer relates to other quests for knowledge...
...Often a person may have to wait for an annual professional meeting to find a few people who share enough of the same scholarly interests to have a lengthy conversation or good argument...
...This rift forces us to recognize that psychology is many different subdisciplines using the same label...
...They also lived their faith in an exemplary style, as did other influential Catholic writers such as Dorothy Day...
...All the members of the group started out educating themselves and ended up publishing-often in these very pages...
...At last count there were forty-some special divisions in the American Psychological Association, which in addition just suffered a major schism between those emphasizing psychology as an experimental science and those who are willing to include the interests of professional clinicians in the organization...
...Spiritual institutes and retreats teach centering prayer and integration of self...
...I do sometimes talk with colleagues in the philosophy and English departments, but my friends there are equally peripatetic, and often share the humanities' traditional distrust of psychology, or what they conceive psychology to be-no small problem for the field itself...
...With the increase of educated persons in larger and larger corporations, professions, and educational institutions, we find a proliferation of worlds within worlds...
...I can use my own case as symptomatic of the general problem-and I am unusually fortunate...
...Whether you eat or drink, whatsoever you do, do all for the glory of God"-and to study and think well has definitely been praiseworthy, as those esteemed as doctors of the church attest...
...Detailed analyses are by nature too specific to cause trouble...
...In educated families there are new pressures from two careers, plus increasingly high standards of childbearing and childrearing...
...Some Catholic intellectuals come in the neo-conservative mode, others tend to be liberal centrists, others are avant-garde devotees of feminism, liberation theology, or Eastern religious movements...
...The Catholic church is now a huge and increasingly diverse institution of many mansions, with new rooms opening up every day...
...If other institutions in the church wish to further the intellectual life, the world of Catholic adult education awaits...
...An intellectual life is built upon certain foundations, and it can flourish best under certain conditions that are increasingly unavailable in American society...
...Only fairly leisured persons can partake of the high form of cultural play that makes up the intellectual life...
...born Utopians: The impossible only takes a little longer...
...In fact I would say that one of the ways that the ideal of a Catholic intellectual life has been differentiated from secular scholarship or science has been its commitment to a holistic vision or sense of religious vocation...
...They were not only attempting to live new forms of the ancient intellectual vocations (Dominican, Jesuit), but also to practice distinctive spiritual ideals in their family lives...
...When you meet a fellow Catholic today, a certain dance of inquiry ensues, since knowing of the other's active religious practice does not allow taking anything else for granted...
...The resulting pressure for turning out scholarly publications means that most intellectual energy is directed toward highly focused projects, which only a small group of other scholars can read with profit...
...Such interdisciplinary intellectual endeavors have often been funded by grants from outside the institutions, such as the state councils on the humanities or corporations...
...Other memoirs of those years among Catholic intellectuals can be found in the writings of Raissa Maritain, Abigail McCarthy, Christopher Dawson, and Richard Gilman...
...As a priest friend of mine said of his new life at Notre Dame, "It's hard to get a sustained intellectual conversation going...
...Ethicists and philosophers I see, and live with, are decidedly not interested in psychology and religion...
...When all went well with these first- or second-generation of educated lay Catholic intellectuals, things went very well indeed...
...If Catholics are to fashion new creative strategies, we must first come to terms with current social realities...
...There are more and more publications, but they are increasingly targeted for professional, scholarly, or recreational reading...
...it is enormously stimulating to share ideological commitments and to have a belief system that advocates the integration of thought, practice, and personal life...
...Even if there were more common forums and publications, would the harassed, overworked masses of educated Americans have time to read and reflect on them...
...There are certain structural difficulties built into the lifestyles of America's intelligent educated professionals which can illuminate our special problems within the Catholic community...
...My female friends and I often extend our reflections on our personal lives through the novels and fiction that we read together, but none of them would ever want to read the psychological or philosophical texts that I eagerly devour...
...We support one another's development and aspirations, and discuss our intellectual work-in-progress in a way that affirms the feminist belief that the personal is political...
...Women were exhorted to live out a particular ideal of the valiant woman, which could not easily encompass career aspirations...
...All around us the challenges and intellectual problems of our modern era await disciplined, creative thinking, infused and inspired by Christian values...
...Since leisure is the basis of culture and one of the cornerstones of the intellectual life, we suffer cultural deprivation in the midst of material plenty...
...Committed Catholics who seek to integrate their religious belief with their professional work have their own peculiar troubles...
...Our present situation, in my view, represents a decline from the level of recent previous decades...
...There is more and more specialization as size, dispersal, and relocations of educated populations transform social groupings...
...Neither at home nor at work do most professional men and women have wives, mothers, maiden aunts, housekeepers, nannies, secretaries, or research assistants to help them cope with pressing workloads...
...The opening of the windows to long-repressed reform brought a surge of new energies, new experiments, and the rapid growth of pluralism within the church...
...A group of persons must generally know the same things, read the same things, and be committed to the same values and goals...
...Individual parishes may not have the resources to go it alone, but dioceses, seminaries, centers for spirituality, retreat houses, and other institutes and organizations can provide programs to stimulate the intellectual life...
...Every intellectual Catholic magazine should be working to get its networks of readers together for more sustained inquiry-and thereby ensure a future readership...
...Without a common foundation, or common goals, or a common life with some leisure, an intellectual life withers...
...There were various circles and centers, and various publication ventures in the East and Midwest, Fordham, Georgetown, Chicago, St...
...Today one side effect of long overdue social reforms is that there are fewer exploited groups that the educated classes can oppress in order to obtain time for their own leisure pursuits...
...what can be done...
...Intellectual Catholics knew who they were, and what they were about...
...For a full-bodied intellectual life to flourish there should also be a community small enough and conceptually cohesive enough for those who pursue inquiry and reflection to share core commitments and knowledge...
...Only highly specialized research published in scholarly refereed journals will count toward more and more exacting standards for promotion and tenure decisions...
...Obviously Roman leadership in the church is bent on restoring the older unities and dominant centralization through the papacy...
...A professional person in America procures a core of helpers and assistants only after he or she has climbed high enough in the professional hierarchy to join the overscheduled and overcommitted leaders of the establishment-who spend their days jetting here and there, crisscrossing the country to attend endless rounds of conferences and meetings...
...Everywhere we see a marked increase in the complexity and specialization of jobs so that the ordinary workload, in both the hours required and the imposed pace of work, is heavier than before...
...Here again there was an attempt to integrate the influence of the Catholic Worker movement's stress on providence and poverty (Franciscan) with the liturgical movement's revival (Benedictine...
...At this point the top-down, institutional initiatives and strategies begin to shade into the bottom-up, base-community, small-group approaches...
...some 230 women and a few men attended...
...One is a decentered, self-reliant, do-it-yourself, till-your-own-garden strategy...
...Naturally I am most intrigued by epistemological questions in psychology and ethics of how reason is informed by faith...
...We see the ridiculous plight of a Pulitzer-Prize-win-ning author like Paul Starr turned down for tenure at Harvard...
...The forties and fifties were times in academia when doctrinaire secular atheism inherited from the Enlightenment reigned supreme...
...When I use the term intellectual life, I mean something broader than narrowly focused academic scholarship, or highly specialized scientific work, or the current state of education in colleges and universities...
...John's, Notre Dame, Boston...
...Academia, religious or secular, is filled with disillusioned people who entered the scholarly professions seeking the ideal of an intellectual community, but now find themselves no better off than their classmates who went into insurance...
...This means, in practice, that even if one can find a group of fellow intellectuals who are practicing Catholics, there can be wide differences among various religious styles represented...
...There must be more cohesion and regular continuity...
...A great deal of idealism was felt by those laypersons called to intellectual work: One studies and seeks truth for the greater glory of God...
...The faithful, at least the feminine faithful, thirst to grow intellectually and spiritually...
...We can barely talk psychology together, much less explore the relevance of religious values to our discipline...
...My fellow parishioners and few Catholic friends give me spiritual support and a sense of religious community but are not really interested in philosophy, ethics, or psychology...
...In recent American Catholic life, John Courtney Murray (on religious liberty), Dorothy Day (on peace), Michael Harrington (on poverty), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (on the family) have significantly shifted the religious or national debate...
...The effort to integrate one's words, deeds, work, and attachments, to serve a transcendent cause, energizes and enlivens professional work...
...When one is intellectually isolated and starving something has to be done immediately on a self-help model...
...Still, to function effectively as an intellectual today is not easy...
...Catholicism, with its avowal of a more communitarian social justice ethic and its full-bodied view of human nature, has something tonic to offer tired blood and anemic individualism...
...Even getting a nuclear family to eat dinner together regularly can be a major project...
...Perhaps there are enclaves that have escaped recent social changes but I have not heard of them...
...My American Catholic intellectual life is conducted mostly by mail and in the library...
...I found this point intriguing, because I think there was an erotic intensity informing the atmosphere of postwar educated Catholic life...
...Rather than engage in hand-to-hand combat at the barricades, or in the courtroom, or in the missions, intellectuals shape the course of activism and give general directions to the professions...
...Professional males do seem to talk to their colleagues about their work, but these conversations often are quite guarded and turn out to be more professional gossip than substantively intellectual...
...We now have a great deal of fragmentation...
...From what I have seen of theology, philosophy, political science, sociology, and English literature, similar schisms and separate schools exist...
...Discussing sporting events seems to serve as a substitute for intimate masculine conversation...
...But every morning I should rise up and thank God that I was born a woman and so have friends...
...Fewer general journals and magazines exist in which serious intellectual ideas can be publicly discussed...
...So many males I see seem completely bereft of personal friendships...
...Intellectuals are neither purely scholars nor purely hands-on activists...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
