I want to second Mark Sargent's thoughts on John Breen's provocative critique of Jesuit legal education. I am grateful to both John and Amy for their thoughtful contributions to the much-needed effort to think seriously about what it means to call a law school "Jesuit." Like Amy, I think it's critical that Jesuit law schools find ways to be explicit about the faith dimension of our Jesuit, Catholic mission, and I'm convinced that we can (and must) find ways to be explicit in an authentically Jesuit way that is characterized by inclusion and dialogue, rather than imposition or indoctrination. If our law schools are to be integral parts of universities in the truest sense of that word, institutions where the whole universe of human questions are on the table, then our law schools must be places where people of faith (students, faculty, adminstrators, and staff) can explicitly explore what it means to integrate their faith into their professional and academic lives, in both curricular and co-curricular settings.
Like John, I'm convinced that, if our law schools are to be places where the full range of ideas and questions can be explored and brought into dialogue with one another, then they must be places where the Catholic intellectual tradition is alive and at home -- not imposed on anyone, but present, vital, articulate, and thoroughly involved in the academic conversation that is at the heart of the life of the university. There can be a strong tendency in the contemporary academic world with which we are all familiar to shy away from any admission of religion into the conversation out of fear of fundamentalism or authoritarianism or the marginalization of people who do not share the religious tradition of the sponsoring institution. There is a fear that any admission of religion into the conversation will make the religious voice the predominant voice or the privileged voice or an excluding voice. My fear is that prolonged failure to confront that fear explicitly and directly has contributed to the actual marginalization and exclusion of the religious voice. The Catholic intellectual tradition should never be imposed on anyone in a pluralistic, inclusive academic community, but neither should the voice of that tradition be marginalized, excluded, devalued, ignored, or made invisible out of fear of offending those of other religious traditions or no religious tradition. Instead, the Catholic intellectual tradition should have an explict, legitimate place at the curricular table of inclusive dialogue at a Jesuit law school.
My tentative hope is that at least some of the fear that makes hiring for mission such a neuralgic topic at so many places can perhaps, bit by bit, be overcome through more conversation that is open, honest, respectfully attentive to the fears that people do have, and, therefore, at least potentially transformative. All of us who care about Jesuit education have to do a better job of helping our faculty colleagues who may be interested to learn more about the Ignatian mission and spiritual tradition and why that mission and spirituality have led Jesuits to care deeply about higher education for so long. I'm a relative newcomer to the professional academic world, but I think the Ignatian tradition has a lot to offer the shared academic endeavor of the law school (e.g., in the classroom and in our scholarship, in clinical education, in concrete concern for justice (experiential and intellectual), in a shared community life among the faculty and in the classroom that is humane precisely because of a respect for human dignity that is rooted in the Catholic tradition that gave birth to the university as an institution, in a deeper understanding of the law as a vocation and in the law school as a culture of discernment, to name just a few areas that a range of other contributors to this conversation have highlighted in different ways). Thanks to John, Amy, Mark and many others for moving the conversation forward in constructive ways.
