Teaching

I began teaching in the late 1990s at a small college in the hills of Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Fresh out of graduate school, still ABD ("all but dissertation"), I balanced my time writing about sacramental theology, marriage, and sex, and lecturing on a host of basic philosophical and theological themes in a combined department of Philosophy and Theology. The gulf was massive: on the one hand, I was reading about the history of the Church's rarefied reflections on marriage, and on the other hand I was trying to help students understand basic concepts that were far from the very practical disciplines they needed to learn in order to make a living.

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Many of my students were second- or third-career adults; or single moms; or students with varied levels of preparation at the secondary level. Mount Aloysius College, like all the colleges founded by the Sisters of Mercy, served many on the margins with compassion and tenacity.

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Within a few months I realized that it was critical to learn how to have meaningful conversations with students, and not simply lecture from material far beyond their interest. So after I defended my dissertation before an audience that included my academic dean (thank you Dan!), I decided that my professional writing would not primarily be in the area of sacramental theology, but rather in the area of spirituality. I wanted to reflect on the ways that people make meaning, build lives and relationships, and forge a path.

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So the sacramental theology of marriage became background music. I've drawn from that research from time to time, as in the volume I co-edited with Cynthia Dobrzynski on the sacramental and pastoral theology of marriage, Love One Another, and in the three books I've co-written with my wife Sue. What drives my teaching and writing, though, is something more fundamental.​

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I believe that progress in history happens when people develop the self-knowledge that enables them to respond to evil with good, and to join with others to reverse the effects of decline. Those who know the work of Bernard Lonergan know that this conviction, in a nutshell, explains his corpus (and is the subject of my recent research and writing). What that means for my teaching is two things.

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First, it means that I LOVE the opportunity to teach young people how to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving, and using the formative texts of the Western tradition as the means to practice those precepts.

 

Second, it means that the vision that sustains my teaching is that I am helping to build a healing minority in the world--paramedics of souls and communities.