Educators in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

Liddy, Richard M.

EDUCATORS IN THE CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL TRADITION. Edited by John L. Elias and Lucinda A. Nolan. Fairfield, Conn.: Sacred Heart University, 2009. Pp. viii + 336. $29.95.

In separate chapters, the volume surveys Catholic contributors to the field of education, particularly American Catholic education. The contributors discussed are John Lancaster Spaulding, Edward Pace, Thomas E. Shields, George Johnson, Virgil Michel, M. Rosalia Walsh, Jacques Maritain, Neil McCluskey, and Mary Perkins Ryan. Its concluding biography spotlights Gerard Sloyan, the great American educator to whom so many contemporary Catholics owe so much, and to whom the collection is dedicated. The volume is both a fascinating survey of these educational leaders and a helpful, clear summary of American Catholic history as seen through their eyes.

Two themes running through these reflections on Catholic educators are especially notable. First, each leader embodies and reflects Catholicism's encounter with the wider American culture, ranging from the late 1800s down to the post-Vatican II and post-post-Vatican II eras. Particularly enlightening is John Elias's portrait of Thomas Edward Shields (18621921), a professor of philosophy and education at the Catholic University of America from 1902 to 1921. Removed as a "dullard" from school at the age of nine but then educated by his parish priest, he joined Saint Thomas Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and was ordained in 1891. Sent by Archbishop John Ireland to study psychology at Johns Hopkins, he spent his life introducing Catholics to the value of empirical research, even for those teaching religion. A truly remarkable man, in 1911 he founded The Catholic Educational Review, and in 1917 he published Philosophy of Education. The other nine essays similarly reflect the interaction between a particular educator and American culture, but also between the American Catholic community on the one hand and those wider movements in the Catholic world on the other, especially the liturgical, biblical, kerygmatic, and catechetical movements that emanated from Europe and that led to Vatican II. The essays both nicely trace the continuities and discontinuities that shook American educators and portray the painful reorientation demanded of American Catholicism as that community moved toward a broader and deeper consciousness that is historically and socially aware.

A second notable theme is the significance of an operative philosophy of education, or, in contemporary parlance, of "critical thinking about critical thinking." This has in the past involved, but also now entails, the hard work of knowing what you are doing when you are doing it, and of struggling in community to a clearer idea of what is meant by "education," as well as by "learning," "teaching," and "mind." How else could and can Catholics find their way among the various currents of modern thought, some coming from the new sciences and modern philosophy? How else could and can these currents be reconciled with the pedagogy of an Augustine? With Jesus' own methods of teaching? Given that the communal liturgy of the Christian community is our first encounter with Jesus, nonetheless that encounter plays itself out not only in poetic and commonsense ways but also in theoretical ways (e.g., those found in Aquinas) and in ways that clarify aspects of human interiority (as these are made explicit in the work of, say, John Henry Newman). These essays, while providing many rich details of the lives of great Catholic writers on education, evidence a groping toward such an overall framework. Such a needed framework, I might suggest, can be round in Bernard Lonergan's 1959 lectures at Xavier University in Cincinnati, published as Topics in Education (1993) by the University of Toronto. Elias and Nolan's volume works well with such a more systematic and foundational reflection on Catholic education.

Richard M. Liddy

Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.