Sixty years ago, the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) directed Catholics to read the “signs of the times.” Two decades later, scientists and engineers began identifying “grand challenges,” or complex problems that call for a coordinated global response.
Applying both perspectives to the contemporary world highlights issues such as poverty, war, racial injustice, and climate change. As ample evidence demonstrates, responses to such challenges have fallen short. To read and address today’s signs of the times will require us to go deeper and think differently. Catholic universities have a unique opportunity and responsibility here. Framing what we face in terms of grand challenges is important but insufficient. Catholic educators and, indeed, all global citizens need to engage fundamental questions.
What do we mean by fundamental questions?
How are grand challenges different from fundamental questions? The difference is not just a matter of degree. Work on grand challenges invokes models of complex dynamic systems which, while acknowledging that there may be unknown variables yet to uncover, tend to claim neutrality and objectivity. The attunement is curiosity. By contrast, engagement with fundamental questions looks beyond complex systems and admits the difference between problems and mysteries.
With fundamental questions, the attunement is wonder and the eventual outcome, wisdom. Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, in “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” a chapter in his book, Theological Investigations (Helicon), invokes a similar distinction between the “little island” of our “so-called knowledge” and “the ocean of the infinite mystery.”
Grand-challenge initiatives tend to adopt what Pope Francis calls the “technocratic paradigm,” viewing every issue through a technical lens while disregarding healthy limits to growth or resource extraction. What remains overlooked is that the focus on grand challenges—presented as solvable problems—and the accompanying neglect of fundamental questions have contributed to our contemporary quandary. We mistake a techno-scientific framing for existence itself, forgetting that our existence is broader and deeper than even the most expansive grand-challenges thinking. We settle for matters at hand and fail to ask what matters most.
Similarly, the increasingly instrumental understanding of higher education reflects a diminished view of the natural world and indeed of human life. At the same time that human activity is recognized as a dominant geological force and the major cause of climate crisis, ironically it has become fashionable to downplay our species’ distinctiveness in favor of an all-in humans-animals-plants-ecosystem perspective. Yet we human beings have particular tasks in the unfolding of creation. These tasks express our humanity and make us more fully human. Fundamental inquiry asks what kind of people we need to be in order to safeguard the Earth and one another. Let’s foster humility without misunderstanding ourselves as simply one thing among others.
Some questions we might ask
What does it mean to be human? What kind of life befits our common humanity? Such questions point to a different approach and possibly a better future. However, university scholars aren’t practiced in addressing them. Two recent lecture series offer a case in point. One focused on the intersection of bioscience and religion yet avoided inquiry beyond the instrumental. The other, on U.S. Catholic responses to climate change in the wake of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (On Care for our Common Home), lacked a discernable faith perspective.
Our academic habits, reward structures, and the customary treatment of “environmental issues” separate from a broader integral ecology indicate fatal flaws in contemporary strategies for addressing the most daunting concerns of today and tomorrow.
Despite our tendency to ignore or even suppress them, fundamental questions emerge, often through intense experiences such as birth, illness, death, worship, love, or friendship. Such experiences invite an openness to the mystery of human existence. Fundamental questions invite an integrated response, beyond what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls the “and then, and then, and then” mode of our contemporary world, whether in the piecemeal realm of policy or notably in mass media where the most incongruous images and bits of information are juxtaposed in a never-ending stream.
By contrast, fundamental questions call upon us to imagine possibilities beyond the little island of our knowledge. Asking them can set in relief the answers that are usually on offer, such as our culture’s implicit response to what it means to live a good life: to garner the most “likes” on social media, to succeed in a zero-sum competition, or to master the technocratic paradigm. Engaging fundamental questions could instead lead us to consider prospects like reducing consumption, reorienting our values, and redefining success.
For those attuned to the signs of the times, everyday life today is charged with the kind of intense and paradoxical experiences that open us to seeing the plight of the excluded. A rising tide of inequality and violence—both physical and symbolic—threatens to engulf us, as do more literal tides that present existential risk.
These experiences can, should, and do sometimes take center stage in education. Although most college students are not at life-and-death thresholds, they are facing significant decisions about a profession, place of residence, and life partner. Students know, at least implicitly, that they are making decisions that will have profound consequences. They, like all of us, need the contexts, competence, and freedom to ask fundamental questions in ways that inform daily life.
Some universities have begun offering courses to this end, notably Yale’s Life Worth Living and Notre Dame’s God and the Good Life. At the same time, putting such a course in the curriculum does not guarantee that fundamental questions will infuse the campus. And, as already noted, the faculty may struggle with them, too. Yet these questions remain salient, urgent, and vital in a Catholic context.
We might say that fundamental questions are asking themselves in our lives all the time. For all of these reasons, the assertion in Gaudium et Spes that “human society deserves to be renewed” feels as pertinent as ever, as does the text’s call to become “artisans of a new humanity.” These efforts unfold through education, which should form “those great-souled persons who are so desperately required by our times.”
The role of the humanities
In the spirit of everything old becoming new again, mine is a modest proposal. We need the humanities. And let’s hasten to admit: The humanities we currently have may not be the humanities we need. We need a humanities at once attuned to the signs of the times and resistant to the leveling effects of the technocratic paradigm.
This is not to diminish the importance of other disciplines or crucial work on grand challenges. The humanities are where some of the greatest minds and biggest hearts have addressed fundamental questions; indeed, these disciplines at their best exist precisely to do this work. If we can follow their example, we are poised to let such questions suffuse not only our universities but our lives. Fundamental questions can shape our practices, our self-understanding, and our collective future.
As global citizens, you and I have the ability to engage fundamental questions. What can we envision on our campuses if we start with the humility to recognize the gulf that separates our little islands from the infinite ocean? How might we reenvision not just the curriculum but the practices of everyday life?
Let’s ensure that faculty and staff along with students have structured opportunities to ask and explore fundamental questions. Beyond mere curiosity, Catholic higher education should foster attunement to wonder in the face of irreducible mystery. Doing so points the way to a “new humanity” and flourishing for all of creation.
This article also appears in the February 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 2, pages 29-30). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Flickr/Marquette University
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