If college students aren't shocked, startled, uncomfortable and challenged twice a week, they're doing it wrong.

I am a professor at a Jesuit university, and when I face 260 young adults in a lecture hall, I now face something I never expected to encounter in a classroom: the belief that students should be protected from wrestling with challenging ideas.

Most of my students are intellectually curious young people who engage energetically with controversial issues. Still, over the past semesters I’ve noticed a small but growing number of students who resist any point of view that is not theirs—and my colleagues across the country have noticed it on their campuses, too. These students avoid not only other perspectives—they avoid encountering other perspectives. When a politically charged issue is raised, these students do not object to one opinion—they object to having the issue brought up in front of them at all. To them, controversy in the classroom is bad. Unfamiliar ideas are to be dodged and thoughtful critique shunned. Their thinking should never be jostled. Yet that jostling is the point of education. 

I teach journalism and media studies. We explore the ethical decisions media producers face in telling stories and deciding which stories to tell. We question and explore how media portray race, gender, sexuality, and class, and how those representations shape our culture, attitudes, and ideas about ourselves and each other. We talk about what’s in the news and on television, who earns Academy Awards and who doesn’t, which books were banned and why, and how the printing press led to profound shifts in cultural power—and that’s just for starters.

I tell students (and write it into my syllabus) that our discussions may lead them to test, shift, or decide to keep their existing perceptions. That’s the lifelong work of an intelligent person living an examined existence. That’s what a fine, inquiring intellect is about. That’s the journey to maturity and true adulthood. And that’s not okay with some students.

A business major in his senior year came to my office hours to ask me why he had to be exposed to discussions about how advertising often objectifies women. “I just don’t see it,” he shrugged. “That’s not something I agree with, so I don’t want to hear about it.”

I pointed out that how advertising portrays women is actually a measured phenomenon. “It’s not really something you need to agree or disagree with,” I said. “These are research findings from many scholars over many years.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t see why we have to talk about it.”

Another day after class, a young man asked me why he had to hear about how media represent homosexuality. “I don’t think I should have to listen to that. I just don’t believe in it.”

“You don’t believe homosexuals exist?” I asked him.

“I guess they exist,” he said. “But I don’t want to think about them.”

This signals an alarming approach to the world: If I don’t like the truth, I’ll just pretend it’s the personal belief of some person I don’t like. That kind of thinking is not the path to working collaboratively with fellow employees, competently leading an organization, or achieving social justice in our time. It is, however, the kind of thinking that our current political climate supports: my side is utterly right, your side is utterly wrong, and there are only two sides.

If these students were in math class they couldn’t dismiss an algorithm as too challenging to learn. But if they don’t like research showing that violence in video games affects young children, they want to wish it away. I wish chocolate didn’t make me fat, but that doesn’t change the fact that it does. A wish is not a fact or an opinion. It is a mere wish, perhaps even a delusion. And heading into a competitive career marketplace (and out into life, for that matter) armed with only wishes and delusions is a bad plan.

Thinking critically means understanding the difference between fact, opinion, and bias. It means challenging assumptions, checking facts, asking perceptive questions, forming coherent, logical, and fact-based arguments, and presenting them clearly in discussion, in papers, and in life. Question everything, even your teachers, especially your teachers. And then search for facts, for research, for as much truth as you can find.

I tell students that I don’t want them to think like me, I want them to think for themselves. But I want them to truly think, not refuse to think while pretending ignorance is a defensible intellectual position. College broadens students’ horizons of experience and deepens their understanding of and compassion for other people, identities, and beliefs. I tell students that they should be encountering fresh information every day, if they are keeping their ears, eyes, and mind open. If they aren’t shocked, startled, uncomfortable, and challenged twice a week in college, they’re doing it wrong.

Ignatian spirituality is rooted in lively intellectual inquiry. It is not the Ignatian way to infantilize students who are thoroughly capable of wrestling with thorny realities. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them. Students need to be brave.

And most of them are. They tackle intellectual challenges with impressive fearlessness and real enthusiasm.

These are not the students who avoid controversy in the classroom. These are the students who engage, even when it isn’t easy, and work their way through cultural and social sticky wickets. These are the students who learn how to discuss sensitive issues with compassion. These are the students who will leave college with strong leadership skills. But students who want courses altered to protect them from the messiness of life may not leave school as well prepared.

My university’s culture is to encourage students to see the social and cultural structures surrounding them, and to participate in making meaningful social change. Social change is not limited to volunteering at a soup kitchen; social change means shifting from apathy to empathy, and from ignorance to informed, critical thinking. It requires thoughtful consideration of real world issues, not running away from them. The mission, vision, and values of Catholic colleges ought to reflect Catholic ideals, but blocking thinking before it starts is surely not ideal. Ignorance does not produce wisdom and compassion. Fear of dissent is the sign of a weak, underdeveloped philosophy—not a vibrant set of values and beliefs based on ethical standards.

The classroom is the natural environment for controversial, challenging issues to be raised, aired out, explored, examined, and challenged. Learning how to do this is a valuable life skill. Critical thinkers are desirable employees, colleagues, bosses, and leaders. People who fear ideas are not effective leaders. People who avoid uncomfortable realities are not people who can make a difference, who can reshape reality to be more fair, more equitable, more just. The conversation is not the enemy. Exploring new ideas is not wrong. The only thing threatened by clear thinking is ignorance.

Young people who fear encountering controversial ideas aren’t bad students, but, like perhaps too many of their elders, they are overprotective of their assumptions. A media theory called Selective Exposure explains this as a human tendency to consume only texts that congratulate us on what we already think, rather than expose ourselves to new information that challenges what we believe. Some choose a Catholic university with the idea that the curriculum will not engage with controversial issues and therefore will not make students feel uncomfortable. The highest calling of a Catholic university, however, isn’t to proliferate dogma but to produce compassionate, informed critical thinkers who can work for social justice in the world. So why is comfort a higher value than learning how to think and reason?

Many young people are trying to honor the beliefs of their parents and respect the traditions of their families—things that will surely survive a robust argument and things that are ultimately only enriched (if we are brave and listen to each other) by new experiences and knowledge. Life will teach them, even if I cannot. 

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Poorly worded: Can we have a Mass that speaks to real people?

The translators of the new Mass prayers have neglected one cardinal rule: Consider your audience.

As the days dwindled before their triumphal entry, the new liturgical changes had not yet risen to even an underwhelming response. “One in being” in the creed pretty much satisfied the mass of still-loyal Catholics, since they neither understood what it meant nor cared enough to Google it. And its replacement, “consubstantial,” is hollower and even less intriguing. Parishioners’ only real problem is why such stuff even matters.

When the official church has to publish a booklet explaining, step by step, why “this is good for you,” bet your bottom dollar it’s not going to be any help at all—especially not where Catholics really need it to help, in their weary and puzzled souls.

To any objective mind, the new changes to the Mass are unarguably not food for ordinary people’s souls. It would be an unusual step, but all authorities would have to do is just ask the people: “Does this bring you and God closer? Does it really make you feel part of a bigger life with the people who share this space and time today?”

On the contrary, the changes are palliatives to the specialist minds of theologians, liturgists, and church historians. In a conversation with several priests, I was dimwitted enough to ask, “But what about the audience?” And one said, pretty intensely, “The audience doesn’t matter. It’s the message that matters!”

And just what is that message? Freedom from the fear of sin and death? Or conformity and obedience? Even the liturgists’ rarefied toolbox of now-required terms springs from some transgalactic thesaurus. I doubt too many parents wonder if their college kids “have missed liturgy this week.” Epiclesis is not even in my 45-year-old dictionary, and it sounds like some eye disease. I strongly doubt that those who have taken a summer theology course and now speak of “mystagogy” also refer to a horse as an “equine quadruped.”

For some time I helped out in a parish every Sunday. But a personal quirk of mine had long conflicted with the personal quirk of whoever had the final word on the previous Mass prayers. I simply could not use the ugly phrase “our spiritual drink” in a conversation with Someone who gives me reason both to be celibate and to put up with his stubborn refusal to fulfill my expectations. So I would say, “Heavenly Father, we offer you these ordinary gifts—bits of bread and a cup of wine—and we ask you once again, by that great miracle, to infuse into these gifts—and through them into us—the living presence of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our brother.”

But a woman in the choir, a member of a pontifical prelature, took a (quite long) list of my liturgical depredations to the long-suffering pastor—among them, substituting “his friends” for “his disciples.” I spoke personally to her and said, “If you’re distracted by those finicky details, you miss the whole essence of the Mass!” She replied, “I like your homilies, but I want a liturgy not only valid but licit according to the Roman ritual.”

And there you have it. The rulebook versus the needs of the family.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan had the courage to ask our advice on how to invite the 30 percent of recently disenchanted Catholics, the fastest-growing Christian group in our country, back into community with the rest of us. Like any good executive, the archbishop is calling in his staff because the “product” has nosedived in desirability. But the staff keeps prescribing remedies without even a cursory consultation with the “buying public” about their true tastes and needs.

There’s the answer: The only place the life of the ordinary Catholic touches the life of the visible church is at weekly worship. What if we give them a Mass that speaks to their honest, confused adult souls? Mass might seem desirable again. If the American bishops could corral the best poets, dramatists, and songwriters to come up with a Mass that preserved the long-ratified structure but also moved the soul, the church might still have a chance.

Both the words “humble” and “human” are rooted in the Latin word humus, which means “dirt.” Would it be thinkable to make the words of our prayer together both humble and human—that is, down to earth—rather than riddled with stilted theological distinctions? Could the language of our prayer be dictated from the bottom up rather than from the top down?

As a simple example, in the eucharistic prayers, where we pray “for our pope and our bishop and all the clergy,” might we also pray for the poor, the lonely, the sexually confused, those who feel like losers, and those who crave some dignity, all of whom we should warmly welcome?

Years ago, because of my unease with the stiffness of the church’s official morning and evening prayer—prayers written by people with concerns other than my own—I wrote three books called Daily Prayers for Busy People. Some examples may clarify the tone suggested here:

Living God, at the Incarnation your Word took on himself what you had never felt before: vulnerability, woundedness, doubt. Welcome! Amen.

Or perhaps: Great Friend, we live hemmed in by mirrors, criticizing our lack of progress, power, popularity, security. Help us to shatter the mirrors. Amen.

Perhaps those are too “breathy” for public use, but they might be a step in the right direction.

We need not descend to the fireworks and screaming that draw 20 million viewers to American Idol or to the diametrically un-Christian Survivor. We surely don’t need to stoop to the level of personal agonies exposed in trashy morning talk shows, or even emulate the former queen of daytime TV Oprah Winfrey—although she may have been closer to understanding and touching the human heart than we are. Why not aim the prayers of the Mass at an audience savvy enough to understand Jon Stewart isn’t just kidding? Somewhere between The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

This is not merely a matter of getting our numbers back up. It is a matter of our doing precisely what we have been commissioned to do: Offer the Good News, the liberating message of forgiveness and resurrection. Beyond question, in its present state, our message does not yet appear to be desirable to those most in need of it.

Such personal, rather than punctilious, concern for souls over doctrines would also be welcome to those of us who have resolved to stay. No matter what.

So help me God: ‘Faithful Citizenship’ and Catholics in public life

The poignancy of the moment was emotional. At the White House last Thursday, with a painting of Daniel Webster looking over my shoulder and a bust of Thomas Jefferson looking on, I raised my right hand and pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States and to faithfully execute my office. I closed with the profound oath, “So help me God.” With that I took up my responsibilities as part of the president’s White House Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

What does it mean to be a Catholic in public life? What role should our faith play in how we vote, what policies we promote, and how we meet the responsibilities of citizenship and public office? How should Catholicism matter for our politics, for jury duty, for serving in our military, for judges and legislators, for candidates and bureaucrats, for voters?

It so happens that next week the American bishops will offer pastoral counsel for such questions at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in Baltimore. Every four years, synced with presidential elections, the bishops release a guide for engaging in public life as voters, citizens, and officeholders. But this year, expectations are that we will see only a new introduction and some small tweaks to their 2011 document, Forming Conscience for Faithful Citizenship.

If so, then our bishops disappoint us. Faithful Citizenship, as it has come to be called, reads like something from another age. Indeed, it’s from 2011 B.F. (Before Francis). Its tone is juridical, and does not convey the merciful and pastoral message of His Holiness. In form, it is an un-Francis-like assemblage of pronouncements for judging citizens, politicians, and officeholders. Moreover, those criteria are oddly presented. Faithful Citizenship seems to imply that governments’ duties to prioritize laws that address the needs of those in poverty, ensure care for creation, and advance the common good through social justice policies and programs are merely secondary or aspirational goals. The further implication is that we’re free to use our prudence to pursue these concerns in any way that we please.

In contrast, under Pope Francis these church teachings have been given a powerful urgency. We have been reminded that such teachings were never secondary, optional, or merely aspirational. The pope insisted even in his speech before Congress that the church’s social teachings have the full gravitas of the church’s moral authority behind them. They are integral elements for how Catholics think about the responsibilities of governments and citizens.

Ahead of what looks to be a morally complicated election year for Catholics in America, what’s wanted is pastoral guidance that reflects the same urgency for the church’s social teachings that His Holiness has conveyed time and again. Our bishops should be reminding Catholic voters and officeholders of the church’s insistence that government itself (and not just charitable individuals) has a responsibility to address poverty, injustice, environmental degradation, and to provide for a moral economy. Our bishops do a disservice to their flock if American Catholics imagine that the church’s teachings for citizenship and government are restricted to matters like abortion, marriage, or religious liberty.

It’s also a disservice if American Catholics conclude from Faithful Citizenship that some issues are prudentially flexible while other issues are somehow too important for prudence. None of the church’s teachings for governance come with a step-by-step blueprint for how they are to be achieved.  It may well be that more immediate success in reducing the incidence of abortion comes from providing better health care to at-risk populations than from de-funding Planned Parenthood. Working to pass 20 week bans at the state level might do more than working to overturn Roe v. Wade. Likewise, increasing TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare) might not be as effective in addressing extreme poverty as increasing the minimum wage or passing a jobs bill focused on repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure. Providing for more local caseworkers might make more difference than increasing the food stamp (SNAP) allowance.

These are all matters of careful prudential consideration. Reducing abortion and poverty are morally required goals, but how we best achieve these goals is a prudential decision. Prudence, however, is not a right to choose any approach one pleases because it fits our political preferences; we’re obliged to carefully assess what really works.

Faithful Citizenship also fails in conveying the Catholic ideal of civic virtue.  Civic virtue is the glue of political solidarity. Its value for addressing the crisis of contemporary American politics cannot be overstated. At a moment when politics in America is increasingly just a marketplace of competing special interests, we desperately need Catholic teaching that tells us to transcend our private interests and promote the common good of all. Democracy only works when citizens have sufficient civic virtue to put the good of all ahead of their own desires and interests. If as a country we are ever to overcome the vitriolic and divisive politics of the moment and to overcome the governmental gridlock created by that divisiveness, then civic virtue must be promoted. For officeholders and elected officials, civic virtue reminds them (as Pope Francis said so powerfully before Congress) that they are to be not leaders, but humble servants to the common good. Faithful Citizenship could do much to remind American Catholics that the church’s own teachings not only insist on civic virtue, but that these teachings offer a way forward from the crisis of our current politics.

Finally, Faithful Citizenship could remind American Catholics that citizenship is not a license, but rather an ongoing formation of the soul to serve the common good. With citizenship comes rights and privileges, yes, but, more importantly, duties and responsibilities. Last Thursday at the White House, with my right hand raised, those duties and responsibilities were keenly felt. Yet, each of us as citizens have implicitly taken such an oath—to defend the Constitution and to faithfully execute the office of citizenship that we hold. So help me God.

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Image: Epstein, Jacob, Sir, 1880-1959. Coventry Cathedral - Archangel Michael and the Devil,
from Art in the Christian Tradition,
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN

November 15, 2015

Click here for scripture readings

Many people have undergone the type of major collapse that Jesus predicted.

Their theological, social, and political worlds have suddenly disappeared.

Others have suffered less (but still) harrowing forms of dismantling: the sudden death of a loved one, a Friday afternoon layoff, a stock market crash.

But unscheduled and traumatic change is a fact of everyone's life.

And we do not skate through it.

Change may happen quickly.

But transition is a slower process.

It is how we psychologically adjust to the change.

It entails grieving over what has been lost, feeling we are without our bearings, and looking forward to something new.

The problem is when we are in the midst of transition, we cannot envision the new. .

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The time of transition itself has been characterized as that moment when the trapeze artist has let go of one bar and has not yet grabbed the next bar.

It is midair living.

The identity we had is gone and the identity we will have has not arrived.

So, depending on the intensity and gyration of the transition, we gain a reputation as not being ourselves.

We eat too little or too much.

We slough off work or become addicted.

We are silent when we should talk and talk when we should be silent.

We start things we don't finish and we try to finish things we didn't start.

We are tired of our friends asking how we are and hurt when they don't ask how we are.

As I overheard someone say about me in the middle of a transition, "Oh, don't mind him and his long hair. He's numb."

In the in-between time of transitions we have joined that legion of our fellow human beings who, in a past moment of arrogant stability, we labeled as "not knowing their [derriere] from their elbow."

Welcome to confusion so profound it is anatomical.

Transitions are so discombobulating it is difficult to see any value in the in-between state.

It is easy to look to the future and bet on our innate resiliency. "Hang in there. You'll get through."

However devastating the loss may be, we will find a way to deal with it, to adapt and continue.

It may take time, but a stable future awaits us.

Even if we do not get completely over it, we will get beyond it.

As our unhelpful friends say, "Life goes on, and so will you."

Spiritual teachers, an unconventional lot, take a different tack.

They say, "Don't hurry to a new security."

They think there is potential in the present process of floundering.

It is not in the hope of reaching the next bar but in the interval of being between bars.

The potential is in midair living.

Without tongue in cheek, spiritual teachers suggest that the in-between time is an opportunity to remember that we are always more than what is happening to us.

We are not only immersed in transition, we transcend it.

Our soul is not only related to the changing temporal order but to the unchanging eternal order.

When we lead a stable life on the physical, psychological, and social levels, this spiritual truth often eludes us.

When disruption occurs—and we either choose or are forced to change—an invitation emerges in the middle of the transition.

Since we are between earthly stabilities, we may just shift awareness to our heavenly connection.

In doing this, we begin to develop our spiritual potential.

In mystical, biblical terms the in-between time is the third day of creation.

On that day God drew up out of the waters dry land and separated "the waters under the sky" from the dry land (Gen 1:9, 13).

The waters symbolize the formlessness and turmoil of transition.

The appearance of dry land gives humans a place to stand in the midst of the swift and dangerous currents.

What God did on the third day of creation, God does every day.

Divine reality is always supplying a place to stand.

However, we most need this divine grounding when we have lost our human grounding, when we are in the midair between the

bars.

Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Image: Ruth Agmon, Ruth and Naomi - the Dialog,
from Art in the Christian Tradition, 
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

November 8, 2015

Click here for scripture readings

The noise of the coins would have been telling.

Thirteen trumpet-shaped receptacles surrounded the outer court of the Temple.

The sound of coins being placed in the containers would have echoed in the Temple area and announced to those present the potential size of the donation.

Large ones would have sounded loudly, while the smallest of coins would have been barely audible.

As Jesus watched the crowds putting money in the treasury, he could hear what the rich  contributed as well as what the widow offered.

Jesus had no direct contact with the widow, but he noticed her offering of two of the smallest coins, just enough to buy her a little bread.

Today's Gospel tells of a widow found in a place she didn't seem to belong among the rich and well dressed.

Like a leper or a prostitute, a widow was regarded as an outcast.

She was among the scribes, who received respect and honor in public.

Jesus accused these same scribes of devouring the savings of widows.

This same widow might even have had her savings devoured by these very scribes.

It must have been difficult to go among them to the treasury.

Many of the rich had already put in sizable amounts, and here she was with her pittance.

And yet Jesus recognized her offering as all that she had.

In Mark's Gospel, Jesus demonstrated to his disciples a clear sense of his mission.

He liberated people from demons, sickness, sin, and oppressive laws and traditions.

Nothing kept him from working to bring the reign of God closer to God's people; he was not swayed by public pressure, fear, misapplied tradition or empty

religious authority.

Jesus spoke and acted with courage in his commitment to serve.

And it cost him his life.

Jesus was clear that God's invitation looked very different from what the religious

authorities or even his disciples had come to expect.

God cared what happened to the least. God wanted people to rejoice that others were cured or healed.

This God welcomed the sinner, the forgotten, the outcast and the widows.

This God's reign was very different from what many in authority had predicted.

All of the characters in Mark's Gospel saw the same signs, heard the same words.

All were invited to love others as God had loved them.

Yet loving the way that God loved challenged their ideas of who their neighbor

really was.

It was a big leap — bigger than some could make.

By his example, Jesus showed his disciples that loving this way was possible, but that it also leads to suffering and death.

This was the reign God wanted, but not one the world readily welcomed.

These were not the kinds of relationships that people would rush out to cultivate

God's reign stretched human generosity and notions about the kind of people that God loved.

We have seen the same signs and heard the same words of Jesus in Mark's Gospel all year.

We hear this same invitation to love.

This world, even this God, might be very different from the one we have come to expect.

Today God still seeks the forgotten ones, the disdained and oppressed.

The refugees and immigrants, legal or not.

God searches for the lost and holds the little ones close.

God holds the outcasts with our arms.

God searches with our eyes and heals with our words and our actions.

And God is waiting to hear the sound of our offering.

It’s okay to be a ‘bad’ Catholic

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Article Your Faith

Robert Orsi makes a brave choice in his recent book Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton University Press). “There’s a taboo associated with speaking out of personal experience in your academic work,” Orsi, a professor at Northwestern University, says. But Orsi ignores this taboo; his text interweaves historical scholarship on Catholic devotions with autobiographical anecdotes about his own Italian Catholic background. For Orsi, then, the academic and the personal are intertwined and inseparable.

Much of Orsi’s work focuses on the study of devotionalism—the personal relationships between humans and saints. But he cautions against reading his academic work as a defense of the practice or making assumptions about his own faith life.

You can be religiously observant and believe passionately in LGBT justice. On the other hand, you can fervently work toward ending abortion and barely attend Mass. While you might look at a Catholic academic like Orsi and think you know what he stands for, internal faith lives are much more complicated than stereotypes.

When you have an academic career that spans more than 25 years, it’s easy for people to put you and your ideas in a box. “I’ve become the spokesman for not rejecting devotions as an integral part of Catholic history, whatever one might think about them,” Orsi explains. “But I would have felt unhappy if I had looked at my ideas today and I hadn’t changed over time.”

A lot of your work has focused on individual relationships rather than theology or religious history as a whole. Why is this?

People are formed in a web of relationships. And it’s in that web where their ideas about religion and the way they inhabit the world come together in a very direct and intimate way.

It brings us right into history’s beating heart to look at family life in this way. For example, I tell my students that if you want to understand why a suicide bomber does what he or she does, it’s not sufficient, or even probably helpful, to only look at ideology or theology.

This is a very extravagant example, but it’s more important to look at peoples’ lives. To look at what their uncle said to them during childhood, what family stories circulated back then, and what stories they were raised on.

We’re born into stories that are already under way. We become part of these stories and taken up into those stories, and that’s the ground on which we become who we are.

Look at Catholicism. Everywhere you look, it’s about relationships; relationships in parishes, relationships with priests and nuns. We come to be who we are in networks of relationships that precede us.

How do personal stories help us understand the story of Catholicism?

I had an uncle who had cerebral palsy. I realized, after coming across a devotion to Margaret of Castello in my research, that my uncle had a very strong devotion to Blessed Margaret.

I began to use my own family as an archive for what I wanted to do. My own intellectual work is so deeply rooted in the environment from which I came and about which I have spent so much time thinking, that I think it adds a necessary dimension to my theoretical and historical work to bring that forth.

There’s an us/them structure in so much scholarship on religion. The idea that “they” are out there, religious people, and they do these things, and we—the scholars—study them. That always seemed ethically, politically, and intellectually suspect to me and increasingly untenable.

On the other hand, the historical and ethnographic work that I do and my personal family stories inform each other. Not directly, not in a sense of one supports the other—sometimes one undermines the other or challenges the other or recontextualizes it in some way. But I always seek to bring them into some productive, even if at times troubling, relationship.

Does the relationship between the personal and academic play out in your own personal practice of Catholicism?

This is one of the other great tensions in Catholicism: what happens in Rome on the level of the universal church in terms of theology, liturgy, sacramental theology, and so forth, versus what happens locally or individually.

Like all Catholic intellectuals, I sometimes envy Jews. People have many different options for being Jewish. You can be radically orthodox or radically liberal, and you have a whole spectrum where you can find your community within that.

Speaking personally—a modern, Catholic, intellectual, politically liberal scholar who is also intrigued by devotionalism and who rarely lets a week go by without saying a rosary—where is there a place for a person like me?

If I were Jewish, it would be the conservative movement. Speaking purely as a Catholic and not as a scholar, I’ve sometimes thought that it would be so great if there was an option like that. A place where you could be politically left, but devotionally conservative. Like Dorothy Day was.

But where is this space, the space for thinking about alternative ways of being Catholic, about asking yourself what you believe?

Isn’t that “cafeteria Catholicism,” taking the pieces of Catholicism that appeal to them and discarding the rest?

I never had any patience whatsoever with the contempt that was heaped upon so-called cafeteria Catholics. It seems to me that cafeteria Catholics are Catholics who are trying to make their way in a modern world with the religious inheritance that they have; they have to figure out how to be both authentically Catholic and, at the same time, true to their other ways of being in the world. It’s very challenging.

Are there alternatives to “cafeteria Catholicism”?

I’m always amazed at my students. I’m always surprised at the fluidity of their understandings of being Catholic.

They’ll say, for example, “I’m all for gay rights. I think that is just really essential. But I’m a conservative Catholic.” That’s fine to say, but I also think somehow that has to be raised to a level of intellectual inquiry.

I don’t know why they can just blithely ignore the tensions between what the church says and what they believe. I guess it has to do with the phenomenon of John Paul II Catholicism. My students want to affirm themselves as conservative Catholics, and yet, when you press them on any of their beliefs, they’re completely not conservative Catholic.

Which is fine. I’m not calling for consistency. What I’m asking for are spaces within the church, within the broad context of Catholicism, where these questions can be hammered out without the thunderbolts of either the right or the left falling down on us. We need a space where Catholics can explore the tensions between religious and social views without fear of condemnation and a sort of exile.

I also am pro gay rights. I have a gay child. But I’m aware of the tensions that this creates with being a Catholic.

Why don’t young Catholics see a conflict between these two beliefs?

I haven’t wanted to push them on this, but it’s a very interesting question.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply a kind of Catholic respectability issue. That this, in a way, is what it means to be a respectable Catholic. It is thought that to be a Catholic is not to be out there advocating for transgender issues, for example. In the same way that young people wear certain clothes, they want to present themselves in a certain way.

It might also be that there’s no context for what “conservative Catholic” means. It might also be that before Pope Francis there was simply no way to be liberal and Catholic. It might have been the same kind of protective covering that a Catholic in the 1970s would have used. “I’m a liberal Catholic,” but then when you pressed them, you would have found much more complexity than that name suggested. There was a certain kind of protective covering. It might just be another way of saying, “Leave me alone.” It’s a way of protecting yourself against having to think.

On a personal level, how do you deal with these tensions?

For me, this is the place to begin challenging and thinking theologically and devotionally about how one lives with these tensions. How can one work through these tensions as a contemporary Catholic?

But where is the space within Catholicism as a whole, except perhaps at a few Catholic universities? Where can you actually do that?

How do you start to open up these spaces in the church?

Catholics on both sides, intolerant Catholics on both the right and the left, contributed to creating a truly airless environment. Pope Francis is doing a very good job within the constraints of a very difficult position and within the constraints of a very problematic inheritance from his predecessor.

I am hoping that one of the things that this pope is doing is allowing for some circulation of air again where you can say, “You know what? I’m politically left, but I say the rosary. I support gay rights, but I also want to be a faithful Catholic.” He’s doing a very good job of trying to pry open spaces where Catholics can be thinking Catholics again, without having to fear what I’m calling the thunderbolts of condemnation.

But we still need to do more work. Where is the space where these conversations can happen? How can we think theologically and devotionally about these topics?

So things like supporting LGBT rights and preferring the Latin Mass aren’t mutually exclusive.

Absolutely. They are not. They are not. The question is, how do you come up with interesting combinations of those various possibilities?

I’m speaking only as a personal Catholic and well outside the organized church, but I think that in many ways the challenge for this particular moment in Catholicism is how to think about different kinds of being Catholic without the condemnation. From either the left or the right.

Is there a way to be able to say, without scaring all your liberal Catholic friends, “Sometimes I’d really like to go to a Latin Mass. That might be kind of cool,” without them immediately crashing down on you, or some analogous thing on the other side?

This hasn’t been possible in the past?

The dialogue often becomes quite dark.There are often thunderbolts of judgment coming from both the left and the right.

Think, for example, about women religious who have been trying to have the conversation about their role in the wider church in recent years. It’s been a very arid environment in which they were forced to have that debate. They were always looking over their shoulders for the feared judgment, trying to figure out who they were in relation to this church, being confronted all the time by figures who were ready to condemn them.

That’s a very dark environment for the kind of open exploration that I’m talking about. We shall see if there can be a lightening, so that people who find themselves in the sort of position that we’re in can actually work through these things without the thunderbolts.

I’ve spoken much more as a Catholic in this interview than I thought I would. I don’t know what’s happening to me

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What changed?

It might be these things have become clearer over time. It may be that I’ve gotten older. I’ve been divorced and remarried. It’s hard to see me as a traditional Catholic. And for many years, I was apprehensive to be perceived too clearly as a Catholic.

In academia, any hint of my faith life was going to mean that my scholarship was going to be viewed under a cloud of suspicion, I think. That was the reality. Maybe it’s just that I don’t care anymore.

How do academics like yourself create this environment within Catholicism that is open to more exploration?

Polls have empirically told us, “Look, Catholics in the United States, at least, are holding a whole bunch of different and contradictory understandings and practices.” But contentious Catholics on either side don’t want to listen to what these empirical polls are saying.

So why not create an environment in which these understandings and practices can be talked through and figured out, and Catholics can make their way toward what they see and what the polls are already telling us?

I can hear the voices of conservatism saying, “Yes, yes, this is just modern self-indulgence. If you’re a true Catholic, you just obey the church.” But I don’t think so. I mean, that’s a really good way to kill the faith.

For many, many years I’ve lived my career without paying a lot of attention to Rome. I mean, I like the city, and I go there all the time. There are some great restaurants in Rome, and it’s a great place to be. But whenever I begin a project, my first thought is not, “Well, let’s see what the official Catholic teaching is.” In fact, it’s the opposite. Instead, I say, “Let’s begin with people’s lived experience.”

When you’re a professor, then you often get asked the question, “What exactly are you doing as a professor of Catholic studies?” There are those who think that what professors of Catholic studies do is teach the official teachings of the church. That would be a very sad and limiting assignment for a professor. My role is to teach the lived diversity of the faith as I see it in the past.

If people are exposed to how diverse the faith was in the past, will spaces inevitably open up for diversity in the present?

On the level of Catholic studies, that’s a way to go: Look at how Catholics have lived, look at the different ways that Catholics have made lives for themselves.

I have also been surprised by how powerful the example of the pope is. If you compare the atmosphere, which we are all capable of doing, of the last two popes, it’s astonishing.

I suppose if one were a cynic, one could say, “Well, of course. You know, Catholicism is an institution like every other institution, and as the leader goes, so go all the sheep.” If you want your career advanced within Catholicism under Benedict, you’re going to have to behave one way. If you want your career advanced under Pope Francis, you’re going to behave in another way. But it is pretty striking to me nonetheless how everything feels different now and how quickly it shifted. I am stunned.

What was the shift?

When I first started teaching about lived religion and devotionalism, people asked, “Why bother teaching that stuff? It has no relevance.” In their minds, if you want to know about Catholic women, don’t look at what women were doing when they prayed to St. Jude. Instead, look at what the church teaches about women.

But if you listen to a lot of traditional Catholic discussions or teachings of men and women, you’d think, “Have they ever actually met a woman? Who is this? Who is this creature that they’re creating?”

John Paul II, may he rest in peace, was really indicative of this tendency. You begin with an ideal of a woman, you define the ideal, and then what happens in real life has to be accountable to the ideal.

The current atmosphere under Pope Francis could open the way for a new empiricism. This could be a very healthy development where people say, “Don’t give me idealized portraits of your mother transformed into a theology of women. Instead, let’s look at what Catholic women are actually doing and have been doing. Let’s look at what Catholic women have been doing for centuries.”

Then, in the context of what we see empirically, then let’s think about how we can understand Catholicism and women, Catholicism and gender, or Catholicism and sexuality. Don’t give me some really idealized version of Catholic sexual teaching. What are Catholics actually doing?

Do people realize that there are many different kinds of Catholics?

I’m amazed how in every survey Catholics in the United States come out liberal on every issue. You think, “Who are these Catholics who are happily filling out these endless surveys?” But then, when you look at the media, the only Catholics that seem to appear are not those Catholics.

I’ve wondered whether or not there is the need in American culture for Catholics to be a certain way. Catholics are expected to be a certain way, and it’s very hard not to be that kind of Catholic, given the serious cultural expectations. The New York Times would prefer it, I think, if we were all another kind of Catholic.

They even do this with Francis, and I worry sometimes. They’ve elevated him as this paragon of good Catholicism, and they’re going to be very disappointed. And I think they’re going to be happy to be disappointed when he does something that doesn’t conform to this image that they’ve created.

I tell my students that that’s what prejudice is: When you think you know everything about a person because of one aspect of them that’s visible to you, before that person even opens his or her mouth.

Whether they’re black or women or whatever, you think you know what the story is with this person. I think with Catholics, it’s very much like that in the United States. Certainly in academia: I know that the minute I say “I’m Catholic,” a whole set of things fall into place that are not articulated but are very strong.

If I say, “I’m a Catholic, but I really want to see space for gay people to worship as full members of the community,” then they’ll say, “You’re a bad Catholic.” They’re not even Catholics themselves, but they’re happy to exile me from my own tradition. At that point, I stop behaving as a Catholic they need me to be.

We have to be bad Catholics, obviously, always.

Is this set of cultural expectations new?

No, it goes back centuries, really. There’s always been, floating around, normative construals of what a Catholic is.

It would be interesting to go back and come up with a list of “bad Catholics” in history. We might find that they actually were very interesting Catholics. I think what “bad Catholic” means is that, first of all, these are Catholics who don’t conform to expectations that are imposed on them either by Catholics or, very often, by non-Catholics. They don’t act the way people want them to.

But these are Catholics who are really struggling to live with the dual inheritance both of their faith and the world they live in. If we were to come up with a list of bad Catholics, we might find that these were some of the most interesting Catholics who have somehow gone unnoticed because they fail to fit the standard stereotypes.

As we keep saying again and again, it’s in the places where people don’t conform where the really interesting stuff is happening.