The Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S. play each other dozens of times on the basketball court this season. Full schedule here. The Jesuit Basketball Spotlight program takes these games as a opportunity for a soft promotion of Jesuit education and mission.  Some version of this announcement will be read at most if not all of these games:

Tonight’s matchup between X and X is just one of more than 90 games this season  between teams from the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities across the United States. Each  of the 28 is dedicated to strong academics and teaching women and men to serve others  and live a faith that does justice.

Grounded in a 500-year tradition, Jesuit, Catholic higher education creates bright futures  for its more than 200,000 students in the United States.

Alumni at the game tonight are just some of the more than 1.7 million Jesuit graduates  in America who are leaders locally, nationally and internationally. [Name of institution]  and its fellow Jesuit institutions thank you for your attendance tonight, and for believing  in the Jesuit mission.

Rick Malloy, SJ, VP at the University of Scranton, prods students to ask some questions:

Will a man or woman who had multiple sexual partners make a good husband or wife? Is hooking up good training for life?

There’s an old saying in Jesuit circles: We form our habits and our habits form us. Those whose sexual practices militate against fidelity, monogamy and meaning during their late teen and young adult years will not easily settle down once they marry in their late 20s or early 30s.

Read the whole thing.

When he was 18, the young Mike Hayes told his pastor that he was going to Fordham for college.  The pastor was horrified and tried to talk him into going to St. John’s “or another non-Jesuit school.”  Mike forged ahead anyway, and he explains why he’s glad he did in “What the Jesuits Have Meant to Me.”

It takes a great deal of slow, careful, thoughtful work to learn a language.  First there must be the example of someone fluent in that language who acts as a model.  Next, there must be careful listening, repeating of sounds that are foreign; memorizing words and their unfamiliar nuances.  Over time one builds small sentences to convey basic meanings.  Months, even years later, one grows in the ability to write and speak sentences to convey ever more complex ideas: from “I like you” to “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

We live in an age that suggests that the strictures of church distract one from the spiritual life–that church is all about rules, and spirituality is all about life and love.  That opinion is wrong.  Church–by which I mean the community of people rooted in a history of worshiping God–is indeed governed by rules, but so is language, and both take hard work to master.  But the mastery, the virtuosity, the poetry, is liberating in its beauty.  Immersion in the life of the church is an immersion in the life of Christ writ large over human history.  It demands careful learning.  For that reason, early Christians designated the period known as the catechumenate as a many-years-long initiation into the life of the church.  Learn the grammar of the church’s life, its wisdom went, and you will be free.  God is there in the unknowing; God is there in the learning; God is there in the deepening of wisdom, the poetry of the church’s life.

Jesuit colleges played five basketball games against each other this past weekend — four men’s games and one women’s.   The marquee game was Georgetown vs. Marquette, with the Hoyas winning 69-60.

Jesuit schools play each other nearly 100 times this season.  The Jesuit Basketball Spotlight program draws attention to these games as a way of promoting awareness of the Jesuit mission in higher education.  Here is a schedule of the games.  Here is an interview with William Kelly, SJ, chaplain of the Marquette men’s team.

If you don’t know Viktor Frankl’s work, read his book Man’s Search for Meaning–one of the most important books of the 20th century.  Below is a short video of a presentation he gave at a 1972 conference in Toronto, in which he offers a basic thesis about psychotherapy that applies more broadly to life: we must think of people as greater than they may actually be.

A parent does that for children.  And God does that for people, too–which is why we become most free when we aim for the high calling in Christ Jesus (cf. Philippians 3:14).

If you can’t see the video, click here.

Here are some links of interest for supporters of Ignatian ministries.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps has opened applications for the 2011-2012 volunteer term.

Loyola Press has started a series of articles to help Catholics understand the upcoming changes in the Roman missal.

Fordham has launched a web-based video series called Jesuits in Conversation.

Mark your calendars for the Ignatian spirituality conference in St. Louis, July 21-24.

Vincenzo Foppa, The Young Cicero Reading, c. 1464 (Wallace Collection, London)

Yesterday was the first day of classes at Boston College.  I love this time of year, and I love teaching at a Jesuit school (no matter what the ranking, which as we all should know should matter very little as long as we are working toward God’s greater glory).  I was reminded of this love when, in my freshman seminar in the Western Cultural Tradition (the first in a sequence in BC’s Honors Program), I began telling the story of the Jesuits’ entrance into education.  It was at Messina, Sicily– some citizens had petitioned Ignatius to start a school, and he sent ten of his best men (including Peter Canisius and Jeronimo Nadal).  That opportunity telescoped into a global mission.  (See some of the members of that worldwide family of schools here.)

One of the remarkable elements of Jesuit education was that it was built upon a bedrock of Renaissance humanism.  (See Ronald Modras’ fine book Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the Twenty-first Century.)  The basic theological principle was this: whatever helps us understand what it means to be human also helps us understand God.  It is a theology rooted in Ignatius’s experience of the spiritual exercises, inasmuch as the exercises are about coming to know the God who has created us out of love and who can be discerned in the entirety of creation– “God in all things.”

Ours is an age of fractiousness and balkanization.  Jesuit education has stood for some 450 years as a sign that all inquiry can be a holy pursuit, be it literary or scientific or philosophical or anything else.  If there is a “cardinal sin” in the enterprise of education, it is the unwillingness to raise or attempt to answer hard questions– a point underscored by the influential Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan.  The problem in colleges in universities today is not a lack of passion, or a lack of faith, or some kind of Marxist-Freudian-postcolonial-feminist-deconstructive conspiracy.  It is rather a lack of integration, of people no longer willing (or encouraged) to cross narrow disciplinary boundaries, to venture, missionary-like, to answer the basic questions: why are we here? how shall we live? what is love? why is there evil?

The Jesuits had the remarkable idea that Cicero could help us answer these questions, as could Homer, Sophocles, Horace, and Livy, along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul.  Theirs was and is an expansive view.  Today, we might add that the likes of Marx and Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche, Sartre and Beauvoir, Kong Zi (Confucius) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and many more.  I think of the language of the Vatican II document on world religions, Nostra Aetate, which caught up to the Jesuits’ forward thinking: “the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions” (paragraph 2).  Religion (Latin ligare, to bind) is that which has a hold on the way we look at the world, and so the religions that are Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, existentialism, feminism, Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on all can teach us something about what it means to be a human being.  And they are all welcome at my seminar table (though, admittedly, some I find more fruitful than others), as long as we all agree to deal with our questions in humility and honesty.

But there is one further point– a gift, really, that Jesuit schools need to offer to the world.  In a world where pluralism is the norm, words often are more heat than light, hatred erupts amidst the burning of sacred books, misunderstanding is preached for the sake of market share, and bias seethes underneath the veneer of civility, Jesuit schools can point to Jesus.  They can invite an encounter with Jesus in classes, in art, in theater, in service programs, in liturgies, in the examples of people energized by the spiritual exercises.  Far from a retreat into a sectarian enclave, the experience of the spiritual exercises can open one in friendship to a world where God breathes everywhere, with “warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Time magazine profiles University of Detroit Jesuit High School, the only Catholic college-prep school left in the city.  Last year, 99 percent of its graduates were accepted into college.  Most students volunteer some of their time in community projects.

Students are told hundreds of times during their education at U of D that they are training to become community leaders, what the Jesuits call “men for others.” The phrase comes up in nearly every conversation with current and former students. “It’s kinda corny,” says Keith Ellison, class of 1981 and a Democratic Congressman from Minnesota, “but that motto really made me think about service. And it set a course for what I’m doing with my life now.”

The Jesuit Virtual Learning Academy, an ambitious venture in online education, recently celebrated its first year of operation. The JVLA provides online for-credit courses, workshops, lectures and other learning opportunities for students at Jesuit high schools. It also offers faculty at those schools online professional development and collaboration opportunities.

Courses are those not usually offered as part of a traditional high school curriculum – such as a Chinese language course and certain advanced placement (AP) courses – and are primarily taught by faculty from Jesuit high schools. Course list here.