Download PDF - America

More documents

Recommendations

Info

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/ M. CRISTIAN Education for justice requires freeing the imagination and stimulating inventiveness. 10 America May 11, 2009
Four Lessons for Teaching Justice BY DREW CHRISTIANSEN Though it has been nearly 20 years since I was a classroom teacher at the University of Notre Dame, I still believe in the engagement of the teacher with the minds of the students through Socratic dialogue, attentive reading and the practice of the written word. Here are four lessons from one who still loves teaching, who has worked for justice and peace in the international field and who is eager to help others share in that work. Conative Education I first stumbled on the term “conative education” in a Saturday Review profile of the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner. Conation refers not to willpower in the Victorian sense, but to a disposition for striving, a combination of aspiration, competitiveness and perseverance. It is the faculty Plato termed thumos, the spirited fighting character of “the guardians” of the Republic. Rollo May wrote about similar ideas in his Love and Will. “Will” he defined as the discipline to realize our desires. The development of disciplined desire is a necessary dimension of education for justice. The challenge of conative education is captured in the transition from St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion that we must “avoid evil” to the contemporary notion that evil must be resisted. I have argued that the logical coherence of the church’s current teaching on peace and war, embracing both nonviolence and the just war, lies in the realization that everyone is obligated to oppose grave, public evil, whether by nonviolent or military means. In Catholic teaching, acquiescence in the face of grave evil is unacceptable; action is required. DREW CHRISTIANSEN, S.J., is editor in chief of America. This article is an edited excerpt from a keynote address delivered Nov. 20, 2008, at the Huether Lasallian Conference in St. Louis, Mo. May 11, 2009 America 11
Page 1 and 2: THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY MAY 11
Page 3 and 4: CONTENTS www.americamagazine.org VO
Page 5 and 6: EDITORIAL Sectarian Catholicism ‘
Page 7 and 8: U.S. CHURCH Candidates for Priestho
Page 9: JOHN J. DIIULIO JR. Slowing the Exo
Page 13 and 14: enters into the fabric of a society
Page 15 and 16: Hand-cast, hand-painted sculpture o
Page 17 and 18: Learning, Living, Doing Education i
Page 19 and 20: The impact of climate change falls
Page 21 and 22: PHOTO: CNS/BOB ROLLER that are amon
Page 23 and 24: FAITH IN FOCUS In Class With Romero
Page 25 and 26: Summer Theology at LMU this May, Ju
Page 27 and 28: JESUIT SPIRITUAL CENTER AT MILFORD
Page 29 and 30: experience is not easy to put in wo
Page 31 and 32: the disciples at Emmaus and later s
Page 33 and 34: son or revelation, and that recogni
Page 35 and 36: CLASSIFIED Education OBLATE SCHOOL
Page 37 and 38: Moment,” 4/20). Some of the event
Page 39 and 40: Twelfth Annual Summer Institute Cla

Download PDF - America

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?