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"The philosopher Charles Taylor argues in A Secular Age (2007) that secular cultures are losing the capacity to experience genuine "fullness," by which he means the experience of a transcendent reality. Inspired by this idea of fulness, Daniel Hendrickson has developed three specific ways of sharing with students and others which he calls "pedagogies of fullness:" study, solidarity, and grace. These are his terms for higher educational strategies emerging out of the Renaissance humanist tradition of Jesuit education. They facilitate human, relational contacts that make fullness, and, hence, meaning and purpose, possible. According to Hendrickson, study, solidarity, and grace counter contemporary forces of individualism, nihilism, rationalism, and relativism with alternative ways of knowing and relating. Hendrickson argues that Jesuit higher education has the opportunity to restore fullness in our resolutely secular age by developing these pedagogies. Moreover, the book poses a challenge to Jesuit higher education in the twenty-first-century to better realize the origins and history of its own tradition. A Jesuit university, according to the author, can be assessed as to how it knows and lives fundamental tenets of its tradition, as well as according to how it recognizes and responds to contemporary problematic cultural conditions. For Hendrickson, Taylor's work gives Ignatian and Jesuit education a contemporary philosophical backdrop against which to be seen"
About the author
Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ, is the president of Creighton University. His leadership focuses on the university's global reach, the importance of studies in the liberal arts, and the expansion of Creighton's mission in the US Southwest. He has worked and lived in the Caribbean, East Africa, and India. He has served on the boards of Boston College, Xavier University, the Institute for Latin American Concern, and Jesuit Worldwide Learning.
Summary
In Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age, Creighton University President Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ, shows how contemporary Jesuit education can foster greater self-awareness, a stronger sense of global solidarity, and an aptitude for inspiration, awe, and gratitude among their students.
