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In the thirty-second episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Anna Bonta Moreland, The Anne Quinn Welsh Chair, Director of the Honors Program, and Professor of Humanities at Villanova University. Moreland begins by expanding upon the details of the opening keynote address she offered at the 2024 Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities conference. In particular, Moreland argued that Jesuit colleges and universities (as with all Church-related colleges and universities) are the Church. While the Church and Church-related universities have their own missions and modes of operation, Church-related universities derive their identity from the Church and, in turn derive their missions and modes of operation from the Church. Moreland recounts the details of her formation as a graduate student in systematic theology at Boston College and how she understands the service she offers students at Villanova as a debt of gratitude. Another dimension of that gratitude is also expressed in books she authored which have their origins in classes she teaches. Moreland then closes by identifying the academic vocation as the love of the question even more than the answer—a love that demands a relentless commitment to honesty. Doing so, as Moreland describes, demands humility and a willingness to confront pride in whatever form it may take.
- Anna Bonta Moreland and Thomas W. Smith, The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters (Catholic University of America Press, 2024)
- Anna Bonta Moreland, Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)
- Anna Bonta Moreland, Known by Nature: Thomas Aquinas on Natural Knowledge of God (Herder & Herder, 2010)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Anna Bonta Moreland, the Anne Quinn Welsh Chair, Director of the Honors Program and Professor of Humanities at Villanova University. Thank you for joining us.
Anna Bonta Moreland: Delighted to be here, Todd.
Todd Ream: I’d like to begin our conversation by discussing the opening plenary address you gave before the assembly of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in 2024, an address entitled, “What Do We Owe the Church?” You begin by contending the way to address the crisis in higher education, as well as the crisis facing emerging adults, is to leverage the transformative nature of what an Ignatian education can offer.
Why do you think Jesuit schools are hesitant to leverage such a form of education?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Great question, Todd. So, Jesuits aren’t the only ones who are hesitant in Christian higher education to leverage their rich theological traditions that they come from. But in some ways they’re the most suited, the Ignatian vocabularies the most suited to the vocabulary of higher education, in particular, the practices of spiritual discernment, I think are just beautifully adaptable to professional discernment. And if there’s one thing that college is about today, it’s about professional discernment.
So they’ve got this beautiful adaptability, but yet, as you know, the hiring practices of the last 50, 60 years at Catholic and Christian universities has been such that the percentage of faculty who are actually committed to the Christian tradition has been reduced. So there’s a sort of wider bandwidth of vocabulary and a shyness about not being welcoming. But in that address and at Villanova, I try to be both steeped in the Christian language and Christian tradition, but that is married to a radical hospitality.
Todd Ream: What do you think then other Catholic colleges and universities sponsored by other orders, by dioceses, et cetera, as well as you noted, you know, Christian colleges and universities, which are also certainly shy at times about drawing from their traditions in ways that can provide this transformative education, what do you think we can learn from that Ignatian understanding of education that might be well received in other contexts and serve other contexts well?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So I think Ignatian universities have been ahead of the curve asking themselves the question, what makes an Ignatian University Ignatian? They’ve been asking that question for decades. I’d say since at least the nineties. And that’s a question that takes a long time to answer. I think other universities have been a little later to that conversation, and it’s a really important conversation to ask within each religiously committed university.
Todd Ream: And I would, you know, one of the things that I’ve benefited from greatly is the mission examen process that in Jesuit colleges and universities have engaged in, in recent years, that seems to be in their own unique way, provide a template or model for other schools to think about what their traditions then offer, you know, in that concept too, so.
Anna Bonta Moreland: That’s exactly right.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
You also argue at the beginning of your address that you want to turn the title that you were given for that address sort of on its head, or at least on its side, title being “What Do We Owe the Church?” In particular, you argue that Jesuit institutions as well as Catholic college universities are the Church. In what ways are these institutions then the Church or reflective of the Church?
Anna Bonta Moreland: I didn’t mean to suggest that academic freedom wasn’t a thing, right. The first thing that faculty at Catholic universities go is academic freedom. I fully embrace academic freedom, and yet it seems to me that Catholic universities are part of the Ecclesia. They don’t stand apart from the Ecclesia. They’re grounded in the Ecclesia. They serve the Church, they serve the wider society. And they’re a particular witness and a particular outgrowth of this rich intellectual tradition. So even the question, what do we owe the Church? It hides within it a standing apart that I was objecting to.
Todd Ream: Yeah. What efforts do you think it’ll take to then to reconnect that relationship?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Person to person. I mean, I think the loss of trust across so many sectors in US society emerges from a loss of personal relationship. And there used to be a time where the local bishop and the head of the local Catholic college had engaged more. Now both of those jobs have gotten really complex, really difficult, a lot of demands and important demands for both of those jobs.
So there isn’t that same sort of time and attention given to the relationship between the Catholic university that resides in a diocese and the head of that diocese. I think it’s time to revive those relationships, but I understand the challenges that are real on both of those sides.
Todd Ream: Yeah. What practices do you think might be the greatest aids then to fostering that reconnection, given the limitations that we’re also talking about too, at least for senior officials?
Anna Bonta Moreland: I hate to say that meals are the answer to everything.
Todd Ream: I’m okay with that personally.
Anna Bonta Moreland: Meals are the answer to everything. I mean, I think there is nothing replaces a conversation that emerges over a meal, it seems to me. And if they can’t meet at a meal, it could be coffee, it could be drinks, it could be anything. But again, it’s that understanding each other, human to human, should be the sort of central relationship out of which then whatever issues emerge with respect to the university and the local ordinary, those can be addressed if there is a relationship of trust.
Quite frankly, there’s a relationship of distrust, a lot of the time between the heads of Catholic universities and the local ordinaries. And sometimes earned, sometimes not earned. You know, the situations are varied, but there should be a hermeneutic of generosity on the part of both.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
In what ways then, if any, do you think the crisis facing higher education and the crisis facing emerging adults is then related to this separation that exists?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So my first instinct, Todd, is to respond by saying, yeah, we all wish it were otherwise, but we evangelize in the field that we find ourselves. So there’s a temptation among people like me to want to romanticize how things used to be. And I try to really resist that temptation, and it’s a discipline to resist that sort of temptation.
So of course they’re related, although that’s a complex story to tell. I don’t know how far it’ll get us to work in the field hospital we’re in right now. I’m throwing around too many metaphors, but you get what I’m trying to say I think.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Pope Francis in particular, has utilized this phrase as a way of thinking about the Church, and then others have picked up on that and utilized it as a way of thinking about the university and the way the university can engage with the culture around them.
When we welcome new educators to our campus, whether they be curricular or co-curricular educators, in what ways can we introduce them to certain rhythms of the academic life that might incrementally reduce this sense of separation. In what ways can professional development, professional formation perhaps help?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So I think actually that it’s not just faculty, but it’s staff. There’s a total ignoring of the hundreds of staff that are giving their blood, sweat, and tears to the lives of undergraduates in particular. There are faculty development workshops. There are all sorts of incentives to encourage faculty to understand the vocabulary of a particular university, but I think it’s time we include the staff in those conversations.
There’s an absurd hierarchy at work in these institutions which sort of as left-leaning as higher education is, it’s astonishingly archaic in its sort of clinging to hierarchy. So I think universities need to include staff in these professional development workshops and not split them as much as they do. And in particular, we’re talking about how to anchor Catholic universities into the vocabulary of their own traditions. That’s an effort that should be extended to staff as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you very much.
I wanna transition now to talking about your own formation as a theologian and as a systematic theologian. You earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Maryland, and then an MA and a PhD in systematic theology from Boston College. At what point did you begin to discern that the study of systematic theology was central to your calling and your calling to the academic vocation?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So Todd, thank God you’re, we’re in the same zip code of age. Because when I talk to students about how I came to do what I’m doing, it sounds so utterly foreign to them. You know, pre-Google. I had a mentor as an undergraduate who basically decided for me—I thought I was going to continue in philosophy and he told me I should continue in theology because so many philosophy departments are radically secular around the country. And he knew that I, that faith and reason were at the center of what I was trying to study. So I said, okay. And I went.
I went, I’m from Argentina. I went back to Argentina for a year. I graduated early from college and wrote to him and asked him where I should apply. And he told me where I should apply. And then I wrote to him and said, well, where should I go? I got in where you told me to apply. And he gave me the phone number. And just imagine, you know, the early nineties in Buenos Aires, Argentina, like landlines are not always dependable. It is a developing country.
I call a Jesuit at the time with a booming voice, and that booming voice made the decision for me where I was gonna go. He literally, at the end of the phone call, Father Michael Buckley, said, Anna, you’ll be showing up to Boston College in the fall. I thought I was gonna go to University of Chicago. I thought this was just gonna be like a rubber stamp. But the booming voice sounded really authoritative and I did.
And honestly, it was providential. BC is where I came to discover who I was, who I wanted to be in an incredible group of friends. I was shaped to be who I am. Everything I am at Villanova, everything I’m giving at Villanova, I was given at Boston College.
Todd Ream: Father Michael Buckley, of course, being a legendary educational presence there in the BC community and in Catholic higher education as a whole. Are there any other mentors then who’ve spoken to your life in addition to that booming voice?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Yeah. Yeah. So Father Michael Himes was also really instrumental during my time at Boston College. Father Brian Daley, a lot of priests, quite frankly. And the truth is priests are able to give time to us in a way that I have four children, I give a lot to my students, but, but I haven’t been able to be that sort of utterly, radically generous in the way that these priests were with us.
We went on eight-day Ignatian retreats every year. We’d have evening prayer on Thursday nights at a Jesuit community, where the Jesuits were having cocktail hour, and we would walk in and dip into their cocktail hour and then go to the chapel. I mean, it was just incredible. We volunteered at a soup kitchen. It was so holistic. They taught us that the academic vocation of Catholic theology involved a whole way of living. And they did that not just by what they were teaching us, but by the set of practices that they inculcated in us. And by quite frankly, how they lived.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Yeah. And invited you into that. That’s beautiful. Yeah. Thank you.
Anna Bonta Moreland: It really was. It was a unique gift.
Todd Ream: As a philosopher then and as a theologian, I assume that authors present and in particular the past are important to your formation as a systematic theologian. Do you mind sharing a few of those in the impact that they’ve also had?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Absolutely Todd. So I would say that my graduate education was a process of falling in love for Thomas Aquinas with Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth and a wrestling with that. I felt pulled in two different directions, and I, I guess I still kind of am. I mean, at the end of the day, I ended up studying more deeply into Aquinas. But, but, but reading deeply in both of those figures was incredibly formative for how, for everything.
I mean, I remember thinking that nothing was more demanding, outside of my marriage, writing that dissertation was the most demanding experience of my life. It called out for me more than I thought I could give. It demanded more from me, you know, as marriage does too. It just demands more from you. It was an incredible privilege.
And Michael Buckley was absurdly demanding. I think I wrote 30 drafts of chapter one of my dissertation but I thank him for it, right? I mean, it was because he was so demanding that he taught me to dig more deeply than I wanted to at that time.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Who then introduced you in particular to Karl Barth, if I may ask?
Anna Bonta Moreland: George Hunsinger at Princeton Theological Seminary
Todd Ream: At Princeton Seminary
Anna Bonta Moreland: So Andover Newton Theological Seminary is in Boston, near Boston College. It used to be a joint program, the PhD program there. And George came, I think, to teach a January course at Andover Newton. Somehow I fell into going into it, got really hooked, asked Mark Heim to do an independent study with a couple of US Catholic rogue graduate students who wanted to study Barth. And Mark was incredibly generous and did an independent study for with us for a long time.
And then we ended up inviting George to Boston College and developing a relationship there. He ended up coming to our wedding. George was incredibly formative as well to my theological development. Again, not just intellectually, but also as a witness himself to Christian faith.
I mean, I think the John Henry Newman’s distinction between notional ascent and real ascent has stayed with me as well, so the life of the mind is really important to me, but the people that I gravitate to toward are the people who are committed to a life of real ascent and George is one of those people.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I couldn’t help but ask where those rogue graduate students, Catholic graduate students, as you called them may have come into contact with Karl Barth, who in particular introduced his work to you.
As noted at the outset of our conversation, you serve as the director of Villanova’s honors program. Would you describe the educational commitments that define that experience for students?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Yeah, so the honors program serves the top 10% of Villanova’s undergraduate student body, but in a way that’s countercultural. So we take these really top students and we encourage them to downshift and to walk through their education in an intentional way. That is a lot of the effort of what we do in the honors program.
We have a series of developmentally appropriate courses that help them begin their college experience downshifting, walking, intentionally turning that sort of backpack to briefcase experience that a lot of universities have into a deeper professional discernment practice. And then preparing them for life beyond Villanova in a fully flourishing way.
And so I teach a capstone course called Shaping an Adult Life that has three components, the meaning of work, leisure—they don’t know how to spell leisure and relationships—and it’s out of that experience of teaching that course and the series of courses that Tom and I ended up writing The Young Adult Playbook.
Todd Ream: In what ways do those commitments, because they have echoes of what we talked about in terms of Ignatian education earlier, but in what ways do they reflect Villanova’s Augustinian charisms?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So they very much do, and I’m actually part of a very lively conversation right now, about thinking about the Augustinian charism, in relation to the character education that is part of a more national conversation, purposeful education and character education.
I would say that at an Augustinian university, we don’t learn alone. Every learning that we do, whether it’s in the lab or it’s in the library or in around the seminar table, is in community. And St. Augustine is the model. So every freshman at Villanova reads Augustine’s Confessions, and then hopefully encounters pieces of the confessions and pieces of Augustine throughout their education. It’s a very teachable text, so both it’s a deeply communal learning experience, and the honors program, the living and learning cohorts, you know, even just the attention that we have toward community is rooted in, in the Augustinian charism.
There’s a softness to the Augustinians, sort of a localness and a softness, and a softness to Villanova as a result that I hope we are always able to hold onto and treasure.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about that softness and perhaps points of contrast to other orders or other institutions? In what ways does it make Villanova unique or distinct?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So Villanova has risen, that star has risen, since I arrived in 2006 and, and in my almost two decades at Villanova, the star has definitely risen. But it still has a mom and pop shop feel to it. It has a nest feel to it that not a lot of universities that are as resource rich, resource rich as Villanova, still have. And a lot of universities have gotten really professionalized in the way and slick, as in the ones whose coffers have been filling. Do you see what I’m saying?
And Villanova still has that kind of gritty Philadelphia, local feel. So much so that I have two children right now there and faculty and advisors and staff have attended to my own children and noticed when they’ve been missing classes or noticed when, I mean, the president of the university noticed when my son cut his hair. So that’s a real attention to the local that I think Villanova very much has, its leadership has. And I just hope we never lose it.
Todd Ream: You have a a president there who you mentioned notices when young people cut their hair and also directs the student musical each-
Anna Bonta Moreland: That’s right.
Todd Ream: At least as often as his schedule allow. And I guess his, from what I understand, his desire is great for his schedule to allow this each spring.
Anna Bonta Moreland: Yes.
Todd Ream: So yeah, not heard of many university presidents that continue to invest in their academic homes in the ways that Father Donohue does there at Villanova.
Anna Bonta Moreland: That’s exactly right.
Todd Ream: I wanna ask you about one thread of your research and in particular, the relationship shared by Islam and Christianity. In 2020, the University of Notre Dame Press published Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy. What led you to pursue that particular exploration of Islam and do so from a Christian perspective?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So that’s a really good question, Todd, because if you look at my intellectual trajectory, it’s not automatically, intuitively explained. I was trained as a systematic theologian. And in fact, that book is a work of Catholic theology. It’s just Catholic theology in the branch of the theology of religious pluralism and dips into comparative theology.
My first year at Villanova in 2006, I taught this horrific course called I don’t know, Medieval Models and Interreligious Dialogue. So it was a course on Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides. And I wanted to do this sort of medieval, because I knew something about that. But it was a typical rookie mistake, a typical insofar as I was asking undergraduates to read primary texts that they were not at all equipped to read. It was just too technical. It was like a grad course at the undergraduate level. I mean, they were very gracious that semester.
But when I went around to teach it the second time, second year, like a week before the semester started, I just thought to myself, I can’t do this again. So I looked on the internet and I found a syllabus of a guy at NYU, a historian of religion who taught a course on the birth and early development of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I contacted him and I said, his name was Frank Peters, and I said, do you mind if I teach your course? He had a series of books. He said, no problem. He sent me the syllabus, sent some syllabus, the exams, everything. He was a resource throughout.
I started teaching this course that I was utterly ill-equipped to teach, utterly ill-equipped. But I learned an insane amount in the process of teaching this course for over a decade. And I rewrote that syllabus, I’d say at least six times. In the process of, and mind you, this is in the early aughts, right? So students knew that they were, they were ignorant about Islam, but they were intimidated to learn about Islam, right. And so this was a soft entry because they thought they knew something about Christianity. But it turns out they learned a lot about Christianity in this class as well.
So these pedagogical questions of how to teach a holy text that is outside my tradition, because I had students read pieces of the Qur’an, in a course. I didn’t want it to be a sociology of religion course. I didn’t want it to be simply a history of religion course. I wanted students to have a sense of the fact that these texts they were reading were live. They’re part of a community of faith that either kneels or falls fully prostrate in front of these texts, before these texts.
So that pedagogical question, how to teach a sacred text that’s not sacred for my tradition, led me to, to write, to go back to my own tradition to read documents of Vatican II, go back to Thomas Aquinas on prophecy. And I wrote a series of articles and then it fully flowered into this book, to answer that question of what Catholics, how Catholics should approach a sacred text other than their own, namely the Qur’an.
And it sort of morphed into this question about prophecy, who is a prophet. And it sort of shifted from the Qur’an to Muhammad as a prophet. And it was a very narrow argument that Thomas Aquinas on prophecy, to the pretty radical claims we make, Catholics make, at Vatican II, about how Catholics and Muslims adore the one God together, for example.
That’s a question I think left open from Vatican II how that is, and even draws from this corner of theology that nobody pays attention to anymore, namely called private revelation, which is how Catholics understand what it means for Mary to appear to children, say on a mountaintop, how we make sense of that encounter, in light of the closing of the canon.
And so it’s a very theoretical, theoretical narrow point that Catholics should, in principle, be open to the possibility of the prophecy of Muhammad, not wholesale, but at particular moments. And to get there, I do a very careful analysis of Aquinas prophecy. I talk about Caiaphas, for example. Caiaphas speaks prophetically and yet he’s condemning Jesus to death, right.
Todd Ream: If I may ask, do you still teach this course?
Anna Bonta Moreland: I don’t, because I barely teach anymore.
Todd Ream: In what ways when you were teaching that course then did working through this book then impact how you approach that course, that it became a more theological point of interaction?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Absolutely. No, it absolutely. The courses is teaching the course is what sort of gave rise to the writing. I thankfully have never asked my students to read that book because it would’ve made repeated that same mistake of year one teaching.
But then the course became full throttle theological. It moved away from the historical trajectory. And it was an exciting course for students. It was a really popular course. And I learned a ton teaching it. And I was really grateful to my department . It gave me the freedom to teach this course, that was just far from my field of expertise experience and yet that experience really deepened my own theological trajectory.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to turn now to talking about your most recent book, one that you mentioned just a few minutes ago in brief, but published in 2024 by Catholic University of America Press and co-authored with Thomas W. Smith, your most recent book is The Young Adult Playbook.
On the surface, this book seems to be a departure again from your previous book length projects, and maybe that’s how you get inspired for a book project and to take one on. But what led you to pursue the creation of a resource designed to meet the needs of young people during these critical years in their lives?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So Todd, I don’t know about you, but a lot of my academic life has developed kind of by happenstance and accident it seems. And I had just finished the Muhammad book. I was teaching this course Shaping an Adult Life, and the student response was almost visceral, like I had put my finger on a raw nerve of their lives. Their response to the course was just astonishing. It threw me back on my heels.
And so I thought, well, maybe I should write a book on this as a palate cleanser because the book that I’d written on Muhammad on Prophecy was highly technical and academic. So this was just supposed to be a one-off. And my friend Tom had given a lecture at Villanova, which was very, very much in spirit with what I was thinking about writing on. And we were part of this curricular initiative together and we’re really good friends.
So I walked into his office and said, Tom, do you wanna write a book with me? And he said, sure. I’d never co-authored anything. Neither had he. We had no idea what we were doing. That summer, we got together and started throwing spaghetti against a wall and honestly what emerged, it was a graced experience working together. We have different strengths. We played to each other’s strengths. We read every word of that book to each other out loud. It was incredible.
And, and then it ended up being not so much a one-off, but very much part of who I am too because along these two decades, you know, I’ve listened to my students. They’ve been in my office a lot. Teaching is so much more about listening than it is about speaking. And they’re in crisis, right? We know that. Not higher education, it’s in crisis and emerging adults are in crisis. And so I’ve been growingly concerned about them. And the book is a way to try to reach young adults in a way that I don’t teach, that I can’t teach in the classroom.
And so the book ended up being a much bigger deal than we thought it would be. It also teaches really well in high schools and parents and grandparents and counselors, like adults who don’t understand what’s going on with this generation are able to get a window into this generation. The book gives them that.
So people who care about emerging adults also found it really useful and helpful and insightful, and mostly because we’ve included a lot of student stories, a lot of student stories that end up sounding like their nieces or nephews or grandchildren or even therapists have found it helpful. So it’s worked on multiple levels in a way that we didn’t even anticipate.
Todd Ream: Yeah. One of the things I thought that was compelling about your book was, as we’ve talked about, it’s written for a particular audience in terms of its explicit use, but it also has a resource level use to it, that seems to have become quite beneficial to, as you mentioned, parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, et cetera, how do we get our hands around how to be the best partners in traveling through these years with young people. And it seems to have really hit a nerve there also.
Anna Bonta Moreland: I think that’s right. I mean, to be frank, Todd, when Tom and I have gone around the country and spoken about this book, I would say almost without exception, somebody has ended up in tears, either a young person or an older person. That nerve that I said that I struck in that class, the book it turns out, also strikes a nerve.
It just, people felt, people feel kind of seen and heard and noticed, in particular with the epidemic of loneliness, but not just with that, in a way that we, that is really a joy to see, but we wouldn’t have anticipated that necessarily.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For young adults who utilize this book in some capacity, what habits do you hope they will develop, and then what outcomes in sort of a broad general sense reflective of those habits, do you hope then continue to serve them well through their lives?
Anna Bonta Moreland: So I use the book in teaching this course Shaping an Adult Life, and the book reframes, it builds vocabulary, it introduces practices, and it gives them hope. So it’s not just a diagnostic “kids these days” kind of book, but it’s very hopeful. And I think so many emerging adults have lost hope for themselves before they’re even out of the gate. And this book tries to arm them with hope and tries to encourage them to throw their fears into the backseat and their hopes and dreams into the seat.
There are little changes emerging adults have made in reading this book that have made a big difference. I’ll just name three concrete instances that I’m thinking of right now. One, didn’t go to law school, law school as, as default option. Huge win for me. Two, and they might go to law school later on, but not law school is default, two, deleted Instagram. All of a sudden you’ve got five extra hours in your day forever. I don’t mean deleted Instagram for seven days. I mean, deleted Instagram, changed your life.
Third, ask somebody out on a date. Turns out, Todd, it’s revolutionary. And students have no idea how to do it. And students have done it and come back to me and I even had alumni five years out, send me an email and say, Dr. Moreland, I finally did it. I went out on a date. It was so great. And I’m thinking to myself, oh my gosh, if you had started this five years earlier, you know, but at least at 25, it’s better than at 40 being alone. So those are three, just particular concrete, but they’re all sorts of possibilities.
Todd Ream: Yeah. When you think about those habits and practices then, and the way students have responded, are there ways we should be thinking about reforming our engagement as colleges and universities, Church-related colleges and universities, with the students that we’re striving to serve? Are there things that we should be encouraging or weaving into our curricular and co-curricular points of contact with them?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Gosh, that’s like a gigantic question. It’s hard to know.
One of the things that we can do is align our efforts. What’s happening in student life, in the career center, in the classroom, in the cafeteria, should be much more broadly aligned than it is. Right now, we have a let a thousand flowers bloom approach, and that’s my default approach. But if we really did think about what the career center is pushing versus what’s happening in the classroom and what student, what happens in the dorms, if we brought together, again it’s part of this—I talked about it earlier, bringing staff and faculty more together to, to feel part of a, of one enterprise together, if we aligned our efforts more, more broadly, I think we would be more successful.
Now, what’s obviously challenging about that is you can’t do it in a top down authoritarian manner, right? So to the implementation of this again, would just have to be a series of facilitated conversations where you learn. So for example, I’m having somebody from the university counseling center come talk to my staff about the resources that the counseling center offers, because it turns out we have two psychiatrists now. I didn’t know that. Faculty and staff should know that, should know really concretely what the university counseling center, what the resources are, and be able to say, why don’t you contact Allie, as opposed to why don’t you send, why don’t you call the university counseling center?
Sort of bringing, aligning those different efforts. We’re all rowing in the same direction, but to weave us rowing in the same direction a little bit more, in a more unified way. I am sorry, I just mixed a metaphor again. But I’d say that’s what we can do.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As our time now is unfortunately beginning to become short, I wanna shift to talking about the academic vocation and your understanding of it in this point in time in which we live and start by asking, as a systematic theologian, what qualities and/or characteristics are definitive of the academic vocation?
Anna Bonta Moreland: The love of the chase, the love of the, the love of the question, more than the answer. Sort of keeping, keeping the enterprise alive and organic. And you, and we can model it for our students. If we’re learners along our students, it becomes an exciting and alive enterprise as opposed to this sort of, ’cause the word, even the term systematic theologian is such a misnomer. There’s nothing systematic about systematic theology. And it’s such a sort of enlightenment term, right?
But the love of the question and the we’re seeking truth, beauty, and goodness together right now on the shoulders of giants, makes it exciting and yet not forgetting the past, not forgetting that we’re asking these questions on the shoulders of giants.
Todd Ream: Yeah. What virtues then, intellectual or moral prove critical to cultivate then in order to exercise this understanding of the academic vocation?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Humility—number one, and that unfortunately when you’ve been teaching easily enchanted 18 to 22 year olds for decades, that does not foster humility in faculty. Faculty think that we’re so interesting, when really we’ve been interesting for sort of cohorts of people who are easily enchanted in what we have to say. And so we’re really not that interesting. So inculcating the discipline of humility in some ways to counteract the academic practice, I think is very crucial.
And honesty relentless commitment to honesty I think is really important as well. Honesty with oneself, but then honesty as one engages questions with others. I’m gonna go with those two.
Todd Ream: And perhaps the answer to this question then can be in some ways derived from what you’ve just said in terms of vices, and what vices do we who are committed to the academic vocation need to be vigilant about guard and guard against in terms of taking hold in our own lives?
Anna Bonta Moreland: Obviously pride. I mean, it’s just so obviously pride. I’m the daughter of an academic. And I grew up, we were four children growing up, and we ate dinner tonight together at, at night together every night. And my father ran the dinner table like a seminar table. I remember thinking, I don’t wanna do that. So pride is, I mean, my father was amazing, by the way, so many great gifts and a role model for me in a lot of ways. But the liking to be listened to is just problem.
Todd Ream: How do you think we expose that, counteract that, address that?
Anna Bonta Moreland: On our knees in prayer. We need divine help.
Todd Ream: Yeah. As we close now, I wanna return to the themes that you explored in your 2024 AJCU plenary address, and ask in particular, in what ways is the health of the academic vocation as we exercise it on Catholic and Christian college campuses related to the health of the relationship that our institutions share with the Church? Is there a correlation between the relationship the Church shares and the university shares within the vitality and the manner in which we go about our work as individuals committed to the academic vocation?
Anna Bonta Moreland: 100%, I mean, to be frank, I think prayer is at the center. It’s at the center, both, both at the institutional level, so having liturgy be a focus at the universities. If the universities, if the faculty, staff and students are praying together, you’re enacting, you’re liturgically enacting the fact that you’re part of this larger Ecclesia. And you’re also, you’re praying with the Church. You’re praying through the Church. You’re praying in the Church.
So liturgy is the place where it, where it all comes together. So an attention to liturgy and attention to inculcating, prayer practices, all of those, I think, are the key to working harmoniously, both at the institutional level with the, with the local church and with a church tradition, but then also at the more particular one zone academic vocation. If I’m not doing daily prayer I’m failing as an academic theologian.
Todd Ream: Thank you. An important point for all of us to consider as we think about how we go about the paces of our work, the guild that we serve, but most importantly, the students who we serve in our classes and in our interactions with them.
Thank you. Our guest has been Anna Bonta Moreland, the Anne Quinn Welsh Chair, Director of the Honors Program, and Professor of Humanities at Villanova University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Anna Bonta Moreland: Thank you, Todd.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
