The College Beat: What’s Next
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I recently had a conversation with a friend about Word on Fire’s The College Beat. “With all the issues exploding in the world,” I was asked, “why would a Catholic ministry like Word on Fire dedicate blood, toil, tears, and sweat to cultivating the Catholic faith of college students?”
My answer is simple.
It’s because, for Catholicism, this generation is what’s next.
Even though the Gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, the souls of each generation are molded by the Holy Spirit, the preserved corpus of the Faith, and the living witness of the one or two generations that precede it. And notwithstanding the power of the Holy Spirit and two millennia of preserved intellectual and mystical wisdom, living witnesses are adept either at forming or deforming the faith of the younger generation. That is why data collected a few years ago by Dynamic Catholic, a non-profit organization dedicated to re-energizing the Catholic Church, was particularly disconcerting. It seemed that if you were raised Catholic and you went to college, there was an 85 percent chance that you would stop practicing your faith in college (most in the first year).
That’s right: 85 percent.
What does that say about the actual impact of our formation? And what does that say about the exquisite malleability of our college students?
Oof.
Somehow the how of living eclipsed the why.
If you consider the implications, it means that on a student’s first true foray away from the formative environs of home, parish, and school, they make a seismic and independent decision to walk away from all they have known—their religious and cultural patrimony—without much fanfare, without much regret. Eighteen years of formation (some better than others) gone—and mostly within the first year. Again, how solid is the stuff of our parental formation? And how stern is the stuff of our kids’ faith?
Not very solid. Not very stern.
Of course, these kids are bright and capable. In his book Excellent Sheep, Yale professor William Deresiewicz marveled at these students’ résumés teeming with evidence of efficiency, multitasking, stress management, and leadership. These kids are smart, and they are going places. As he recalled,
A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track.
But ask them about the deeper things in life, such as their calling, their sense of meaning, or their purpose in life, and they freeze. Somehow along the way, the big things got pushed aside by the small things. Somehow the how of living eclipsed the why.
And the problem is not just a college student’s newfound independence, with its tantalizing morsels of sex, drugs, and ideology on demand. It is also the way many students are taught. Carted through a confusing array of majors and programs, mindsets and mentalities, students often find themselves wandering in a wasteland of materialism, reductionism, and hyperspecialization. In the mad pursuit to do as opposed to be, as eminent Yale Classics professor Donald Kagan lamented, we witness the rise of the functionary and the loss of the “complete man or complete woman.” The complete man or woman is a person gifted with a broader view, a common sense, a hunger for context, and an insatiable curiosity. They never stop learning because they never stop wondering. They are wise and not simply smart. The hearts are stirred by vocation. These are the minds that are open to faith.
We at Word on Fire are pleased to celebrate the life of the Catholic mind at an incredible array of colleges and universities. From Notre Dame to Princeton, Hillsdale to Yale, Benedictine to Clemson, the University of Texas-Austin to the University of Dallas (among others), our College Beat writers are bright, engaging, inquisitive, and intelligent—and they are Catholic.
In the wake of a banner year of Catholic conversions worldwide, and especially on college campuses, let’s explore what is on the minds of the Catholic students in the trenches. As they step away from home and onto campus, why do they still step into Mass? These are not an odd, marginalized enclave of believers—they are engaged and involved, passionate and winsome, the best and the brightest.
So join us every two weeks to read writers who learn or teach on campus. Meet the complete men and women, the discerners and the seekers, the crowd favorites who are also keepers of the faith.
Let’s renew the faith of the campus.
Why?
Because, for Catholicism, this generation is what’s next.