Jesuit Scholarship in a Secular Age Conference

August 31-September 2, 2023

McCormick Lounge, Lakeshore Campus, Loyola University Chicago

Over the course of their history, Jesuit colleges and universities have looked to Jesuit academics as particular stewards of both university mission and identity. Over the past five decades, however, the conversation around the role of Jesuit scholarship has failed to keep pace with the rapid changes in higher education generally and within American and Canadian Jesuit institutions (AJCU institutions) specifically. This has left the role of Jesuit scholars underarticulated.

Given this situation two tasks lie before junior Jesuit academics: articulation and adaptation. First, articulation of the role Jesuit scholars are to play in fulfilling the mission of AJCU institutions – institutions that now exist not only within secular contexts but are often themselves quite secular. (In this context, such an attribution of secularity is meant to signify not the absence of religion per se, but that AJCU institutions are themselves interiorly cross pressured; they are spaces where claims to coherency of meaning, integration of mission, or thickness of culture are buffeted by rival winds.) Second, it is to be hoped that articulating the role of Jesuit academics within such a secular arena can lead to an integrated understanding of how Jesuits can adapt themselves to the context into which we have been sent and, in so doing, accomplish again the kind of intellectual inculturation for which the best Jesuit scholarship has long been known. 

This conference was composed of junior Jesuit academics who, bringing their varied disciplinary and vocational expertise, sought to describe our current context and articulate our aspirations for what it might become. We took the tensions in our current context as a call to adapt ourselves once more, to ask again where the Spirit is laboring and to learn through such asking how contemporary Jesuit scholarship can play a part in handing on a tradition adapted to a changed – and changing – context. Jesuit education was, in fact, born of just such creative adaptation to novel times, places, and persons. Christ was and is the inspiration, center, and purpose of Jesuit life, yet cultural adaptability demands holding the creative tension of being capable, at one moment, of witnessing to Christ by speaking of things other than Christ while, at another moment, returning to explicitly Christian speech and action. Jesuit higher education has continually adapted so as to accomplish this same end for new populations, changed religious sensibilities, and new models of scholarship and education. Confident that inhabiting such tension creatively is possible, this conference sought to be a space for the articulation of how such a possibility can be realized. 

We have plans for more Jesuit Scholar Conferences so keep an eye out for those in the future!