So now – at least in my head – I can return to where I began: If there’s no direct causal relationship between education and development, why start a school in a developing country to help its development?
Why? Because we’re not starting a school founded on the progressivist myth. Instead, we’re starting a school founded on a commitment to faith and justice. Let me explain – and I’ll return to N.T. Wright in a moment to help me to do so.
I mentioned above that the progressivist myth has a hard time dealing with the reality of sin. What if a school’s aim was not to churn out folks to be used as objects for progress but instead had as its aim the formation of virtuous people who are knowledgeable about the world they live in, capable of analyzing situations, and ready to address the needs of society as they encounter them? And, again echoing what I wrote in the earlier post, what if its other equally important goal was to form men and women to behold God’s grace?
I don’t think these two goals can be separated. We Jesuits talk a lot about the service of faith and the promotion of justice; usually – to be honest – we talk around them. (I’m mostly talking about myself in this regard, but only mostly because I know how much we struggled at Loyola Marymount University to clearly articulate the relationship between the two in ways that were meaningful.)
A passage from Wright has helped me clarify the relationship between them. Wright writes about idolatry and its social implications (again, I don’t have the exact page reference – shame on me for not taking better notes):
When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch.
Issues of morality and justice cannot be disentangled from issues of faith; or to put it slightly differently, a commitment to justice is a commitment against idolatry, a commitment to the worship of the one true God (or in still another way: orthopraxis and orthodoxy implicate one another – involve one another in a necessary way). (And unless Jesuit institutions are willing to speak of faith in terms other than the comfortable, therapeutic ones designed and defined for our use by late modern industrial society, any attempt to describe the relationship between faith and justice in any meaningful way will continue to elude them.)
It is no secret that corruption is a huge issue in here Africa. This rampant corruption has deleterious effects on development. President Obama spoke about it during his visit; the pope spoke about it during his visit; the African bishops spoke about it during the recent synod in Rome, and I read about it every day in the newspapers here. Corruption is the result of a sort of idolatry that combines the worship of power, riches, and glory with an attitude of invincibility. (I might add here that the colonizers were certainly not paragons of virtue in this regard! They held sway over the colonized oftentimes in the most ruthless ways, enriched themselves to the detriment of native populations, and “collected” territories as signs of national prestige.) The formation at OLQP of virtuous citizens concerned about the common good rather than their influence on people and processes, their own wealth, and their own fame will help a great deal in the development of this country and this continent, I am certain.
A final, related quotation from Wright in this regard (this time with a page citation!):
We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can’t be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love. (p. 239)
(As one kind elderly lady at Our Lady Gate of Heaven [“The Gate,” as it was called] in Detroit used to remind me when I went too long in my preaching, “Bring it home, Father.”)
So…
The Society of Jesus is not starting a school in Dodoma to hasten the way to development as popularly conceived. We are starting a school with a very particular purpose in mind, to form young men and women “to learn, to love, to serve” (the school’s motto) – for the improvement of their own condition, yes, but also for the welfare of others and the common good of all to the greater glory of God. This approach has been tried (though not so frequently since the modern era, really); and I think this way is true.
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