Re-Membering Catholicity: Higher Education, Racial Justice, and the Spirituality of the Posthuman University

Jeffrey S Mayer

doi:10.3390/rel12080645

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.

Highlights

Introduction andMethodology“What if white America is only willing to provide pity and charity, but not justice?”(Yancy 2017, p. 120)
Taking a cue from Keenan and Jack, is the university a community, and if so, how is community possible? What do we think a university is for, and for whom? Even more, how do we think of the university? The subsequent exploration of these questions relies upon what posthumanist thinker Rosi Braidotti has termed the posthumanities
Without an inner–outer ethico-onto-epistemology grounding the intra-activity of what we do across the Catholic academy, solidarity will remain a very quaint-sounding word in our mission statements, a final topic to which we turn

Summary

Introduction and Methodology

“What if white America is only willing to provide pity and charity, but not justice?”. Guided by Felix Guattari’s sense of transversality as an antidote to the corporatization of the university, Braidotti’s posthumanities model a relationality and affect in education, an understanding of person not as an autonomous rational individual but as a capacity to affect and be affected, and a “more complex assemblage that undoes the boundaries between inside and outside the self” With a marked emphasis on cognition at the expense of our embodiment, the grafting of minoritized students on to neoliberal centers of learning that call themselves “Catholic” invites a diffractive-reflexive re-engaging of the catholicity of such institutions. Rather than the “damaged human nature that is liberal subjectivity” (Kroker 2012, p. 119) of our technomeritocratic age, an incarnational religion holds the potential of awakening our co-creative capacities as hybridized persons in loving solidarity within and from the triadic spaces of our universities

The Phenomenon of the University: A Posthuman Re-Imagining

Re-Membering the Racialized Past

Co-Creating from the Splice

Findings

Conclusions