Faculty Research Fellowship Program: Application for Summer, 2007
Catholic Social Learning: How to Educate the Faith That Does Justice
A Book in Progress
Roger Bergman, Ph.D.
Director, Justice & Peace Studies Program
Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Abstract/Overview
In the summer of 2006, with the support of a vFellowship from Cardoner at Creighton, I
made a substantial start on a book to be titled Catholic Social Learning: How to Educate
the Faith That Does Justice. The inspiration behind this project flows from three
wellsprings: (1) my twenty-five years (since 1981) as a practitioner of justice education
in various faith-related settings, (2) my awareness (for almost as long) that the tradition
of Catholic social teaching (CST) itself has almost nothing to say about Catholic social
pedagogy, and (3) my appreciation for and participation in (since 1993, when I became
the founding director of the Justice & Peace Studies Program at Creighton) the
commitment to justice in Jesuit higher education. I believe I have learned something
from my own experience, that CST has much to learn about pedagogy, and that Ignatian
pedagogy is a sure foundation for this enterprise.
The table of contents with tentative titles:
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Personal Encounter: The Only Way
Ignatian Pedagogy and the Faith That Does Justice
Teaching Justice after Alasdair MacIntyre
Immersion, Empathy, and Perspective Transformation:
Semestre Dominicano 1998
Chapter 5: Justice at Home: Service-Learning
Chapter 6: Truth, Justice, and the Christian University
Chapter 7: A Catholic Pedagogy for Justice: Models and Recommendations
As of October, 2006, the first three chapters have been completed, if not finished. I plan
to complete the fourth chapter during the current academic year. Three colleagues are
reviewing the chapters as they are completed. With the support of a Faculty Research
Fellowship, I will finish the entire book in the summer of 2007, which means researching
and writing Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Chapter 3 has been accepted, pending minor revisions,
for publication in the peer-reviewed Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and
Practice. I have begun a promising conversation with a major academically respectable
Catholic publisher, to whom I will present the first three chapters this fall.
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I. and II. Statement and Significance of the Problem and the Project’s Purpose
The particular question this book asks is, How do we educate (“lead out”) the faith that
does justice? What pedagogy is needed to make Catholic social teaching (CST) no
longer the church’s alleged “best-kept secret”? It certainly is not a secret by virtue of
being kept. The U.S. bishops’ pastoral letters of the 1980s were front-page news even in
the secular press and there are dozens of introductory books and plentiful pastoral
resources on CST. It is rather because CST has not been received or perceived as
valuable and important. It is instructive that of the approximately 600 pages of the
“canon” of CST (O’Brien & Shannon, 1992), only one and a half pages are devoted to
“Educating to Justice.” If what is lacking is definitely not the intellectual content that
would nourish righteousness or commitment to justice or political holiness, how do we
stimulate the “hunger and thirst for righteousness” named by Jesus as one of the
Beatitudes (Matthew 5:6)? How do we encourage the deeply rooted and creative crisis of
Christian conscience which seems the only morally and spiritually sane response to the
contradictions and conflicts of contemporary global reality?
Although many justice educators in Catholic institutions practice at least elements of an
effective pedagogy, such as will be developed in this book, no practitioner, researcher, or
theorist, as far as I am aware, has adequately articulated the structure of this pedagogy in
light of the pertinent psychological, philosophical, and theological literature. Books on
justice education tend to duplicate what I describe as the “faulty default pedagogy” of
CST itself: the official promulgation of ethical principles, the fitful filtering down of
these principals to the faithful, and the occasional exhortation to implement them in one’s
own life. For example, a 2006 book by long-time justice educator and Villanova
University professor Suzanne C. Toton, Justice Education: From Service to Solidarity,
treats justice pedagogy almost entirely as an intellectual process whose efficacy depends
on better ideas about social structures, theology, the church, the university, and activism.
It does not address the basic question, why would anyone care about justice in the first
place? I answer that question in Chapter 1: “Personal Encounter: The Only Way.”
Next, I propose that the “whole-person” pedagogy of Ignatian tradition offers a
substantial glimpse of an effective vehicle of Catholic social learning (CSL). That is
elaborated in Chapter 2. I further propose that CSL must be intentionally counter-cultural
not only in its ethical vision, as offered in CST, but also in its pedagogy itself. I use the
writings of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to make this argument in Chapter 3. Chapter
4 describes and analyzes, in light of Lawrence Hoffman’s seminal work, Empathy and
Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (2000), but also in light of
Ignatian spirituality (Brackley, 2004), one model of justice pedagogy, Creighton’s own
Semestre Domicano, for which I was accompanying faculty in the spring of 1998.
Chapters 1-4 will be finished by the end of the current school year.
Chapter 5 will develop an understanding of the contribution service-learning (SL) can
make to justice education as developed in the first three chapters, especially since the
study abroad or intensive immersion model developed in Chapter 4 will not be possible
for all students. I have taught two SL courses myself (in several iterations), served on
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several university committees on SL, and under the Hewlett Grant in 2001-2002, directed
a semester-long faculty development seminar on SL and justice, in four iterations, for
twenty professors.
Chapter 6 will place the educational vision of the foregoing five chapters in the context of
historical and contemporary understandings of the Catholic and Jesuit university, from
Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century to Pope John Paul II and Fr. Peter-Hans
Kolvenbach, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
Chapter 7 will provide a concluding and integrating discussion of the vocational vision
and pedagogical strategies developed in the preceding six chapters, with special attention
to practical models and recommendations.
III. Summary of Pertinent Literature
The doctoral research I completed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Ph.D. awarded
May, 2005) was in the psychology and philosophy of moral development as related to
moral education, and is thus relevant to this project. The dissertation was titled
“Educating the Moral Self: From Aristotle to Augusto Blasi.” The “lay abstract” gives
some idea of the literature reviewed:
In the fields of psychology, philosophy, and education, increasing attention has
been paid by researchers and theorists to the concepts of “the moral self” and “moral
identity.” Although the more familiar terms “character” and “conscience” have not
disappeared from academic discourse, these novel terms provide a fresh start for
thinking about the personal dimensions of morality. The purpose of this dissertation is to
develop a theoretical perspective on the moral self and to explore its ramifications for
educational practice.
Principal sources for this study include psychologist Augusto Blasi and the
ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offers an
analysis of the challenge Aristotelian virtue ethics presents in our current context.
Philosophers John Dewey and Nel Noddings, respectively, offer modern pragmatist and
contemporary feminist perspectives on the formation of the moral self.
The moral self may be thought of as all the dimensions of the human person that
enable us to live a moral life [the “whole person,” as we would say in Ignatian
pedagogy]. Moral identity may be defined as how I think about myself as a moral agent
and what kind of person I am committed to being [the vocation question]. My theory of
the moral self addresses these themes: how moral identity develops from childhood
through adolescence and into adulthood, especially among exemplary persons; the
relation of moral identity to motivation; the role of moral understanding in forming
identity; the relationship of choice, will, and identity; the centrality of habit; the
integration of affect (emotions, feelings) and cognition (perception, thinking); the
relationships between concern for the good, for the self, and for the other; the self as
relational and dependent on community and tradition; and the importance of having an
idea of the truly moral person as an ideal or goal of human development.
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My hope is that a better understanding of the moral self will help us, parents and
teachers and citizens, to be better educators of our children, students, and of one another,
and that this might contribute to a more just and peaceful world.
The bibliography is fifteen pages long, making it impossible to summarize “the pertinent
literature” in this space. However, I can provide some idea of my scholarship by
summarizing two of the most pertinent chapters. Three of the chapters have been
published in peer-reviewed journals, a fourth has been accepted, pending minor revision,
and a fifth is presently under review.
1. “Why Be Moral? A Conceptual Model from Developmental Psychology,” Human
Development, 45/2 (2002), 104-125.
This paper is concerned with the relationships among moral reasoning, moral motivation,
moral action, and moral identity. It explores how major figures in developmental
psychology have understood these relationships, with attention to schematic models or
conceptual maps. After treating Piaget, Kohlberg, Rest, Colby and Damon, and Blasi, I
argue that Blasi provides the crucial elements of a critical synthesis, a conceptual model
of how developmental psychology might best answer the question, Why be moral? I
conclude by suggesting that this psychological model of moral functioning challenges
conventional notions of what constitutes our greatest moral challenge.
When this paper was first presented at the Jean Piaget Society in Montreal in June, 2000,
the president of the Society described it publicly as “the best review of the literature we
have available.” It is now frequently cited in the literature.
Upon the invitation of two of the leading scholars in the field of moral psychology, this
article was subsequently extended and published as the second chapter, “Identity as
Motivation: Toward a Theory of the Moral Self,” in Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez (2004).
2. “Teaching Justice After MacIntyre: Toward a Catholic Philosophy of Moral
Education” has been accepted, pending minor revisions, by Catholic Education: A
Journal of Inquiry and Practice,” the premier academic journal in the field. This is a
revision of chapter 4 of the dissertation, and is the only portion of the dissertation that I
plan to use in the book project. An abstract follows:
How is the commitment to social justice sustained over a lifetime? This question would
seem to be a matter of character, and that calls attention to the Aristotelian tradition in
ethics [“Aristotle for Contemporary Moral Educators,” a revision and extension of a
dissertation chapter, has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal; it makes use of much
contemporary scholarship on Aristotle’s ethics]. No one to my knowledge provides as
much insight into the challenge of the contemporary appropriation of this tradition as
does Alasdair MacIntyre. Although a moral philosopher rather than a moral educator,
MacIntyre’s critique of the failure of the Enlightenment project to construct a rationallybased universal ethic, coupled with his critique of the modern nation-state of liberal
capitalism as antithetical to the practice of virtue for the common good, provides a
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challenging if controversial context in which moral educators might think about justice
pedagogy today.
Upon invitation, I have submitted a proposal based on this paper to a conference on
MacIntyre to be held at London Metropolitan University in the summer of 2007.
IV. Research questions/hypotheses when appropriate
Addressed in previous sections.
V. Design and Methods (as appropriate to a project in the humanities)
A¹. Major sources to be used for chapter 5, “Justice at Home: Service-Learning”
Astin, Alexander, et al. How Service Affects Students. Los Angeles: UCLA Higher
Education Research Institute, 2000.
Eyler, Janet, and Giles, Dwight E., Jr. Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Jacoby, Barbara, and Associates. Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and
Practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 1994-present.
Rhoads, Robert. Community Service and Higher Learning: Explorations of the Caring
Self. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Weigert, Kathleen Maas, and Crews, Robin (Eds.), Teaching for Justice: Concepts and
Models for Service-Learning in Peace Studies. Washington, D.C.: American
Association for Higher Education, 1999.
Youniss, James, and Yates, Miranda. Community Service and Social Responsibility In
Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
A². Major sources to be used for chapter 6, “Truth, Justice, and the Catholic University”
Beirne, Charles J. Jesuit Education and Social Change in El Salvador. New York:
Garland, 1996.
Buckley, Michael. The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a
Jesuit Idiom. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998.
Duminuco, Vincent J. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
Ganss, George. Saint Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University. Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1956.
Hassett, John, and Lacey, Hugh (Eds.) Towards a Society That Serves Its People: The
Intellectual contributions of El Salvador’s Murdered Jesuits. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 1998
Langan, John P. (Ed.). Catholic Universities in Church and Society: A Dialogue on
Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1993.
Modras, Ronald. Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the 21st Century.
Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004.
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O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993.
Sobrino, Jon; Ellacuria, Ignacio, et al. Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit Martyrs of El
Salvador. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990.
D. Schedule for completing the project
1) As previously noted, chapters 1-3 have been completed, subject to revision to be
finished by the end of the spring semester, 2007; chapter 4 has been presented in an early
version at the 2006 conference of the Association for Moral Education at the University
of Fribourg, Switzerland, and will be revised and extended by the end of the spring
semester, 2007. Chapters 5-7 will be completed during the summer of 2007.
2) The entire manuscript will be revised and ready for submission by the end of the
calendar year 2007.
3) I do not foresee the need for further support beyond the summer of 2007. As noted, I
have begun a conversation with a major Catholic publisher and am hopeful that the book
will be published in 2008.
VI. References (and see above, V. Design and Methods)
Brackley, Dean, S.J. The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on
the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola. New York: Crossroad, 2004.
Hoffman, Lawrence. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and
Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Lapsley, Daniel, & Narvaez, Darcia, (Eds.) Moral Development, Self, and Identity.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004.
O’Brien, David, & Shannon, Thomas. (Eds.) Catholic Social Thought: The
Documentary Heritage. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992.
Toton, Suzanne C. Justice Education: From Service to Solidarity. Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 2006.
Appendix: Biographical sketch of principal investigator
I emphasize here, in addition to what has been noted previously, my role at Creighton as
a leader in justice education.
I began teaching theological ethics as an adjunct in 1989 at the invitation of Fr. Richard
Hauser, S.J., who was then chair of the Theology Department, and taught two or three
courses a semester until 1993, when I was appointed the founding director of the Justice
& Peace Studies Program by Dean Michael Proterra, S.J., in the College of Arts &
Sciences. I had proposed such a program to the Dean, and he had asked me to design the
curriculum. Sixty-six students have since graduated as JPS co-majors or as Justice &
Society majors (the JAS major is offered in cooperation with the Department of
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Sociology & Anthropology, which explains my recent appointment to a tenure-track
position in that department, although I am neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist).
In 1999, when three Jesuit university presidents issued a call for a national conversation
on “the commitment to justice in Jesuit higher education” on the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the Society’s 32nd General Congregation in 1975, which committed the
Society to “the service of faith and the promotion of justice” in all its ministries, then
Academic Vice President Charles Dougherty appointed me to lead Creighton’s
participation in this national project. (In personal conversation, he referred to me as the
“go-to-guy” on justice education at Creighton.) With the assistance of a university-wide
committee, I co-authored and edited “Education for Justice at Creighton University Since
1975: A Self-Study,” a 41-page report that was presented at the Midwest regional
conference at University of Detroit-Mercy. I then led the Creighton delegation to the
national conference at Santa Clara University in 2000, where Fr. Kolvenbach gave his
famous address on “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit
Higher Education.” I was also a Creighton delegate to subsequent conferences at Loyola
University Chicago and John Carroll University in Cleveland. I have presented at all
these conferences on topics of the book project.
Shortly after my appointment as director of the JPS Program, I began doctoral work at
UNL in education. I began attending and presenting at the conferences of the
Association for Moral Education in Minneapolis, Glasgow, Vancouver, Chicago,
Krakow, Dana Point (CA), Cambridge (MA), and Fribourg (Switzerland). I am presently
in the final year of a three-year term on the AME Executive Board, for which I am
chairing two committees. I have also presented on moral psychology at conferences of
the Jean Piaget Society in Montreal and Vancouver and at the International Conference
on New Directions in the Humanities at Cambridge University in England.
In addition to my seventeen years at Creighton, I have six years of justice education
experience in non-academic settings prior to and immediately after my two years at
Weston Jesuit School of Theology, where I earned a Masters of Theological Studies,
emphasizing social ethics. That is, I have a total of twenty-five years of practical,
professional experience in social justice education in varied faith-based settings. My
doctoral work in moral psychology and philosophy of education has given me the
necessary theoretical background to do the serious analysis of justice pedagogy already
underway in this book project. My deep commitment to Jesuit higher education and
Ignatian pedagogy (I am currently a member of the Jesuit Seminar) provides the
necessary grounding to ensure that the book will indeed be of value to colleagues at other
Jesuit and Catholic universities.
In the summer of 2005, with the support of Cardoner at Creighton, I made a six-day
retreat at Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House in Sedalia, Colorado, with the express
purpose of discerning my relationship to this book project, given some lingering doubts
about it. I came away from that retreat with a full head of steam.
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One of my outstanding JPS graduates recently visited campus to participate in the postgrad volunteer fair as the new director of a volunteer program. She also sat in on one my
classes. Here’s what she wrote in a card subsequent to that visit:
“Being in your class reminded me of just how important education for justice is, so as I
struggle to find my way in this work, I know I’ll be calling on your for help. I’m glad to
say that I know THE EXPERT on educating for the faith that does justice. I mean, you
will be the one who ‘wrote the book.”!
I will do my best to live up to her generous words. Although Catholic Social Learning
will not be my last research and writing project, it is indeed seem a vocational watershed
for me.
I have been teaching the faith that does justice for twenty-five years. The book is my
attempt to articulate what the teacher has learned.