Preface

The recent encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has been justly praised for the comprehensiveness of its approach to global environmental challenges, and the document is particularly notable for illuminating the recognition that the least privileged members of societies around the world in many cases face the injustice of first exposure to toxic environments. But there is another significant point of emphasis in the document that holds particular importance for Catholic universities around the world: the encyclical calls for the cultivation of an “integral and integrating vision” (141) that is necessary to address the development of an “integral ecology” (10), and in so doing provides a fresh approach to the concept of the unity of knowledge that holds great importance for planning curriculum especially in Catholic universities.

The issues of environmental concern and sustainability already hold great importance in many universities, and themes derived from this area can helpfully draw students into social and scientific engagement with local and global communities. It is, of course, essential that universities maintain the openness and critical freedom that are necessary components of authentic academic discourse, so even issues of dissent from prevailing scientific opinion offer an opportunity for educational institutions to demonstrate the robust quality of respectful academic discussion.

Students for many good reasons are drawn to issues of sustainability and ecological soundness, and these issues present splendid opportunities for demonstrating the fruitfulness of the many academic disciplines that can illuminate them. The encyclical, however, poses a higher and more extensive opportunity to consider ways of redeveloping the soundness of the underlying plan for the entire curriculum, because while calling our attention to the global and social relevance of the academic disciplines it also highlights their necessary interdependence in the cultivation of a mode of understanding that is sufficient to encompass the environmental crisis.

This call for the development of an integral vision through which the unity of knowledge can be grasped in relation to the concrete examples offered by complex ecological problems provides a new opportunity for Catholic universities to reconsider their academic organization and the organization of their curricula. Clearly, the challenge of activating an awareness of the interdependence of academic disciplines within the vision of the unity of knowledge, powerfully articulated by Blessed John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University, has long held importance for Catholic universities. This encyclical now issues a call for such integration to be considered with new urgency.

The encyclical achieves such a call by interweaving a set of critiques of the problems posed by modernity with particular awareness of the difficulties that flow from the power and success of modern science and even from the many blessings achieved through that power. Francis reminds readers early in the encyclical of the words of Blessed Pope Paul VI and his warning that scientific progress must always proceed with the support of “authentic social and moral progress” (4). Francis develops this warning into the awareness that science has established a new “techno-economic paradigm” (53) that “may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice” if not accompanied by an appropriate legal framework (53). The encyclical elevates this concept by calling it a globalized “technocratic paradigm” through which human beings exercise scientifically-based procedures to control external objects (106). Such practices are extended to many different areas of human experience, and as a result become the habitual basis on which we approach the world. At that point, the technocratic paradigm becomes “an epistemological paradigm” (107) and exerts a shaping influence on all those who form their lives within its horizon.

Here with an eye on our universities we can recognize the classic situation in response to which liberal education has its historical and philosophical roots: human beings develop their intellectual and spiritual habits, orientation, and horizon from the culture in which they live and in most cases with no distinct awareness that their opinions are shaped by principles they have neither examined nor freely endorsed. Enabling students to recognize the existence of the epistemological paradigm within which they are operating and to consider and examine that...