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In the thirteenth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Mark Bosco, S.J., the Vice President for Mission and Ministry at Georgetown University. Bosco begins by discussing his research interests residing at the intersection of theology, literature, and the cultivation of a well-ordered imagination. Those interests led him to explore the life of Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. While most of Bosco’s scholarship comes in the form of books and articles, his 2019 documentary, Flannery, received the Library of Congress’s inaugural Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. Bosco then discusses how those interests emerged, how they contributed to his calling to the Society of Jesus, and how they informed his service at Loyola University Chicago and now at Georgetown University. At Loyola, Bosco taught in the theology department and led a center dedicated to the Catholic intellectual heritage. At Georgetown, he was called to lead the division that helps cultivate the university’s Jesuit mission while also providing pastoral care for all members of the community. Georgetown’s academic programs and location in Washington, DC attract students and faculty members from around the world and from a myriad of religious backgrounds. At Georgetown, Bosco contends those backgrounds become a strength, operating in a culture informed by Jesuit charisms such as cura personalis (or care for the whole person) while also appreciating those backgrounds and the ways they interact with one another. Bosco then concludes by detailing how universities such as Georgetown serve as locales in which the Church can do its thinking while also preparing the next generation of lay and clerical leaders.
- Mark Bosco’s Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia (Long Distance Productions, 2019)
- Mark Bosco’s Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2005)
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 Father Mark Bosco, the Vice President of Mission and Ministry at Georgetown University. Thank you for joining us.
Borrowing from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, you argue the work of Flannery O’Connor as a “counter, original, spare, strange.”
To begin, what did Hopkins mean when he wrote these words? And what then do you see in O’Connor’s works that reflect such an understanding?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah. Well, thank you. Good to be with you. I think what Hopkins was talking about is that we tend to kind of conceptualize or categorize beauty as all about symmetry and, and a kind of perfectionism and a kind of a way of seeing the world as a kind of what’s the word I’m looking for? Kind of like a photo curated piece, right.
And what I think the poem is saying is that no, there’s beauty in the uniqueness, in the particular strangeness of reality. But you have to see beyond the surface, right? And, and sometimes you see then the particularity and the uniqueness of things.
And I think that, I think that Flannery O’Connor was trying to say in her stories that all of her characters, you know, 99% of them are redeemable characters, and partly in their particular kinds of ways in which they are fallen or broken and asymmetrical, you might say. That’s where the salvific act can happen.
So I think that she’s trying to say that we can find beauty in our uniqueness and not in something that’s uniform.
Todd Ream: In what ways were you drawn to the works of Flannery O’Connor?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah. You know, I remember reading her stories in high school and thinking, what is going on here with this story, all these dead bodies? And, and then I found out she’s this Catholic writer who goes to Mass every day and she reads Thomas Aquinas and she reads Jacques Maritain and she reads all these kind of theologians and philosophers.
So I kind of came back to her, and I realized that as I was reading her and studying her and writing about her, there was a sense that I wanted to tap into the kind of Catholic resources that kind of fed her imagination. And I felt that sometimes O’Connor’s critics were afraid either of that theological imagination because they weren’t theologians and they didn’t know how to talk about it. Or they were a little bit allergic to religion, allergic to faith, and therefore wanted to find a Freudian critique or a Marxist retreat, you know, kind of critique.
So my work and my fascination was that the more I learned about what she read, friends with her, what she wrote, really is this deep, deep sense of the Catholic imagination at work in her art.
Todd Ream: Your reflections on Flannery O’Connor’s works are not limited to writing and teaching, but along with Loyola University of Chicago’s Elizabeth Kaufman, you co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced Flannery: The Storied, Life of a Writer from Georgia, a film which won the inaugural Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for documentary films in 2017. And also aired as part of PBS’s American Master Series in 2021. What compelled you to pursue that project?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: You know, I was again concerned with the right kind of biography or a biography that could get the fullness of O’Connor’s life. And I had done some interviews with people at conferences who were writing about Flannery O’Connor. And I had friends who had done some very good interviews about O’Connor with her, her friends back in the 1990s. People who were still alive and knew Flannery O’Connor.
And so using those interviews as a backbone, I wanted to try to kind of show the breadth of her life and the, and the humanity of her life. So, I think the things that really drew us to this documentary were how we could talk about Flannery O’Connor as someone who really lives in the American experience, the 20th century.
So she was a woman in the South. What was the South like and, and how is it different and the same today? What does it mean to be a woman writer, who’s a serious writer, and not someone who might be considered a romantic or a writer of summer beach novels, you know? She was taken seriously by critics in that regard.
She grew up and she was dealing with the dismantling of the Jim Crow South, and I just thought the sense of where our country is today and where it was in the forties and fifties when she was writing, it’s very much, we’re still struggling with those same things. So for me, Flannery O’Connor, in her life and the struggles in her writing, in some ways reflected a kind of a 20th century journey that we’re still on in many ways.
And finally, you know, she was a disabled woman, and I just think all of the ways in which academic discourses disability studies has kind of come into the fore, O’Connor, in some ways with her metaphors and with her own personal life kind of lives in that world. So, so again, very present to the moment today.
Todd Ream: On top of what you’d already learned by teaching and writing about her works, what, if anything, did you learn that was new by writing, directing, and then producing a documentary?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: I think one of the things that I grew to love more and more is how funny she was. I think I always knew that she was funny and there was a satire, but I really think she’s very funny though because by the time you read a novel or a short story 20 times, right you really kind of get into the humor of it, into the mechanisms of that humor. So that was a kind of a personal discovery of mine, a personal love.
I think what I learned is how human her discernment of life was of going to Iowa, of really this contemplative sense of what kind of artist can I be and still be a person of deep faith. How can I use my art for something greater than my own ambition?
And I think that what I really learned was that in some ways, she was trying to get hold of or discipline, her sense of pride, her sense of ambition, so that it could be directed to something greater than herself. And that I’m hoping what the film did, and certainly it’s what I see in her spiritual life as something that we should all take to heart.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you some more direct questions then about your own vocation. You’re originally from St. Louis, Missouri, earned a bachelor’s in philosophy from Cardinal Glennon College, Master’s in English from St. Louis University, an M.Div from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and then a PhD in theology and Literature from the Graduate Theological Union, also at Berkeley.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to being called to serve the Church as a priest, but also to serve as a priest, as a member of the Jesuit order?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: I grew up in a very Catholic culture, a very Catholic city, and so I kind of understood Catholicism and religion as part of the air I breathe, datum, the datum of reality. And I have to say that going to the Catholic, you know schools of higher education, that also kind of fed into a kind of a worldview in which faith and reason actually were not in tension. They and I kind of felt that in my own intellectual life, that these things can come together.
I was a philosophy major at first, and then I realized that philosophy wasn’t quite giving me the answers I wanted to, that had stopped me. And so in some ways, later on, I realized that that was the theological questions that I was asking. So I was always very much involved with the questions of meaning. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be a human being? I was interested in art and how art kind of produces the human experience and how it reflects that. And so those were the two big things.
After college, I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I went to New York and I think I found my first vocation as a teacher. And I worked in a school in the lower east side of Manhattan, mostly first generation students. And all of a sudden I found myself teaching religion at a Catholic high school, music, and literature. Those three things are still part of my life today.
And so my students to this day say, when I teach a literature class, oh my God, there’s so much like theology. And when I teach theology class, how come we have to read so many novels and poems in this theology class? So for me, those kinds of things just were so interwoven.
So after finding that, I guess my vocation is to the Jesuit priesthood because I knew Jesuits. Because I talked and spoke and I went to church at a Jesuit church, and because of the intellectual life of the Society of Jesus it just seemed to be the home for me.
And I remember teaching, I’ll share a very personal story, I remember teaching in the lower east side, getting ready for school, and I was brushing my teeth, and this thought came, it was my, it was my, my voice in my head, but it was like, you know, you really should think about becoming a Jesuit. And I remember it so well because I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet, oh my gosh, because I’m kind of contemplating this.
And after that moment, it just really never went away. It just kept on coming back, not in kind of like forceful ways, but it just never left my consciousness. So my vocation went from being just a teacher to a kind of teacher, a teacher in this Jesuit community of faith wanting to do the transformation of not only the mind, but of a heart of putting together a faith and an intellectual tradition together. And so that led me to the Jesuits and it’s been a great adventure.
Todd Ream: What mentors proved most formative to you in terms of the formation that you’ve experienced over the course of your life?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, I would say there were certainly professors, I still remember in college, a professor, she taught existentialism and it just kind of we could talk about those big kinds of questions about what it means to be human in the modern world. There are other professors who taught me about ethics courses that really provoked me. And then there was some literature professors who really got me hooked on people like Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, and things like that. These very kind of dramatic writers who had questions of faith and salvation seemed to be played up in the psychology of the characters. So I think that was part of it.
And I do think that writers were kind of mentors to me. I mean, I’m kind of an academic in which, like, I did a book on Graham Greene, I had to, I just wanted to understand and let him, in his stories, kind of teach me something. Same thing with Flannery and others.
And then of course there are some great mentors in the Jesuit order. Whether it’s people, those who had died, people like reading the autobiography, Ignatius of Loyola knowing the story of Father Pedro Rupe, the Jesuits, or just kind of having the Jesuits down the street having a burger with me, talking about you know, about life and about a vocation of service this charism of the Jesuits.
Todd Ream: Thank you. To date, you’re the author, editor of five books, including the documentary too, but author, editor of five books.
When exploring works that reside at the intersection of theology and art, what sense of intrinsic satisfaction do you experience?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: I think that when we, when you look at how faith lives in culture and what kind of a faith could produce Chartre or Handel’s Messiah or, you know, a Flannery O’Connor what kind of faith actually can produce and stay within culture? I think I get excited about those kinds of cultural productions that have built this kind of Western civilization, you might say.
And so I, I’m very interested in how we interrogate what is beautiful and do it within this kind of Christian the Christian resources and scholarship of Augustine and Aquinas and others. I’m also interested in how it says something about transcendence in the human experience, the sense of mystery.
I get great satisfaction of helping students and readers find some of the keys to open that kind of view of the world or that vision of art. It’s a very contemplative kind of way of looking at art. So I feel in many ways I get the satisfaction of making that light bulb go off where faith and the imagination and art are not at, at, at some kind of opposition, but they’re actually woven together to create in a creative way.
Todd Ream: Prior to your appointment to Georgetown, you served on the theology and English faculties at Loyola University of Chicago and directed the institution’s Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to serve in those capacities at Loyola, and then how that sense of service impacted your ongoing vocational discernment?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, so I had been ordained and had, had, had gotten to, to Loyola as a professor and in my fourth or fifth year, maybe sixth, I can’t remember now, I was asked would I take on the directorship as the outgoing director was stepping down. And I saw this actually as almost kind of the perfect place, the convergence, the confluence of my life in many ways.
In many ways, I try to embody that Catholic intellectual kind of vision in my teaching and in my scholarship. And here was a center that was trying to both interrogate this tradition, celebrate it at the same time and see it as resources for the modern world. Like, it’s like we’re not having to recreate the wheel every time we have a difficulty within our political, our social, our economic, our cultural world.
And so I think the center for me was a discernment to explore, and maybe even expand, how I understood the Catholic intellectual tradition as a great resource for people today.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In addition to teaching courses in Georgetown’s theology and English departments, you serve as the university’s Vice President for Mission and Ministry, a role to which you were appointed in 2017.
Would you please describe the discernment process that you experienced that then led you to accept that appointment?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, you have to understand that as a Jesuit, you have the vow of obedience, and so in some ways you discern with others, you discern with others. And so my superior, my provincial, asked if he could give my name to the president of Georgetown, who had heard of what I was doing at Loyola Chicago. And so I said, sure, I would be happy to have those conversations.
And of course, I was very happy at Loyola. I thought I was gonna be there my whole career, actually, as a Jesuit scholar, teacher working at the Hank Center, this, this intellectual center. But I was brought out here and I was moved by, you know, Georgetown being another Jesuit school, being the first Catholic university, Jesuit university in the country, how I could bring my gifts to that school.
And I remember the, the president at the time saying, I really would like an academic in this position, because in some ways, mission and ministry tends to be thought of as, as a kind of a pastoral component or category of the university. he really wanted to kind of bring those things together, to bring the pastoral and the intellectual life into some kind of conversation and dialogue.
So I think that’s why I said yes my provincial gave me the permission to say yes or no to it. And so I said yes to it and came here in 2017.
Todd Ream: In what ways do you seek to enhance Georgetown’s commitment to its Catholic and Jesuit missions through the programmatic and ministerial efforts your office oversees?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, in terms of programmatic ways in which of my job is to help, for lack of a better word, on ramp new you know administrators, deans faculty, to understand that there’s a kind of a literacy of language that that you need to really successfully engage Georgetown University, right. I’m not trying to convert anybody to any faith tradition, but I’m trying to make them literate in the language of a 500 year tradition of education that we have.
And so part of it is just doing these seminars, which have been really, really wonderful ways to get to know faculty and administrators. But I kind of lead a seminar on what is, what is a Jesuit university and who is St. Ignatius of Loyola? What does social justice mean in this perspective? What does, what are the neuralgic issues of higher education and, and what are the resources that this university’s heritage, as Jesuit and Catholic might provide. And so it’s really a kind of a formative thing that I do. So a lot of programmatic ways, I’m just trying to form people to be part of this community as full citizens of this community.
The other side is the pastoral side, so that is just really helping students, especially undergrads understand who they are, to invite them into a deeper understanding of that. You know, as you know, it’s a university, so nothing is coercive. How do we invite people into the different ways in which faith is part of their life and can be celebrated and experienced?
And so we have a, so a lot of the campus ministry reports up to me and we have a very diverse religious community here. We call ourselves a Jesuit and Catholic home for all faiths. Partly it’s how do we accompany folks all these kids as they go through these four years of university.
Todd Ream: As a way to offer some examples of some of the work that you do with faculty and staff, but also then with students, is it possible to describe, say, a typical day?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: A typical day? Well, okay, so I teach one course a semester, just to kind of keep my hand in it. So the typical day I will have at a, have a Monday, Wednesday class we’re doing a Flannery O’Connor seminar in the spring because it’s the centennial of her birth. We’re doing 24/7 Flannery O’Connor, but I’ll do that in the morning prepare for that.
I’ll probably have a meeting or at least a Zoom meeting before or after that with the cabinet or, or members of the administration on anything that’s going on that week. In the afternoon, I might have a couple meetings, one-on-one with administrators or faculty. I will have a one-on-one assessments with my direct reports.
And then in, if it’s on a Monday, we’ll have the seminar with nine faculty and we’ll do that for 90 minutes every other week for the semester. We’ll end there about five o’clock and we will as a priest, we’ll go to, say mass, usually either in the afternoon or in the evening. And then making myself available to students and to events in the evening. Because I live on campus, it’s very easy for me to kind of just, all in a day’s work start in the morning and finish up at nine o’clock and really never leave campus.
Todd Ream: What dimensions of your current role do you find most intrinsically and vocationally satisfying?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: I think what I most enjoy is this idea of sharing a kind of vision of education, a way of being in community that’s, in some ways it’s so much tensions with the way universities have to be run as businesses or universities have been, you know burdened by, you know, political discourses that are kind of threatening it. And just kind of keeping us leaning into the value-centered university that I think Jesuit education is.
So how do we lean into taking care of our students? How do we lean into the, the, the way the religious traditions actually can support and sustain us in difficult times? I get a lot of satisfaction of bringing people together for dialogue on issues and giving a way of proceeding that’s not gonna lead to ranker or is not gonna lead to some kind of, you know, battle lines being drawn.
So this moment in education and higher education, it’s a real consolation to be able to work with different audiences, different communities within the university, to let them understand that they’re part of a pluralistic community, but at the same time, allow them to know who they are and give themselves their, space for them to identify and represent themselves. So, yeah, it’s a very satisfying school in that regard to bring these things together.
Todd Ream: Whether these individuals are members of religious orders, clergy, or they’re laypersons, what advice would you offer to individuals who are considering whether they’re being called to serve in a comparable role as a chief mission officer for their institution?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: First of all, I think be open and know what you know and, and know and be able to acknowledge what you don’t know. So for example, when I came to Georgetown, although I had an intellectual kind of sense of what Interreligious dialogue was and how to care for Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, you know, Protestant students in a Catholic university, I also learned that there’s a lot I didn’t know. So I think that just being open to learning from the people around you.
I also think that the art of listening is just really important. And making sure that people feel listened to. And I guess the sense of a vocation is like, I think we’re always trying to make explicit what’s implicit in universities, that we’re really here to enlighten, to come to truth, but come to that truth grounded in a real human experience of community. Whatever that might be.
So how do we bring together a, I guess what I love about this kind of work is that I can use the word formation. We’re forming minds and hearts. We can shape the conversation. We can make space for difference and, and celebrate it. So I would say just making sure that those are always kind of being examined as you try to, to lead in this kind of job, has been an important part of my life.
Todd Ream: As you’ve echoed on a couple of occasions that Georgetown’s heritage, programs, and location offers it a long history of fostering dialogue amongst different religious traditions that are represented amongst its student body as well as its employees. Would you describe how the university understands the relationship shared by opportunities to advance its Jesuit and Catholic mission and opportunities to foster inter-religious dialogue?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, I think there’s a real discernment going on in the early two thousands about how could Georgetown University be an intellectual space for the Church but in a modern, contemporary way, what are the needs? And one of the things we tried to do is look at some of the documents of the Church, especially Vatican II documents, especially Nostra Aetate, which was really about interreligious kind of awareness, interreligious respect and dignity.
And so I think from the very beginning of the, the, the last of this, of this millennium, there’s been a push to say, we will be Catholic in the, in this certain way because this is what an intellectual, academic space should do, right. How do we look at the difference? How do we celebrate it? How do we make sure that there’s a sense that they feel that others feel respected?
So I don’t, I think the thing that’s most important is that we don’t silo religious traditions and say, okay, well we have an imam taking care of the Muslims. They’re good over there. And we have an Episcopal priest taking care of these Protestant kids. That’s really good over there. And then we had the Jesuits and the Catholics take, how do we actually come together and model that dialogue, model that accompaniment.
So we put into, we put into place programs. We have an interreligious retreat. We have Catholic retreats. We have Muslim retreats. We have Jewish retreats. But we also have retreats that bring people together to say, what are the common values of these faith traditions? We also have what we call a chaplain’s tea every Tuesday, which invites all the different chaplains from all the different religious traditions together.
And then I also think that what Georgetown has done is it’s tried to create intellectual centers like the Center for Jewish Civilization or the Muslim Center for Christian/Muslim Dialogue. There are places that we can do the intellectual conversation about what’s different and what’s similar.
And I, to be honest with you, I also think that the legacy of Pope Francis has helped us along, right. This document Fratelli Tutti that he wrote. How do we make sure that we’re not just saying, okay, well I’ll put up with you, but how do we actually live and walk together?
I want students, I want faculty, I want the university to be about the fact that religions are there actually to help human flourishing not to be a division. And so how do we kind of work at that in a difficult time?
Todd Ream: As our time unfortunately begins to become short, I do want to transition now to asking you, how do you define the characteristics and/or qualities of the academic vocation for you personally as you’ve grown over the course of your career, but also for educators who you welcome to Georgetown, whether they be curricular educators or co-curricular educators?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: One of the great words of students that are the millennial students is, is the sense of belonging. And I think that as intellectuals, as scholars, as teachers, we sometimes think that our vocation is just, let’s just do our, the business of scholarship or the business of, you know, managing a department or the business of managing a campus.
What I think is most essential is that we get beyond that, although we have to be a business, so to speak, we can never make our kind of our grounding. So how do we make faculty belong to an institution? Own its values, celebrate them, invite them into spaces that are maybe not just the ivory tower, right.
So I think in some ways what I think is essential for me is there has to always be this kind of explicit invitation to go deeper, explicit invitation to belong in ways that go just beyond perhaps your expertise as an academic or as a, as a staff member, and to find ways to come together especially in times of joy, but also in times of sorrow or anxiety.
So creating spaces for dialogue, whether it’s an academic forum or whether it’s a prayer service that brings differences to get people together.
I think that the students’ word belonging is probably a useful word for how we create a university today, as well as for our faculty and staff.
Todd Ream: When seeking to exercise such an understanding of the academic vocation, what virtues do you believe are most important to cultivate?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah. I think to be honest with you, I think humility is the first one. Learning how to put one’s ego or one’s ambition in, in a larger kind of perspective for the greater good, the common good. So I think a sense of humility at what you do. Why are you doing it? Is it all about you or is it about something greater than yourself?
I think the other thing, as I mentioned before, is so many people don’t feel listened to or seen. And so the value of really honoring that and doing the work of saying, I do understand what you’re saying. I might not always agree with it, but I do see you, I understand your concerns, giving them the space, giving others and myself the space and time to say that. So I think humility, listening.
And I think a sense of belonging to something, creating spaces so that that faculty know that they’re worth more than just in terms of their how many books they’ve written and their, you know, assessments on course evaluations. How do we bring these things together? I think that’s really an important aspect of the values that we bring.
There’s a word in Jesuit education, cura personalis, you know, how do we care for the whole person? And that means not so much, you know, take care of me, but what do I need to know? How, what kind of context are you living in, that I can enter where you and kind of start where you are as opposed to trying to yank you to where I am, right. Go in your door, so to speak.
And I think that in many ways, those things will go a long way to creating community and creating an intellectual community.
Todd Ream: Thank you. When seeking to exercise such an understanding of the academic vocation, what vices do you believe are most important to confront, especially within an academic context, such as the, which we find ourselves living today?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Yeah, I think the sense of a, kind of a superficial understanding and, and using the, the, a superficial language of, of difference a, a very superficial understanding of diversity. Those, those kind of key words we, we know that are under duress right now of equity and inclusion.
I think that we have to again, be worried about that kind of weaponizing of language across differences, of seeing language as a way to kind of have a zero sum game. If we can make everybody a winner, that’s the conversation I want to be in. I do not need to fight any kind of zero sum game conversation in the academy. And I think that’s the most important vice to get rid of.
And the second one, I guess is that sense that I have to be right. I think we have to live in the mystery of life. And we have to kinda live in a kind of gray area and acknowledging that. And so this, this sense of moral combination of black and white just seems to burden us and divide us as opposed to getting us to think about the similarities that we have in trying to figure out how to be scholars, teachers, staff today.
Todd Ream: In what ways do you believe the health of such an understanding of the academic vocation is then dependent upon the health of the relationship that the Church and that Church-related universities share?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: Again, I feel very blessed to, to kinda live within this 500-year tradition of Jesuit education. And it’s got its kind of pedagogical style that allows for a kind of expansive sense of the human person takes seriously faith as a component of reality, a way to truth just as much as maybe in epistemological way.
So I think in some ways making sure that pedagogy is the first way of seeing the process of learning as a kind of much more open, much more transcendent and much more celebratory. We spent the last 50 years with the hermeneutic of suspicion, and I kind of want to turn that around and say, yes, we have to be suspicious of systems and, and structures, but we also should celebrate where the human person of the human community really flourishes and does wonderful things and, and celebrate the kind of accomplishments that occur within that.
So I think in some ways, the Church, as a kind of resource and as a conversation partner with the intellectual life should be something that should bring us together.
There’ll be places where there might be differences because the intellectual life is there, the academy is there to question, right. And it does bring suspicion to structures. But at the same time there has to be that space where we are in conversation and dialogue together.
Todd Ream: Yep. As we close then, in what ways do you think, as we turn that hermeneutic sort of on its head or on its at least on its side, in what ways do you think that the Church can be of greater service to the university in the years to come and vice versa?
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: There’s a saying that the university is the, the, the place where the Church does its best thinking. And I like that phrase, right. We should be the place where the Church does its best thinking, not not to promulgate, but this is the places where processes of thought, where we can ask the hard questions about life today happen.
And I think that a, a religious institution, a religiously inspired institution like Georgetown or other places that that disconnects from the churches, disconnecting from 2000-year conversation and a community that has, has kind of, has, has gone through highs and lows throughout its whole history, that in some ways we have to be, always be in conversation with that.
So I think that the tradition and the Church itself invites us to a language and a way of thinking and being. And I think that the, the, the academy invites the Church to find a safe space or place to do its critical thinking on the world today.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Father Mark Bosco, the Vice President for Mission and Ministry at Georgetown University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J.: It was a pleasure to be with you.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at seven Christian Scholars reviews 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.
