AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

How One Gen X Theology Professor Teaches Gen Z with Scott Moringiello

A few weeks ago, our guest was the sociologist of religion Tricia Bruce, who talked about what we know about the state of the American Catholic Church today. On this episode, host Mike Jordan Laskey is pursuing the same questions but from a different angle. Our guest is Scott Moringiello, and he’s an associate professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. In that role, he teaches a rather large course called Introduction to Catholicism, which he has taught multiple times. Over the years, he has taught hundreds of Gen Z kids from all sorts of religious backgrounds about the foundational basics of the Catholic faith. He’s gotten to learn about the students’ own experiences with faith and what energizes them or keeps them distant. Scott was also an academic mentor of Mike’s almost 20 years ago. He was a graduate assistant in a phenomenal liberal arts seminar Mike took, which he still considers the greatest intellectual experience of his life. One way you can tell the power of that class is the fact Scott and Mike are still friends all this time later. So they talked a bit about what made that class so incredible and how it informed Scott’s own approach to education. They also discussed some of his Scott’s mentors from Regis High School in New York City, his Jesuit alma mater that’s still near and dear to his heart. Finally, Mike also asked Scott the role of the liberal arts and college education in the world of ChatGPT. They had a wide-ranging conversation that feels a bit like old friends getting together over a meal or a libation. Scott Moringiello: https://las.depaul.edu/academics/catholic-studies/faculty/Pages/Scott-Moringiello.aspx AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus www.jesuitmedialab.org/

Duration:: 57m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) From the Jesuit Media Lab, this is AMDG. I'm Mike Jordan-Lasky. A few weeks ago on the show, I talked to the sociologist of religion, Trisha Bruce, about what we know about the state of the American Catholic Church today. On this episode today, I'm pursuing the same questions, but from a different angle. My guest is Scott Morengelow, and he's an associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago. In that role, he teaches a rather large course called Introduction to Catholicism, which he has taught multiple times. So over the years, he has taught hundreds of Gen Z kids from all sorts of religious backgrounds about the foundational basics of the Catholic faith. And he's gotten to learn about the students' own experiences with faith and what energizes them about it or keeps them distant. For all of the imagining I do about the religious thoughts or experiences of folks in their teens and 20s today, it was awesome to talk to someone who has a ton of real life stories to reflect on. Scott was also an academic mentor to me, almost 20 years ago. He was a graduate assistant in a phenomenal liberal arts seminar I took, which I still consider the greatest intellectual experience of my life. One way you can tell the power of that class is the fact Scott and I are still friends all this time later. So we talked a bit about what made that class so incredible and how it informed his own approach to education. We also discussed some of his own mentors from Regis High School in New York City, his Jesuit alma mater that's still near and dear to his heart. I also asked Scott about the role of liberal arts and college education in the world of chat GPT. And we had a wide ranging conversation that felt a bit like old friends getting together. I had a lot of fun connecting with him in this forum and I think you'll enjoy the conversation. You can subscribe to AMDG wherever you get podcasts and thanks for joining us. (gentle music) Scott Morengello, welcome to AMDG. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing? - I'm doing well, thanks for having me. - It's so good to chat, not often do you get to talk with you. College teaching assistant about 20 years after you had class with him, but we've stayed friends. It's a great joy. - Yeah, I think that was the spring of 2004, is that right? - Yeah, five. - Five. - Yeah, yeah. - So that experience now is old enough to buy a lottery ticket anyway. - That's right. - You were back and you were there for some of the most important intellectual formation experiences of my life. That class, I've talked about this class we were in together on the podcast before, Faith Doubt and Reason, taught by Dean Mark Roach at Notre Dame. And as like a 19 year old, yeah, 19 year old for me, like 18, 19, that class was like so important and blew open my mind in my sense of like what education was and who I am and what I'm meant to be. And so I wanted to talk to you about kind of those experiences is you've kind of, you stayed in the classroom, I have left it, but now you're working with kids who are not even born then or just born when we first met in that class and inviting them into intellectual experience that I imagine is in some ways kind of similar related to kind of what we embarked on, kind of exploring some of the big questions about life in an intellectual way, but bringing our own kind of journeys and stories into dialogue with those things. So we're gonna talk today first about a class you teach at DePaul University called, what? Introduction to Catholicism. - That's right, yep. - Yeah, so I want to talk about that class and what students, how they respond to that, what you've learned about them from there. I think this is a curious way, interesting way in to like thinking about the church today and young people today to see like, okay, young people with all their different backgrounds thrown into a class about Catholicism, what are you noticing having taught this class a bunch of times? So first maybe just like, what is this class, what goes into it, what are your goals, give us that like the top section of the syllabus rundown, what is this class? - Yeah, so before I get there actually just a couple more lines on the class that we took ages ago. So I was the teaching assistant for Mark Roach who was at the time the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame. And the reason I was the dean, I was his TA was because Mark Roach and I went to the same college. We went to, both went to Williams College. He's 20 or so, 25 years old than I am. But the crazy thing was that he and I had the same two favorite professors in college. And I, when I got to Notre Dame, my college professors told me, oh, you should look up Mark Roach. And there was a lecture where I saw him and he asked a question and I said, oh, hi, Dean Roach, my name is Scott Marangelo and Frank Oakley told me to say hello to you. And Frank Oakley was the former president of Williams College and had taught Mark Roach before he was president. And the reason, and so Mark Roach was very excited about this and we had lunch and then I became his TA. And the reason I mention all of this is that the, what you just mentioned about being 19 and taking a class that was really important to you was a similar experience to mine when I was 19 or 20 or whatever. And that those classes that were so important to me were taught by the same person, team people that taught Mark Roach, those classes. So, and the reason I bring that up now is that I think that we have far, far, far to transactional a sense of education these days, especially when it comes to college education, but I think this is also true for secondary and primary education. And because we have a transactional sense of education, we often forget the importance of relationships in education. You learn as much from other people as you do from, the other people in your class and from your teachers as you do from the textbooks or the books or the experiments or whatever. And I think people rightly worry about what teachers are up to and our teachers compensated well and taken care of, et cetera. And I think all of that's worthwhile. But sometimes the way we talk about teachers on the primary or secondary or tertiary level often just sees them as kind of cogs and some kind of transactional machine. And the longer I've taught, the more I've come to realize that these relationships are really what's essential in education. And I think especially for Christians, for Catholics, if we lose sight of that, we've lost sight of a lot. It's worth noting, of course, that just about all the stories we have in the gospels, when Jesus is teaching or interacting with people, he mentions them, talks them by name and that kind of personal aspect. I know this is a big Jesuit thing too. If we lose that in the name of kind of educational efficiency or demographic trends or anything like that, we've really lost a lot. And so I'm grateful for two Mark Roach and that he was able to put me in this situation where I've become friends. But I'm also grateful to this small liberal arts college that I went to that where people who graduated 25 years apart from each other could feel connected enough to just say, "Hey, we have the same teacher, let's chat." And that happened. So thanks to Frank Oakley and Mark Z. Taylor and Mark Roach for all of that. - Yeah, it is. - Anyway. - No, no, now that you've set that up, I will say, we both have kids around the same general young age, primary school age, and let's just put that into even a sharper relief for me to see what do I want from my kids' teachers? And the thing that I want first that I haven't realized from preschool up into primary, I want them to see my kid and to love my kid. Nothing more and nothing less than that, which is maybe a lot to ask, but it just comes down to noticing, seeing their gifts and celebrating that and seeing things that they need to work on and encouraging. But that is when they, and I meet with a teacher and it's clear that they are perceptive about my kid and what, they take joy in being with the kids. That is such for me as a parent. It's like, "Oh, yeah, that's what I want," versus times when you can feel like, maybe that isn't quite there. - Absolutely. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think that's right. And so I hope, I certainly try, I hope I succeed to kind of bring that spirit to my own teaching and my own kind of classroom experience. And as you mentioned, I teach, at DePaul, I'm in the department of Catholic studies. In fact, right now I'm the chair of the department of Catholic studies. - I'm sorry. - And yeah, yeah. If people kind of understandably have questions about the origins of the understanding of purgatory and the Catholic tradition and being chair, and I talk to other chairs about this, being chair makes you realize the kind of necessity of purgatory 'cause it's got to make sense somehow. Anyway, so I'm the chair of Catholic studies and professor, associate professor in Catholic studies, I have tenure, and I have taught this class introduction to Catholicism at least once a year, sometimes twice a year since I got to DePaul in 2014. And DePaul is by student population the largest Catholic university in the country. But we don't have the endowment that Notre Dame or Boston College or Georgetown has. But because we're in Chicago and many of our students come from the Chicagoland area, it's not unusual to have students whose background is Mexican or Polish or Irish, sometimes Italian too. And which is all to say that it's not unusual to have a class where a lot of the students have some kind of cultural memory of Catholicism, but it's also the case where again, I have 10 plus years of experience on this. I can count on, and I teach every class, every time I teach this class, there are about 40 students in the class. And I can count on one hand the students in those 10 years who, and we're talking 500, 600 students, I can count on one hand the students who have had, let's say more than a fifth grade understanding of Christianity, right? And I can also count on one hand the students who have had any sense of what liberal education kind of broadly conceived is. And I wanna be clear that neither of those things is at all the students' fault, right? And what I tell them, and I make this pretty explicit throughout the quarter, that the, even if they go to church on Sundays, not all of them do, some of them do, I would say it's usually a minority of the 40, that they're likely to have not really a kind of deep intellectual understanding of this 2000 or so year old tradition. And at the very least, and again, obviously, I don't like require in any way, shape, or form that they're Catholic or that they, quote-unquote, believe any of this stuff. But by the end of the quarter and the quarters of 10 weeks long, my hope is that they have an intellectual understanding of what's going on. And along with that intellectual understanding of Catholicism, which befits an adult, they have a understanding of why liberal arts education is kind of worth their time. DePaul has a, what we call the liberal studies program so that students have to take different courses in different liberal arts subjects. So they take a couple of classes related to history, a couple related to religion, a couple like one or two related to philosophy. And a lot of times they, again, they see this as very transactional, they have to kind of tick the boxes. Well, I'm a music composition major, but I have to take these classes, so I'm just kind of getting it out of the way. And again, this is not their fault, but they don't have a kind of more holistic understanding of one of the purposes of tertiary education is to kind of give you an opportunity to think through some of these issues, to think through what it means to be an educated person, to have a wide variety of interests, to build a life, et cetera. And so I see part of introduction of Catholicism as a way to help them do that. And then finally, and get back to your questions, finally, I think it's crucially important that they come to see that this learning happens in a community. So I make a big deal. They're almost always very surprised that within the first week of class, I know all of their names, and I encourage them to get to know each other, and when they refer to each other's comments to say, someone so said, or I disagree with so-and-so, or whatever like that. And one of the things they often tell me is that they appreciate that. And I'm in touch with many of them 10 years later, and get integrated into their lives in all sorts of fun ways. So, yeah. - So when you're building that syllabus, and you're thinking about these kids coming in with a range of experiences, the Paul again being very large is diverse, as you were describing, what, there's a whole lot in those 2000 years. So what did you want to make sure you included, what goes into building that syllabus? - The first thing, and I have the first reading for the class, is this wonderful essay by this 20th century, Irish Dominican named Herbert McCabe, simply called God. And for lots of my students, probably all of my students, if they think about Christianity at all, there's no particular reason for them to. But if they think about Christianity at all, what they think is that Christians believe there's some dude in the sky, who's kind of watching them, and that dude in the sky has given them rules. And if they obey the rules, good things happen. If they disobey the rules, bad things happen. And that's connected to another belief they have, that is not strictly speaking, having to do with Christianity, but that everything that's worth knowing, or maybe even everything that's available to know, is somehow empirically verifiable. And so, for the students who do go to church, they actually believe that too, that God is some dude in the sky, and that everything worth knowing is empirically verifiable. But Christianity just feels right to them. And for the students who don't go to church, they believe those two things that God, what Christians mean when they say, "God is some dude in the sky," and everything is empirically verifiable. And they don't feel it, so why bother? And because I think all three of those things, God is not some dude in the sky, everything worth knowing is empirically verifiable to show whether or not it's true, and what really just matters is your feelings. Because I think all three of those things are false, it takes a little bit of work to kind of help them see that, well, maybe that's not the case. And so then, so that's kind of step one, as it were. And then every class we spend, it's kind of topical, right? So we talk about God first, then how do Christians read the Bible? And when we do that, we talked about Acts of the Apostles, chapter eight, and Luke's Gospel, chapter 24, the road to Emmaus. And then we spend about two weeks just on the Gospels in Jesus, then we talk about the church, we talk about bishops, we talk about prayer, oh, I'm sorry, Mary and the saints, prayer, liturgy. We talk about the moral life, and in order to talk about the moral life, I have them read St. Vincent of Paul and the Louis de Merlach, because I were at the Paul. And then we finish the quarter by reading Benic the 16th day as Kirtaz asked God is love, which I think, and then I think the students see this, recapitulates, first of all, the themes in the class and second, especially the God reading with the Herbert Mckayba saying. And so every class they have something from the Bible, some chapters from scripture, almost all of them are from the New Testament. And then there's some kind of interpretive reading to go along with that. And so the hope is that they can see that the Christians don't simply read the Bible, but there's this tradition of Christians reading the Bible and interpreting it. And what we're doing in the class is ourselves kind of getting into that interpretation. I jokingly say, although it's a kind of serious joke, that the two things I teach, in any class I teach are I always teach about one God and two grammar. And what I mean by that is that when I say God, I mean, what does a person love and why does the person love it? And when I say grammar, I mean, how should you or can you articulate those views so that other people can understand them, right? And so the issue of writing, of communicating, of speaking in class, et cetera, all of that is part of the class. And frankly, I think all of that should be part of really any class, anybody teaches. Yeah, so the way I come back to your question, the way that I've structured the class is thematically and the hope is, and I think this does happen, that students see there's this kind of great intellectual edifice that is connected with Christianity. One final thing on this, the two of the best comments I ever got at the end of the class, two different students, two very different points of view, one student said, you know, I could never believe all of this stuff, but I realized this isn't stupid. That's a great answer. And the comment that I could literally just retire now, thanks to the student who said this, he said he had a kind of tough life growing up for all sorts of reasons. And he said to me once, well, you know, I have benefited in my life from people who have loved me, who had no reason to love me. And then he said, this class helped me understand why someone would do that. And now he's in RCIA, which wasn't kind of good work. Yeah. So, yeah, well, thank you for that overview. And I want to go back to where you started. - Sure. - About God. So with the way you described it, it reminds me of a sociologist Christian Smith, who studied on young people in religion. It talked about a coin, the term a moralistic therapeutic deism. Is there a sense of what their religion is? Again, there's a God kind of removed who's up in the sky, who has some rules. And if I do good things, good things will happen. And I will say like, I understand that that is, you know, amateurish and, or immature, I guess, immature and then like, and not the kids. And I will say, even though I have a master's degree, sometimes if I'm like thinking about God, I can like fall into that very easily, you know? It's like, I'm not like, what do I think God is? So what, what is the, what is it, it becomes in, or your kind of vision that you're presenting to them that might make them think, oh, maybe it's not quite this way. What's the opposite of moralistic therapeutic deism? - Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things that McCabe says is that Jesus in the New Testament says to one of the crazy things Jesus says in the New Testament is that God loves him. And the word for love in the New Testament is agape, which is a different kind of love than the word for, like erotic love, so it's arrows. And love and McCabe kind of supplies this, right? He doesn't, this doesn't come in the gospel itself. It's not explained in the gospels. But for McCabe, love implies equality. So I can, in order for me to truly be in a loving relationship, I need to see the person I love as my equal, right? That doesn't mean we're the same. It just means that the differences don't matter. And for McCabe, for Jesus to say that God loves him is for Jesus to say that God can love human beings. And it's also to say that Jesus is God, right? 'Cause Jesus is God's equal, right? And so what Christianity is, is the way in which human beings get caught up in the love that God is between the Father and the Son, and then to talk about the love between the Father and the Son is already to talk about the Holy Spirit, and to talk about the Holy Spirit's connection to human beings, well, that's to talk about grace. And so in the first letter of St. John, chapter four, where it says that God is love, it also says, touch later, if anyone says he hates his brother but loves God while he's a liar. And so our God, as it were, loves us first, and then our response is to, or better, the way we are truly ourselves is to love others the way God loves us. And the more active we make our understanding of God and the more active we make our understanding of love, I think the closer we are to what Jesus is up to. And then prayer, which is, of course, essential to all of this, is that constant reminder, that constant formation that recalls for us that God loves us, right? So prayer isn't so much, or really, prayer isn't at all informing God of stuff, 'cause God already knows, but instead, prayer is allowing, opening ourselves up so that God can form us. And we're the kinds of creatures as human beings who, first of all, we need kind of constant formation. And second, how we move our bodies, stuff like bread, or water, or oil, helps us kind of focus. And we're the kinds of creatures for whom, being in connection with others, being in community with others, helps us form who we are. And so the church is nothing more and nothing less than a community of people who is trying to help each other love better, which is to say, a community of people that's trying to help each other be more themselves. - I imagine that's compelling for your students. And I'm curious about, as you're going through that the semester and having taught it a bunch of times, I'm sure you know, on some of those days, it's gonna get interesting. Or like that, you have a really good response from your students to certain readings, or to certain themes. So I'm curious, out of this kind of overview you're giving, whether it's on the nature of God or prayer, or again, blowing open their idea of what love is and what that means, what are some of the themes or topics that pretty regularly are like leading to great conversation in class? - I try to make the class build on itself. So, and I say this pretty explicitly, that topics that we talk about in week one will continue to be into our important topics for us, you know, throughout the quarter. And for different students, the penny drops at different times. I know almost always the prayer class where we talk about this idea again, that prayer is about formation rather than information. Students always kind of like get into that. The class on Vincent DePaul, where Vincent kind of lays out for his community what they, how they should spend their days. The students really like that. And one of my, I'll tell you this quick story, which is one of my favorites. While the students are reading and when we meet in class, they'll say something like, wait a second, hold on. Like how, how much are they actually praying here? It seems like a lot. It sounds like he wants them to pray like all the time. And so I break down, you know, if you were to do the divine office, and then if you were to go to mass, and then you had a little morning prayer, a little personal prayer throughout the day, I say something in fact, you know, let's imagine they wouldn't be too surprising if they're spending four hours praying. And the students are like, that's crazy. I could never do that. Like, come on. And then I will say to them, I'll pick a student. And at this point in the quarter, you know, I'm friendly with them and it's not like an interrogation. I'll say to one student, you know, take out your phone and she'll say, okay. And my classes usually like have a 940 to 1110 slot. And so you have an iPhone, right? And she said, yeah. And I said, you have that thing on your phone where you can tell how much time you spent on your phone during the day, right? And she said, yeah. And I say, okay. It's whatever, 1030. How much time you spent on your phone today? And I have a pretty strict no technology policy in the class. And so I know from 940, so more or less the last hour, they haven't done anything on their phones. And she'll say, I've been on my phone for six hours. It's 1030 and the things reset at midnight. And I say, okay. You've been on your phone for six hours being advertised to and making, you know, the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk more wealthy. Vincent DePaul thinks it's a good idea to spend four hours thinking about the love that is the reason why there's something rather than nothing. Who's the crazy one? And that gets them every time. That really gets them. And a lot of them, and I really appreciate that. It's like a lot of them are like pretty fit or like exercise a lot. You know, have like weight lifting routines. And when I make connections between the sacraments or prayer and workout routines, they totally get that too. They think that makes a lot of sense. And they understand why somebody would do that. And so, yeah, the more we talk about community, the more we talk about formation or practice, I have found the more students really get into it. - So you're mentioning of the phone. I do have a, it's the question kind of about technology. And so you say you don't allow it in the classroom. And I know you have students doing writing in class when they're there. And I'm curious about this generation of students. And I count myself like a person who is relatively, if not quite digital native, pretty close to it. Whose phone usage is higher than I would like. And then again, young adults now, they have like the highest of all adult cohorts that report the highest level of loneliness as well. And just like what are you seeing in terms of like how technology has affected your students as they're coming in the door? Are they lonely in terms of, so like is the idea of community is something new because, or are they like, do they feel not lonely because they're connecting with people on social media all the time? Do they find it easy to put their phones away for the hours at very heart? Just tell me a little bit about what you've noticed in terms of the relationship with technology and how Catholicism, Christianity might offer some kind of counterculture to that. - Yeah, that's a great question too. So as I said, I make it explicit that there's no, that you're not allowed to use your phone, you're a laptop in class. And I say, first class, second class, I repeated a few times in any throughout the quarter, that all of us, and I count myself here too, all of us are on our phones or our computers all the time. And I say, for three hours a week, you were going to have a space where you are not on your phone and you're getting used to talking to other people without any technological intermediary or technology as we talk about it today. And I think a lot of them find that actually pretty refreshing, they get a little afraid of it, maybe at first, so the first class, they're not totally sure that they can do it. But I do find that, of course, sometimes people's minds wander or not totally paid attention or feeling a little sleepy or something. But on the whole, I do find that folks are engaged for the 90 minutes that we're in class. Like I don't take breaks in those 90 minutes, sometimes people do, but sometimes other professors do, but I don't do that. So we're just kind of, we talk about the material for 90 minutes or so. And one thing that my department does, and we might be unique in the University for doing this, but basically every other week, we invite students to come to the department and have pizza, like we call them study nights. And we've been able to form kind of real community because of that. And I'm connected with this program that I helped start a few years ago called the Catholic Learning Community. And it's where students kind of connect their faith life with their academic life. And now some of the students live in a dorm together, which is nice. So I do think that the more folks get together in person, the better and the more folks get together in person, the better and the more opportunities, colleges and universities and education on all levels can help facilitate that, the better. And I think that it's really an essential part of educational missions to be able to do that. And I think that the students respond really well to it. A lot of them really don't like online classes. Even there are some for whom online classes are good things without question. But I think a lot of the times they don't take their online classes quite as seriously. And I think the reason they don't take them quite as seriously is because they don't see the immediate... There's not as much buy-in. And there's not as much buy-in 'cause there's no real sense of community. (gentle music) - Hey, this is Mike and we'll get back to the show in just a second. I wanted to tell you about an awesome Jesuit organization with a global mission, American Jesuits International. Throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the Jesuits have schools, health clinics, and social centers that respond to the urgent needs of their communities. American Jesuits International mobilizes individuals and institutions in the US who are excited to support these projects. Two Jesuit NGOs, Magus Americas, and Jesuit Missions Incorporated are merging to become American Jesuits International. This is big news because it is the first time that the US Jesuit provinces share a single international solidarity organization. If you want to learn more about the work of the Jesuits in the Global South, or to join this international community of solidarity, check out their new website, americanjazuitsinternational.org. That's americanjazuitsinternational.org. Okay, now back to the show. (gentle music) - I could imagine, so these students coming into your class and they see you care about them and you're encouraging them to care about each other and they're meeting outside that is forming them in terms of what church can be, should be, is. Again, this community is nothing more and less than helping each other love better. That would be like, you would feel, even before there's the intellectual assent to the creed or something, like there is a feeling or like the sense of this is like where I'm home or where there's belonging and meaning here. And I remember having you come over to our dorm, and that during that class in the semester and just like ask big questions, we didn't have time for in class and just feeling like, you know, on fire with like that curiosity. So as that's happening, so I am curious too, like within this context, we've talked a little bit about like some of the kind of misconceptions are common people come in with about the church. And Catholicism, that tradition, there might be some more. And then I'm also curious as you're doing this, like what misconceptions a lot of us have about Gen Z students and what that you see are like, yeah, maybe that's not quite true. And if we can kind of set this environment a certain way, then like a lot of those things that we would, you know, we would say like paint with a broad brush, I don't exactly bear out all the way. So that's kind of two questions. If there are any more of those, again, misconceptions about Catholicism, but then again, the other way misconceptions about the students. - Yeah, when it comes to the students, I am suspicious, I'll put it that way, of folks who talk about students who either don't have kids who are college age or who, you know, aren't teaching kids. Who aren't in the classroom with them. And there are all sorts of material conditions today, which militate against folks kind of forming communities, whether it's economic issues or educational issues or whatever. And I find that, I mean, it sounds almost cliched and simplistic, but I do find that the more, I just kind of talk to the students as students and the more we have something to talk about when it comes to the material, the less I find any kind of stereotype true. And so, you know, officially, I suppose, officially you and I are in different generations and officially you're in a different generation from my current students. But to go back to where we started, the amazing thing about the Bible and the amazing thing about Kierkegaard and Turis of Lissa and Julian of Norwich and Santa Gosten and et cetera, is that these texts and these ideas keep being interesting to people, right? It's, and so, yeah, like, you know, I'm not on TikTok, right? Although I had a very funny conversation with my students about pavement on TikTok and Utah fits. But the fact that I am not on TikTok doesn't, and the students are, doesn't in some way, shape or form me and they just can't deal with Kierkegaard or they can't deal with John's gospel or sorry, but the idea that God is love is just kind of totally foreign to them. Well, it's like, in some ways it is totally foreign to them, but that's fine 'cause it's totally foreign to me too. And so I think that we live in an age where economic data and Vox explainers and charts and graphs, supposedly explain all sorts of stuff to us, and I'm not convinced they do, and I'm certainly not convinced they do when it comes to folks who are, I don't know, 18 to 29 or something. And I think as a church community, you know, diocese and the Catholic church in the US, et cetera, I think that, I don't, this is not exactly my world, but, and so I don't have any simple answers for anything, but again, I'm suspicious of folks who think that they need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to questions of like community and belonging and making people feel at home, et cetera. And I have really never found, again, I don't know, 600 students I've taught, 800 students I've taught, I have never really found a great resistance to these ideas, to think that we talked about in class. I don't think that quite answers your question, but. - Yeah, I mean, again, like, if you can look at some of the data, there's just another study that came out recently about kind of young adults in faith communities and kind of why people are leaving, right? And often can name like any one of the hot, certain hot button issues. And those are certainly important issues, but it's not like a. - I actually, like I'd push back on it. I don't think that's true. I actually don't think that's true. So I think that big, so for example, let's take a very simple and straightforward thing. Like, you know, so you read a study that says something like, and these studies exist. Oh, you know, people are leaving the church because women are not being ordained priests. Okay. It's not as if the folks who are leaving the church because women are not being ordained priests are en masse going to become opinions, right? I think that the material condition, you know, or, you know, families aren't going to church because they don't feel welcomed, right? That's suburban families. And this is my kind of left-wing aspect. So suburban families aren't going to mass because kids have soccer on Sundays and they've decided that soccer is more importantly going to mass, right? Yeah, they can like say what they want about, you know, their commitment to inclusion or something. But I'm actually just not convinced that when there are kids at my parents, families at my boy's school who don't get a mass on Sunday, it's not because of some like social quote unquote hot button topic, it's because of baseball, right? Or like they'd rather, you know, if spring break overlaps with Easter, you know, like, well, folks are going to Florida. Well, that doesn't have anything to do with like hot button topics, right? That just goes, has to do with the fact that they've decided that going to Florida is more important than being with their Paris community. Now we might want to ask why the Paris community doesn't do a better job of making the community feel like a community. Like I think that's a completely fair question. But I'm not convinced, like I understand that people give these answers in surveys, but I'm not convinced that those answers are actually true. - Yeah, and I mean, I, for me again, thinking of my own formations, again, as one person, but having both a Paris community and then, you know, in our intellectual community 19 years ago, we talked about having places where the big questions are welcome, where you can, it's that, and like, you're talking about everything and like meaning and you do find this community that is growing and is nurturing and welcoming and empowering and saying what do you think? We want to know what you think and we want you to be in dialogue with each other and with these texts and like, so that was just home for me, you know? And now like we've been in different parishes with our kids and I like sometimes have tried to volunteer like, hey, let us run a children's liturgy of the word during that. So families with kids feel more engaged and getting crickets back from, like, so that, yeah. So I think there are like those questions about how well are we, is choosing, I remember when my now wife taught a religious ed class that was so good and the kids said he'd rather go to that than baseball practice, right? Like, but are we making it so irresistible? And like, say, hey, you have big questions or you feel lonely or isolated? Then like, look, we've got beauty, truth, community. All these things are here. How good are we at sharing that? - Right, absolutely. - Accessible to people. - Yeah, yeah. - I don't know. But yeah, so that's, I think when we think about what, how we're doing and what we're about and like what we're trying to get better at as church, those are the ones to me like, okay, like, what? Can we focus on your opinion? - No, absolutely, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that, you know, our liturgies, it's not a surprise to anyone to say that liturgies in the US are often dumbed down and the music is bad and the preaching is bad and the people aren't engaged. And then when people try to get engaged, they, and people are very territorial about the sorts of things that they do at Mass and so they don't want to give those things up because that's very deeply connected to their identity in ways that maybe aren't very helpful. But again, like, I don't mean to cast dispersions on folks, but just to say that my own experience suggests to me and in chatting with others from all sorts of different walks of life that a lot of the reasons people say that they do X, Y, or Z is not actually why they do X, Y, or Z. - Sure. - Yeah. - I want to ask the kind of one, like kind of last big category of questions. You mentioned too, like one of the things early on that students kind of come in with that's baked into our culture today is the sense that all things that are worth knowing or all knowledge can be, you know, empirically known or discovered. - Sure. - And that even sometimes like our, you know, we see a study or these charts or a Vox explainer and that is, that's, that's truth. So I am curious about like, how do you begin to kind of work against that and what are things that, and what is a way of inviting someone in who has so been shaped to think like, oh, science is what the truth is. You know, I believe in science. Could, I'm gonna quote it. - Sure, sure, right. - Yeah. So yeah, what are ways that you begin to invite folks into thinking that, hey, there might be things worth knowing that are not empirically verifiable. - Yeah, I think that a big part of it is to show that in a deep way, science is in science. And so what people think. So a very simple example would be that when I ask students if they believe, for example, that human rights exist, they almost always say yes, but none of them quite knows why. And when I ask them, when I help them see that they've never empirically come across the number two, right? They can't show, they can show me two fingers, they can show me a picture that represents the number two, but they can't really actually show me two, right? And let alone kind of visit questions about quantum mechanics or whatever, right? So I think it's, and this is where the kind of Catholic stuff and liberal artsy stuff goes together. - Yeah. - Too often we just have a somewhat impoverished and maybe more than somewhat impoverished sense of what, like the world is a wonderful place, right? It's full of wonders. And we impoverished, we allow ourselves to be impoverished if we don't take that seriously. And if we think that everything again is reducible to economics or some understanding of biology or something like that. And I mean, obviously climate change is real. Obviously, diseases get communicated in different ways, right? But to say that my desires can't, at least not necessarily be reducible to biological urges. You know, that's, I think that's like a philosophical point, which I think is true, that's not simply a, you know, that's not like a religious question. But I think that one of the things that education should be about is helping students see, and this is the case like for all people, right? Education, not just in tertiary, but, you know, I lead a adult ed class at a local parish in Chicago to help us continually be reminded how wonderful the world is. And then it's like, you know, like, like as it Hobbes, it says to Calvin, you know, it's a wonderful, the world's a wonderful place. Let's go exploring. And I think that as Christians, to say that the world, that love is the reason that there's something rather than nothing, is to say that there's this continual abundance and continual fecundity that is always worth exploring. And I think that obviously we have, we have to make livings and we have to take care of our families and et cetera. And all of those things are completely worthwhile and important, but we are also, you know, fearfully and wonderfully made. And there's more to us than that. And it should be the task of all education, but especially Catholic education, to help students see that. I mean, obviously not everybody has to be a theology major or a Catholic studies major or anything like that. But I do hope that every university, every school on whatever level, every parish, takes seriously that part of its mission and maybe the main part of its mission is to help people see how wonderful the world is. - Do you feel like that ends up being lost somehow? Like a lot of schools, even Jesuit colleges, universities, we see like humanities and liberal arts being cut and STEM and pre-professional programs and kind of silos elevated? Is there a, do you feel like there's a crisis in this space now? - Do you feel like you kind of have to prove your, like the liberal arts are important in your setting or to students even, both students and administrators? Yeah, just let me be one of the last question on that, the state of liberal arts today and why they're so important. - So first I would say that it's important to note that liberal arts includes physics and chemistry and biology and mathematics. - Sure. - Because a lot of the cuts that are happening are happening in physics departments too, right? So that's number one. Number two, yes, I think there is a real issue. And again, talking about material conditions a lot, but one of my summer jobs in college was, as a doorman and a fancy pants co-op in New York City and all the people there were like incredibly wealthy. And it turned out I went to college, I was in class with one of the people that lived in the building, it's kind of funny. And I remember meeting her dad and he said, and like a fabulous wealthy person. And he said, yeah, I can't imagine anything better in college than reading the elite in Greek, right? That's funny. And I think that the, oh, so much of this, these cuts and it's this horrible, like, oh, these things are, humanities are just for rich people, right? And you know what, we just want folks to have these extremely well-tailored pre-professional programs and that's it, right? And again, it's like, well, and my friend Zina hits, I think it's been on the show, is-- - Not yet, but hopefully someday. - Not yet, yes. Her book Lost in Thought is So Great About This 'cause it's like all of this stuff is for everybody. You know, everybody can like ponder like Plato and everybody can think about Heisenberg and I think, yeah, I think education is doing itself a real disservice when it's cutting programs that help students see how wonderful the world is. Not that accounting's right, like, or, you know, becoming an electrical engineer, that's totally amazing, but you should also be able to have this space to study more than that. - Sure, so I've said it last question a few times. I do have one very, very last question, being the Jesuit podcast. And as you are Jesuit educated, and I know for you, again, you're going back for your own kind of intellectual communities and things that have set you on this path that your time at Regis High School in New York was super important to you. And so, yeah, just maybe just a brief reflection on how your education at Regis kind of set you up and what about that you try to bring with you into your own classrooms. - Yeah, I do think that this idea that the world is wonderful, full of wonders. And that you become more yourself the more you explore that. So, John Connolly, may he rest in peace, Lou Mackey or Lou who taught me Latin and Greek. May he rest in peace, Father Dorican, who taught me Greek, may he rest in peace, then Father Jim Van Dyke, who's the current president of Georgetown Prep, Father Philip Judge, who I think he's actually in Georgetown Prep these days. Father Arthur Bender, who Mike Lasky knows, who's at Still at Regis. Eric, Mr. Eric D. McKellie, who's Still at Regis. I mean, everything I do, I mean, I don't say this lightly, like everything I do is just kind of riffing on them, along with Martell and Frank Oakley and Mark Roach and others. And they took these kind of unruly kids from the greater New York City area and they taught us what mattered. And I'm intensely grateful to that, to them for that. And yeah, I mean, it's a debt whose interest grows and will never be repaid, but I'm intensely grateful for. - Well, Scott, Martell, thank you so much for this great conversation. - Thank you for having me this weekend. - Yeah, no, it was fun and a lot of great stuff to what you want to think about. And hopefully I can come out at your class sometime. - You're always welcome. - Next time you're in Chicago. (upbeat music) - AMD G is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States based in Washington, DC. The show is edited by Marcus Bleech. Our theme music is by Kevin Lasky. The Jesuit Conference Communications Team is Marcus Bleech, Eric Clayton, Megan Leach, Becky Sindelar, and me. Connect with the Jesuits online at Jesuits.org, on Instagram at We Are The Jesuits, on X at Jesuit news, and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jesuits. Sign up for weekly email reflections at Jesuits.org/weekly. The Jesuit Media Lab offers courses and resources at the intersection of Ignatian spirituality and creativity. If you are a writer, podcaster, filmmaker, visual artist, or other creator, check out what we have going on at Jesuitmedialab.org. If you or someone you know might be called to discern a vocation to the Jesuits, connect with a Jesuit vocation promoter at be@jesuit.org. 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