1. Re-Membering Catholicity: Higher Education, Racial Justice, and the Spirituality of the Posthuman University
- Author
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Jeffrey S. Mayer
- Subjects
catholicity ,Catholic Social Tradition ,critical race studies ,decoloniality ,evolution ,higher education ,Religions. Mythology. Rationalism ,BL1-2790 - Abstract
In the reinscribing of white supremacy in the United States, the contemporary university as a place of exclusion presents a problem of religion. Approaching religion as “the search for depth” and addressing the “techno-myths” of betterment, longevity, and the rituals of enacting these myths that capture today’s social imaginaries, this paper proposes an alternative to religious faith in “rising” and the rhetoric of the contemporary American technocratic-meritrocratic paradigm. Adopting the posthumanist methodologies of reflexivity and diffraction, the author argues for an embodied catholicity of the university as a community, an open system rather than a pre-formed locus to which racially minoritized students are “added” or “included”. In advancing the co-creativity of a Catholic-pluriversal university via an ethic of love and care, the author presents a Christian spirituality that is itself a technology that offers the hope of enacting a more life-giving congruence between the sacred and the secular than the myth of Manifest Destiny and the racialized violence that is the continued manifestation of that mythos. Embodied in the posthuman mystic’s practices of “re-memory,” the author presents Christianity as a performative-pluralistic religion of evolution, one of common action with the potential to draw into something new the energies of creativity in today’s university.
- Published
- 2021
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