The Truth of Things

Human beings are created in the Image and Likeness of God in such a beautiful way. We are designed to receive as a gift everything that flows from God. We have free will in order to be able to freely choose his love and goodness. We have bodies in order to receive the goodness of creation. We have an intellect in order to receive His truth. The core of moral theology is how we can properly receive these gifts in order to gain the fullness of God's love.

Let's face it - sin and ignorance are frustrating. As a teacher of moral theology, I am variably moved between compassion and vexation as I experience our culture's inability to gain full goodness because it is either blind to the truth or unwilling to live according to it. Of course, I am also bothered by my own inability to live what I know to be true. After all, I teach moral theology. I know backward and forward what is good and what is evil. Yet, I am still unable to fully embrace the good and to get rid of the inferior and false allurements in my life. In part, we humans have to come to peace with the fact that we will never completely be free from the effects of sin and ignorance this side of Paradise. We must be ready to accept God's mercy and to humbly acknowledge our weaknesses. On the other hand, we don't want to bow to defeat either. We must always strive against these impediments to happiness and work toward perfection.

While this Web log will almost certainly deal with sin and moral issues, I would like to focus at least as much on the other effect of original sin. I think ignorance gets short shrift in our current moral dialogues. I grew up in an era that believed that catechesis must focus on the experience of the relationship with God, not on theological knowledge. My catechesis was not quite the cliché of collage and banner making and "Jesus loves you" messages (though I did make my share of banners in my time). However, there were many things that I never learned until I studied for my master's degree in theology - things that I should have learned in high school catechesis classes. What is even more irksome to me is that throughout my high school career, I never really learned how to think. In fact, I only discovered what the term "critical thinking" really means after I had been teaching for seven years and started to do some professional research. Critical thinking too often refers to "creative problem solving" but hardly ever is the term used correctly to indicate methods for clear thinking, careful discernment, and effective argumentation.

As a Catholic school teacher, I have become very frustrated with my students' lack of ability to think clearly. I have to continually remind myself that it is not their fault. We are failing our students as a school system if we do not give them the ability to discern truth, and feed the curiosity that is a natural part of human nature. However, do you ever hear these things mentioned in discussions about the failure of our schools? Don't discussions on school failure usually center around poor test scores? Standardized tests don't measure thinking skills. While they play their role, they should not define the totality of our educational mission. We need to teach people how to think about the multiplicity of facts and claims to truth in our culture and how to discern what is true and how to use that truth. That's true education.

In the love of Christ,

Brother Thomas