By Vanessa Rotondo
I spent the first half of January 2020 in San Salvador, El Salvador, accompanying a group of Fordham University undergraduates on an immersion project. We planned to learn about the forces that drive transnational migration and hoped to draw inspiration from the courageous legacy of the Salvadoran Jesuits and their co-workers martyred in 1989. But the trip brought an unexpected takeaway for these students: the shared recognition that Jesuit education is far more intellectually demanding, spiritually challenging, and personally satisfying than they had previously suspected.
When we returned to New York, the students began to process their San Salvador experience with the help of Jesuit pedagogy and Ignatian spirituality, endeavoring to concretize what they could do to be agents of change in communities at home. As I watched them undertake these reflections, I saw them first struggling with, then embracing a fluid and dynamic world that ultimately eluded their control, but one that, nevertheless, required them to assume collective responsibility for shaping a more just and humane future.
I recognized in the dynamic of their collective struggle and acceptance that they were undergoing an experience of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity.” In liquid modernity, which is arguably the context in which we all find ourselves today, people tend to approach the world with profound skepticism, and instead of just accepting things as they are, they consistently question why and how things became this way. At the same time, individuals, now more than ever, feel a need for authenticity, value, and purpose in their lives. The result of this experience can be an uncomfortable tension between an external world not to be trusted and an internal need to find meaning and security within that world. Far too often, this tension is left unresolved and ends up promoting an overwhelming experience of alienation and fragmentation.
But these students together transcended this uncomfortable tension--and bypassed the fate of disaffection--with the help of Jesuit pedagogy and Ignatian spirituality. Together, they contemplated the unjust and violent realities of broken social and political structures at home and abroad. Together, they applied an array of critical lenses to understand these realities. Finally, together, rather than being overwhelmed by the process of contemplating and critiquing, they committed themselves to taking responsibility not only for intellectually deconstructing and rebuilding these realities, but really doing so--for and with others.
The most notable thing about these students transcending the pitfalls of alienation and fragmentation is that they did so within a community.
We live in a world where the techno economy drives impermanence and fluidity, where individuals define and redefine themselves daily--a world where, by design, no center is meant to hold, no values meant to stand firm, no commitments meant to remain permanent.
Fordham University participants pose in front of a mural during their immersion trip. Photo courtesy of Fordham University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.
And yet these students learned that, despite the unquestionable fluidity of their world, relationships do matter; despite the reasonable temptation to cynicism, things can change for the better; despite the satisfactions of finding some semblance of meaning alone, committing to a future for and with others is a more precious and resilient gift. These students recognized that they alone do not have the answers. Rather, they together committed to learning the truth for the common good, holding one another accountable for being meaningful contributors to society.
Reflecting after our visit to the University of Central America in San Salvador, where the martyrs of 1989 gave their lives, one student mentioned how they had previously seen their education as pragmatic and transactional, but now recognized it as a conduit for critical reflection that could induce both internal change and external action. The context of El Salvador and the model of the Jesuit martyrs had become a spur to think differently about the intellectual life, for the sake of others and for the sake of a common good.
Jesuit pedagogy and Ignatian spirituality enabled them to understand that making meaning in a fluid context requires transcending oneself, living in communion and community--and that this way of living can provide a center, a ground of meaning in a fluid world that, by design, too frequently fails to provide these things.
Vanessa G. Rotondo is assistant director of immersions and student engagement at Fordham University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of the University of San Francisco.