Engaging the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Across the Disciplines The Importance of Catholicity in Our Current Moment

Abstract

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition should animate the academic life and educational mission of Catholic colleges and universities. A clearer focus on the catholicity of the tradition — its aspiration to wholeness — will help us better understand what it means to engage the tradition in the heart of the institution’s academic mission. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition is best described as a conversation open to an uninhibited process of questioning that leads across disciplinary boundaries with an openness to questions of wholeness and ultimacy, a conversation in which all are invited to participate as a leaven for their scholarly lives. The Catholic college or university that is truly animated by the Catholic Intellectual Tradition will therefore be a community engaged in a certain sort of conversation: a diverse community of teachers, scholars, students, and administrators sharing life together, working and talking together, in the shared pursuit of truth and wholeness.