New Director Introduction, Fall 2007
From the Director, LIMExpress, Winter 2008
I am pleased to introduce myself as the new Director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM). This position represents a return home for my wife and me (and our three daughters)—we grew up in New Orleans, and I've taught as adjunct for LIM. It is good to be back for personal reasons but also because Loyola and LIM represent important resources for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Yet LIM's reach extends beyond the city. In my brief time here, I have met and heard from so many of our graduates around the country and around the world who are responding to their baptismal call to ministry. This has indeed been gratifying.
You can learn more about my background by clicking here. But by way of introduction, I'd like to say something about my approach to teaching and scholarship. Most of my studies and teaching have been in Catholic schools and have focused on the Bible and Church history. Because of the primarily Catholic context of my studies, they have been informed by love for God, the Church, neighbor, and God's gift of creation.
In my teaching, I've found that the Catholic biblical and historical heritage can strike unprepared students as odd and disconcerting; it's found in different languages and hails from different historical and cultural contexts. However, study informed by love for God, Church, neighbor and God's gift of creation can result in a certain sharpness of vision that enables students to uncover past riches with important implications for today. In fact, study of the past results in critical perspectives. It reveals the oddness of our own time and the truth about its sometimes astonishing disregard for human life and creation.
Based on Jesus' invitation in Matthew 25 to seek him in surprising places, the acuity we gain through study has other ramifications. Combined with the classic insight that nothing that exists can be entirely evil (and so whatever is must be good in some way), it provides for that critical optimism so characteristic of Catholicism (Remember Pope John Paul II's constant admonition; "Be not afraid!"). It allows us to discern goodness in other faiths, philosophies, cultures and institutions.
With its location in the Church, its grounding in tradition, its attentiveness to context, and its concern for adult pedagogies, LIM provides me a welcome home. With the Apostles at the Transfiguration, I would say it is good to be here.
Please keep in touch and let us know how LIM has benefited you or could improve and what successes you've met with. Also, please see the links above for updating your contact information and watch for updates about our exciting spring and summer programs.
Thank you!
In his three-volume Time and Narrative, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wonders about stories. Why are they so prevalent across culture and history? At the risk of vast oversimplification, he says that they render time meaningful. Without stories to organize time, it would be just one meaningless thing after another.
Since returning to New Orleans to become director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM), I’ve been immersed in stories, often, not surprisingly, involving Katrina and its aftermath. Many are elicited by the one-word question, “How’djado?” (which, translated, means “how did you, your, family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances do during and after Katrina?”)
What does surprise me is how a New Orleans day seems to have more time in it than those elsewhere. I made this discovery as I witnessed how willing New Orleanians are not only to tell stories but also to listen patiently as others relate their own experiences and also, as in my case, others’ experiences at second and third hand.
The other category of stories I’ve heard since moving here includes those about LIM. Having taken LIM courses as a student, taught on campus and graded extension papers as an adjunct, I thought I knew much of what there was to know, but I was mistaken. I’ve learned that we were founded forty years ago as the Catechetical Institute of New Orleans at the Archdiocese’s Notre Dame Seminary. Thirty years ago, we moved to Loyola as its Institute for Ministry. Twenty-five years ago, we started our extension program.
The main thread that runs through LIM stories has been its transformative character. It has affected believers ranging from the traditional to the progressive in jobs from the most obviously ministerial to those much less obviously so. It has led people to leave jobs they found to be incompatible with their faith and to start new ones, often at reduced pay. It has enriched the life of the Church in New Orleans, around the country, and around the world.
In fact, several years ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, held a three-day celebration to honor its LIM graduates, the first Catholic university graduates in that country since the time of the sixteenth-century Reformation.
Overall, I’ve found LIM, its faculty, staff, and graduates to be even more inspiring than I expected. It is a gift for me to work here.
To return to my opening thoughts, stories aren’t just descriptive. They have power to impart meaning. Sometimes they do so for the worse and, thus, lead to despair, as suggested in myth. For example, the one thing left imprisoned in Pandora’s Box was hope, and this after all the world’s ills had escaped. A more contemporary example is how some (mis)interpret the Book of Revelation as pinpointing the approaching, inevitable, and catastrophic destruction of the earth. In doing so, such stories devalue creation and obscure God’s loving intentions (that we sometimes thwart nonetheless).
Yet stories can also convey the theme that Pope John Paul II stressed throughout his papacy—“Be not afraid!” To be sure, he recognized that God’s love does not hold sway everywhere and
in all hearts. But the stories that he told, indeed the great stories of our faith about the
liberation of the Israelites from slavery, about Jesus’ saving death and resurrection, and about
God’s mysterious presence in the most surprising corners of creation, assure us that God’s
love will ultimately win out.
It is for this reason that many of my fellow New Orleanians tell Katrina stories. They relate
suffering and misery, yet most also convey hope even against so much evidence to the
contrary.
It is for this reason also, I believe, that people become LIM students. They want to learn more deeply about faith’s stories that speak of liberation from sin and its effects and of God’s transformative love for creation. And they want to learn how to tell such stories more persuasively in their many and varied ministerial contexts. Indeed, LIM has been a gift to me, but for the past four decades it has also been a gift to the Church and the world. Spread the good news!