As a scholar-practitioner in Jesuit higher education, I’ve witnessed how generative AI is not merely a tool students use—it’s a formative force that shapes how they reflect, imagine, and even pray. Drawing on the Catholic imagination, Ignatian pedagogy, and sociological frameworks like liquid modernity, I argue that Jesuit institutions must respond not just technologically and reactively, but actively anticipate methods of integrating AI both theologically and pedagogically. I introduce the concept of Imaginative Intelligence as a formative goal—an embodied, sacramental way of knowing that invites depth, wonder, and resistance to automation. This is not a call to reject AI, but to reclaim the mission: to form students who are not just capable of generating responses, but of asking better questions. Who they become cannot be prompted. It must be practiced, accompanied, and formed in freedom. This, I suggest, is the best way to advance Catholic and Jesuit identity for higher education in today's context.
Forming Physicians for Others: The Identity of the Jesuit Catholic Medical School The Jesuit medical school accepts a widely-acknowledged telos: the preparation of the medical student to offer excellent patient care. It pursues this telos, however, through the distinctiveness of Ignatian formation, which finds expression in each domain of undergraduate medical education. This formative commitment, oriented toward and witnessing to an appreciation of the unconditional worth of the human being, may empower a subset of medical students—who are engaged by a life of faith and open to the transcendent invitation of their lives—to experience an even more fundamental transformation—one that foresees a future contemplative practitioner for whom the encounter with the patient is discernment-laden and Spirit-shaped. The Jesuit medical school thus becomes the formative setting for the physician who situates the patient encounter within their relationship with God. For this subset of medical students, medical practice may become prayer as the patient encounter reveals itself as a context for being-Christ-for and seeing-Christ-in the patient. Because God’s love is both active and diffusive, this Spirit-formed physician becomes a witness within and around the patient encounter.
During the 2025 meeting of the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU) at the Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, Jesuit Superior General Arturo Sosa offered the keynote address, “The Jesuit University: Witness to Hope, Creative and Dialogical Presence.” He urged the global university apostolate to respond to our common challenges: the climate crisis, political reactionism, institutional mistrust, and economic inequality. The Jesuit university, he insisted, must reimagine itself in order to respond to these threats. But the precise manner in which Jesuit universities should respond must still be articulated. This essay begins that project. It opens with an analysis of Sosa’s theological assumptions and then focuses on two of Sosa’s key priorities: ecological conversion and apostolic solidarity. Because these priorities are expressed as aspirations rather than plans, the essay imagines future possibilities in more concrete terms. First, the essay describes how an integral education might move Jesuit universities toward ecological conversion, and second, how institutional solidarity might move them toward apostolic solidarity.
This study examines the formative impact of selected faculty and staff formation initiatives offered at Boston College, with particular attention to those shaped by Ignatian spirituality. Drawing on qualitative survey data from 134 participants, the analysis identifies interrelated conditions through which formation is experienced as a coherent process rather than a set of discrete programs. Across initiatives, renewal and vocational clarity were most often described through four conditions: People, Pause, Place, and Purpose, understood here as the alignment of values, commitments, and lived practice. Presence emerged as the relational medium through which People, Pause, Place, and Purpose became formative. Presence captures the quality of facilitation through which structure is held with attentiveness, trust, and discernment, enabling participants to experience formation as accompaniment rather than instruction. Findings suggest that formation’s impact depends not only on the conditions in place, but on the relational way those conditions are carried. Together, the findings advance a framework for understanding faculty and staff formation as both a scholarly field, grounded in recurring formative conditions, and an art, enacted through accompaniment that supports discernment, interior freedom, and mission-aligned practice in Jesuit higher education.
Urban Catholic institutions of higher education are being challenged to do more when it comes to working with communities that surround them at the same time as they face multiple external pressure and must clearly define the value of their mission. In this article, we present a model for community-engaged practices that emerge from the ground up to move these institutions more in line with Catholic Social Teaching. “Cool People Doing Good Work” is an adaptable model centered around relationship building and authentic engagement with local experts, stakeholders, and community members that then builds to institutional change. This model places integral humanism at the forefront. This humanism, sponsored by the Church, emphasizes the development of human dignity over that of the market. The model developed is countercultural in that it approaches the development of the person and community, while centering subsidiarity. We first root the model in Catholic mission and values, then describe its steps. We end with an example of its application in a midwestern city. This article seeks to highlight the ways in which community-engaged work pushes urban institutions to adopt and recognize the work by incorporating it into their broader mission.
Ignatian pedagogy is the philosophy and methodology for teaching and learning that evolved from the wisdom accumulated from 500 years of Jesuit education. The Ignatian approach views education as a collaborative process that transforms students and teachers, preparing them for moral and ethical action in the world. While the core values of Jesuit education have remained constant, the changing demographics within our Jesuit communities and among the faculty and staff of our institutions offer an opportunity to celebrate its many intersections with peer-reviewed research on effective pedagogical approaches that center students and foster justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this article, we describe the five elements of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) - context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation - and how they can be accessed and expressed in a variety of disciplines, with a particular lens on the intersections between the Ignatian paradigm and critical pedagogies of social and racial justice, whole-person education, and teaching that fosters psychological and spiritual development. At the end of each section are suggestions for instructional strategies that exemplify an Ignatian Pedagogical approach that is engaged, reflective, and inclusive.
This is a reflection on different aspects of higher education and generative software (so-called 'ai') in light of Ignatian discernment, especially the key consideration of "context." Drawing on administrative and classroom work at a Jesuit university in the United States, Catholic Social Teaching principles, papal teaching on social justice and technology, and an honest consideration of generative software's social, corporate, and ecological contexts, this reflection soberly assesses the fraught nature of complicity with such neoliberal, exploitative, and extractive contexts for Jesuit institutions of higher education. While it is easier to go along with mainstream economic and cultural assumptions, I claim here that the problems with generative software systems and the practices of the companies that make them available are so antithetical to the stated aims of Jesuit education and Catholic Social Teaching that debates about the functionality of generative software in educational spaces are posterior to the debates that matter most.
