Last month, the church celebrated the 60th anniversary of “Gravissimum Educationis,” the “Declaration on Christian Education” that was promulgated in the final weeks of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Reflecting on that document recently led me to revisit a subject I have found increasingly important in my own teaching career: the matter of educating for hope.

I am not writing here as a theorist or as a church leader or university administrator. Rather, I write as someone who has taught for 41 years in seven different universities in New York, Cambridge, Boston, Manila, Bangalore, Pune and Rome. I want to be specific and practical in what I say.

Let me start with an enduring experience of self-doubt about my teaching—and then a decision to rethink how I teach in theological ethics. It was an experience where I learned to teach my students not only what they need to know but also that they need to learn to act on what they know. Proceeding from this, they need to learn to act both vulnerably and collectively. 

I am more and more convinced that vulnerability and collectivity can be signs of hope in these fragile times. 

I learned from the theologian Margaret Farley, R.S.M., the grace of self-doubt, which she considers one of the least recognized gifts of the Holy Spirit. The story below is one of an insight that arose from an enduring period of such self-doubt.

Over a number of years in the classroom, I had begun to interrogate the effectiveness of my own teaching. In my ethics courses, while the students may have learned the material well, I was not sure that they would, in the end, actually act ethically. I knew from exams that they knew the material; what I didn’t know was whether they would incorporate the material into their own decision-making. 

I began to realize that I was teaching them what to do but not why they should do it. I was not teaching my students to recognize (or to respond to the recognition of) need. 

Resources for recognition

In trying to discover what helps us to recognize the other, I discovered multiple writers on the matter of vulnerability. I have written about this elsewhere, first and foremost in my essay, “Building Blocks for Moral Education: Vulnerability, Recognition and Conscience,” in Kevin C. Baxter and David E. DeCosse’s 2022 collection, Conscience and Catholic Education.

In 2005, the Irish moral theologian Enda McDonagh introduced me to the theology of vulnerability in a book called Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith, Morality and Art. McDonagh began his treatment on vulnerability not with the human but with God. God reveals to us God’s self as vulnerable; by the very act of creation, God creates and then lets the light be, lets life be, lets nature be, animal life be, human life be. This is a God, McDonagh adds, who lets go and takes risks, a God open to creation. McDonagh also sees in Mary’s reply to the Annunciation, “Be it done unto me according to thy Word,” another moment of vulnerable risk, of being receptive to divine initiative. With Mary, the vulnerability of the creation extends into the Incarnation. 

Implicit in this is the assumption that if God is vulnerable, then we who are made in God’s image are also vulnerable. 

Similarities to McDonagh’s claims can be found in the writings of other theologians. For example, Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s gloss on sympathy in his work on prophets captures the vulnerability that the prophets tangibly breathe. Heschel wrote in The Prophets in 1969:

An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos…. Sympathy is the prophet’s answer to inspiration, the correlative to revelation.

Through sympathy, “the prophet hears God’s voice and feels God’s heart. He tries to impart the pathos of the message together with its logos.”

Much of the contemporary discourse on vulnerability is, as the great ethicist Roger Burggraeve noted, indebted to Emmanuel Levinas. In the English-speaking world, it is Judith Butler who follows Levinas’s thought in developing an ethics of vulnerability. She recognizes that the moral life begins with our vulnerability. “Ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that ethical relation,” she writes. Vulnerability defines and establishes us as creatures before God and as moral agents among one another. 

Vulnerability is our being already bound ontologically to others. It is our nature; it is the condition for the possibility of our responding, of our being ethical. “You call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call,” Butler writes. “In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.” Our vulnerability is what allows us to recognize and to respond, in short, to love.

Teaching vulnerability collectively

In higher education, we generally learn vulnerability collectively. Catholic schools of higher education host literally thousands of Christian service programs so that students can learn what the work of Christian mercy and justice is. We have a great track record on that; our universities help young people to become men and women for others. 

But can those lessons also be learned in the ordinary classroom? 

For example, when I teach my students about global public health, do I teach them to listen with vulnerability to the prompts within them to respond to others in need? Somehow, I felt, they were not engaging with what they learned in my classroom in the same way as in their Christian service programs. I worried that I was just relaying the research and the data. I was teaching global public health, but I wasn’t engaging them to do the work.

One promising response is happening at the Jesuit university where I teach, Boston College. Like some other universities, we now have a variety of courses specifically designed for students to learn how to accompany the work of justice and mercy with the writings of the Scriptures, the works of philosophers and theologians and even social scientists. These intellectually and spiritually formational courses engage the students to be vulnerable and responsive.

But they are not formatted like most courses: You cannot simply give lectures to your students. The courses are much more participatory, discussion-oriented and collective. Students do not simply receive the teachings; these teachings about Christian responsiveness have to be engaged and shared. 

This turn to the collective ought not to be so surprising. Jesus, after all, taught his disciples to be vulnerably responsive in collective ways. The Twelve learned collectively how to follow Jesus, sometimes in pairs, but always inevitably in a group of 12. 

Indeed, most times, we do not learn vulnerability on our own. We learn it with others, in a service program or with others in a classroom that comes collectively to terms with why the works of mercy and justice are so urgent and true.

Teaching vulnerability—vulnerably

I found myself able to engage with vulnerability in a collective way when I “team taught” classes where I was no longer the singular professor. A different dynamic developed in the classroom—and it was one the students perceived. 

My first experience teaching collectively was about 25 years ago. A colleague of mine at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Daniel Harrington, S.J., one of the most important Catholic biblical theologians in the English language, wanted to teach a course on the ethics that arise from the synoptic Gospels called “Jesus and Virtue Ethics.” He invited me, a junior faculty member and an ethicist, to team-teach with him. 

We worked together on a design for the course. The first class would be on the Kingdom of God, the second on discipleship, the third on the Sermon on the Mount and so forth. Harrington first taught the biblical claims on the Kingdom; I taught the moral ones. He then taught the biblical claims on discipleship; I taught the ethical ones. 

When students asked questions, they saw how differently we responded to their questions; they saw that we had questions for each other as well. They saw an entirely different pedagogy unfold with two different teachers with two different competencies in the same classroom. Biblical ethics, we realized, was of course best taught by biblicists and ethicists together. We even wrote a book together, Jesus and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology. 

After teaching this course three times, Harrington proposed we teach another course on “Paul and Virtue Ethics.” Soon, we found this approach becoming normative, for us and for other scholars.

In a similar way, when I taught on global public health, I began to teach with a public health physician. Students saw our vulnerability in our ability to work with one another. A new competency emerged in our teaching together. 

More recently, my university decided to redo the core curriculum—required courses in theology, philosophy and the humanities and social sciences—for all of our undergraduate students. The administration insisted that many courses engage two different competencies and be taught by two different faculty members from wholly different departments. 

These courses are designed to engage students in interdisciplinary explorations of topics of critical importance. They include topics such as ethics and engineering; climate change and urban planning; the rule of law and the meaning of justice; memory and literature; and many more. They exemplify a new vulnerability for faculty and students to learn how to better recognize and respond to our challenges, and they help faculty to prepare students to become engaged, effective world citizens.

When faculty teach alone, they are the sole arbiter of the classroom agenda; when they teach in pairs, a new dynamic of teaching develops. When we relinquish our independence, we learn a new dependency, but we really cannot appreciate that new dependency until we actually engage it. 

But back to my original thesis: How do all these claims on vulnerability and collectivity lead us to hope?

I often write that the virtue of Christian hope was born at Golgotha and that Mary Magdalene, along with Mary the Mother of Jesus and the disciple John, are the true icons of hope. Mary Magdalene is a witness at Golgotha. She is also the one who vulnerably goes to the tomb on Easter morning, the one vulnerably running from the tomb to the Upper Room. She witnesses in hope to the crucifixion and the resurrection, and she brings to those gathered in shame in the Upper Room the healing news of Easter. Her vulnerability leads her back to the apostles to help them recognize and respond to the extraordinary news. She helps them to re-establish their dispersed and vulnerable collective with the good news.

If we truly want to be witnesses to the good news, then let us look to its vulnerable roots and to our collective call to be educators together. If we want our students to learn from one another, we need to teach with one another. By working together, let us learn to teach our students to “go and do likewise.”