Theological Notebook: Revisiting "The Closing of the American Mind"

[novak]

G etting my feet back under me after a few days of yucky throat and achey back. I got my H1N1 shot last week, and it seems that half the time I get a flu shot, I seem to get flu-ey symptoms in the next week, in a mild way. The medical folks tell me that there's no causal connection of that sort, but there you go.

I remember toting around a

Comments

[saralinda]

This gets into the ongoing question of the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities, which has been an interest of mine for some time. I'm not ready to sign off on everything the Catholic neo-cons have to say about such things (my political suspicions working against the conservative minority, too) but I do find it more than dismaying to have students at Catholic universities leaving without ever having even gotten a sense of what the Catholic tradition in general even is. I also find it bizarre that the more we speak of valuing "diversity," the more Catholic schools feel under a pressure to philosophically conform to secular school models, as though there were only one way to be "diverse!" It would be a much more interesting (and truly diverse) educational world if America had a plethora of schools of clearly diverse worldviews and philosophies. So the article made for interesting reading, as well as a bit of a reminder to me about how many years I've put in to knowing my way around the cultural map. It's starting to

[novak]

Not rambling: expressing a frustration that's more than legitimate, and perhaps not heard enough from Catholic academics who are not in Theology, Philosophy, History or Education, and who are in some way specifically dealing with (or specializing in) Catholic Education.

Yes, there are some differences between institutions, although I don't think that it's a matter of research institution vs. teaching college. There are places that are consciously challenging the secularization of the academy in this way, but the potential problem is that (in our very American, polarized way) these places tend to envision themselves in very conservative or "traditionalist" ways that I don't think necessarily truly conserve the broader Catholic tradition. In other words, you get all the baggage of American Catholic conservativism/traditionalism as well as the benefits that can be there in that movement.

[amea]

FANTASTIC thoughts.

I, incredibly, have never read this book. (Along with a lot of the world's nonfiction...) Okay, so maybe it's not incredible that I haven't read this book, but it sure is embarrassing.

And I'm motivated to read it now. So, thanks for that.

(PS - my roommate's doctor-dad says whether or not flu symptoms appear is dependent on whether or not you've been injected with a 'live-virus' or 'dead-virus' vaccine. makes sense to me? not that that's worth much.)

[novak]

Heyya. Yes, I'd be curious to read your journal as you read it, especially given that your undergraduate education prepared you so much more thoroughly and consciously for such questions, whereas I was still largely just trying to figure out what the questions were at the time I read it.

I got (and think I usually get, for the regular flu shot) the "dead virus" vaccine, and so I shouldn't have had such symptoms, which adds to the mystery of it all.