The Work of a Catholic University in Local Culture

Lay communities around Catholic universities stand poised to be a source of renewal for an America which has lost its rootedness in local culture.

That’s a lot, so before we talk about that, let me take a step back and tell you a story about my friend Nathan and his wife’s ancestral rhubarb. He brought the rhubarb back from his in-laws, who live outside of one of Ohio’s biggest cities, in a brown Menards plastic bag earlier this spring. Although I know little about botany, and my knowledge of rhubarb at that point was limited to dessert-based encounters, the three thin red stalks which flowered out into pathetic-looking, wilty green leaves did not inspire my confidence in this thing’s survival.

Nate proudly informed me that this was an offshoot of a larger rhubarb plant which has been cultivated his wife Hannah’s family for at least four generations, passed down from her great-grandfather, who grew it in New York, to her grandmother, who cultivated it in Pennsylvania, to her mother, who cared for it in Ohio, to Hannah, who has now brought it to northern Maryland. He told me that even though the variety of rhubarb isn’t particularly unique, he and Hannah had long sought to transplant some of this family rhubarb to their backyard, where Nate in his spare time cultivates a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Nate teaches hard science at the local college, a small liberal-arts Catholic university of less than twenty-five hundred students where I also teach. He is the handiest man I’ve ever met. To prepare his garden for the rhubarb—which notoriously requires a lot of heat, sunshine, and space to spread out—Nate constructed a raised three-by-three-foot cinder-block planter, which he filled with bright red Penn channery silt topsoil common to our area. Nate planted his wife’s rhubarb into this cube of concrete and dirt with some hesitance, worried that the plant would not be able to adjust to the Maryland soil. But it did. Within two months, the rhubarb had flourished, filling all nine square feet of the planter. Still, Nate chose not to harvest any this year, as a transplant is supposed to acclimate to its new environs for a while before you take some for a crop. But if you really needed rhubarb on short notice, you could ask Nathan and Hannah for some and, knowing them, they’d probably give it to you.

A couple weeks later, I was eating dinner with them and their wonderful gaggle of children. Over a homemade pie (narrative neatness tempts me to say it was rhubarb, but it was huckleberry), our conversation turned from their trip to Ohio to one of our favorite authors: Wendell Berry. Berry, a Kentucky-based farmer, over several decades has written a vast corpus of essays, novels, and poems on the connection between local community and an adequate cosmology. Though Berry is non-denominationally Christian, his thought shares the incisive insight explicated by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, building on the encyclicals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI: the way we see the world fundamentally affects the way we think about others and vice-versa. Cosmology and anthropology are intertwined. If we see the dignity of our fellow human beings as malleable, as important only insofar as they are means to achieve our own whims and desires, we will treat the earth in the same way.

Berry’s thought, like Francis’s encyclicals, cannot be reduced to a single intuition or takeaway, but many of Berry’s writings explore the implications of this idea for a rightly ordered human society. Take, for example, Berry’s 1990 essay “The Work of Local Culture,” where he contends that a healthy community grows in the same way as healthy soil, via the accumulation of things that fall into it. Just as the flourishing earth forms new topsoil, new humus, out of the things it naturally collects, like plant detritus, empty nutshells, and animal droppings, so too do flourishing communities form new members, new human beings, out of the things they naturally collect, like memories, stories passed down from parent to child, and intergenerational knowledge of and fidelity to a particular place. This force that the soil and local culture share is centripetal—it draws all things into itself. For Berry, a healthy community must be a local community, insured by “trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help” between its members, requiring a community scaled so that all its members know one another. This community is shaped by those within it, not by external forces.

The community’s continued life occurs via a process of departure and return of its members, akin to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” Before modernity, communities maintained themselves via generational succession. Berry points to Jacob, the Prodigal Son, and Odysseus as proof of this universal human desire. In these stories, the protagonist rebels, leaves, and wanders before returning home to his family, changed and ready to stay. But in modernity, the cycle of departure and return is broken halfway through. Children no longer return home when they depart, but instead choose to leave, lured away by the cities and their promise of greater material wealth.

Children find wealth more appealing than the richness of their local communities because of education, especially college education, which teaches them that their destiny “is not to succeed [their] parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession.” Educators feed children a narrative in which parents are painted as a “bad influence,” holding the children back from their full potential. Paradoxically, this narrative also appeals to parents: what father or mother wouldn’t want their child to live a better life than they did? The problem, as Berry observes, is that many educators incorrectly identify the common good parents should desire for their children. Instead of seeking the common goods of “cultural tradition” and dedication to place, universities instruct their students that the goods of accumulating material wealth, professionalism, and “originality” are better. “The new norm,” says Berry, “according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents.” This often-permanent arrested development results in local cultures falling apart, as its next generations move away to the cities for better jobs.

“What would he say about us?” Hannah’s question cut like a spoon through pie crust and huckleberry. Their family trip back home to Ohio had encouraged Hannah to scrutinize Berry more closely. “What would he say about me and Nate, who have left home to get educated and have stayed away, whether by choice or circumstance or both?”

In order to answer these questions, I need to tell you a little bit more about Nate. Like the rhubarb, he also comes from Ohio, specifically from a once-thriving industrial city that as of a few years ago ranked as one of the poorest cities in America. Nate’s story is his to tell, and you deserve to hear it from him, so I will divulge only what he says when his students ask: he grew up in poverty, had to drop out of state college his first semester on his first attempt at an undergraduate degree because of instability in his finances and home life, and at one point relied on scavenging from dumpsters for his daily bread.

At his lowest point, Nate encountered the Catholic faith. Spurred by the truths of Catholicism and the authority of the Church fathers, he started down the long, hard road to conversion. He met a young woman who would become his future wife, a strong Catholic from a tight-knit homeschooling family who walked with him along the path to holiness. Nate finished college with a degree in education which required him to teach in some of the nation’s poorest inner-city high schools. (This experience is still reflected in his undergraduate teaching today; Nathan is well-known among the student body for his ability to reach any student, no matter their social, economic, or educational backgrounds.) He married Hannah and decided to return to school for a doctorate, which he received from a top institution.

When Nate received his PhD four years ago, his job prospects were bountiful. He could easily have taken one of many industry or government jobs for scientists in his field; had he done so, he would now be easily earning over twice his terminal career salary in higher education. Instead, he chose to take a teaching-heavy tenure-track professorship at a small Catholic university in The Middle of Nowhere, Maryland, which, at the time, was under national scrutiny and in the midst of legal scandal. Several people told Nate he was insane for choosing this school. But he did, because he felt God calling him to help there.

Nathan moved his growing family to Maryland, hundreds of miles away from where he grew up in Ohio. In the intervening years, he has made a lasting mark in the school’s community. He has been instrumental in the conversion of several students and in the softening of hardened hearts towards the faith in dozens of others—not because he proselytizes, but because his compassionate witness and understanding of how the Truth is revealed in science encourage the students to investigate Catholicism more carefully.

But it is Nate’s role in the local community that I find most impressive. His household is regularly packed to the gills with people coming over for post-Sunday Mass brunch. These gatherings include faculty colleagues and their families, fellow parishioners, neighbors, and community members. When you need help building a fence, tearing out a stump, slaughtering chickens, fixing a sink, or moving to a new house, Nate is the guy to call. In my own life, Nate was one of the first people to welcome me into the community. He taught me how to ride a bike. When a grant to complete my graduate studies abroad was delayed for a year because of the pandemic and I couldn’t find anywhere to live, he and his family welcomed me and gave me a place to stay. Nathan is one of the most Christ-like men I know.

But, according to “The Work of Local Culture,” Nathan is a failure. He has no plans to return to the city where he grew up. He has no desire for his children to return to this place where he was born to carry on a family legacy. Hannah too has failed—rather than staying near her family in Ohio, she chose to obey the precepts laid out in the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and followed her husband. Despite their joint commitment to building up the community of the place where they are and where they plan to be, potentially for the rest of their lives, if we take Berry’s arguments inflexibly, neither have carried out the work of local culture.

This isn’t peculiar to Nathan and Hannah. Many of the most committed members of the community which has grown around the university would similarly be considered failures to our original local cultures. We hail from northern Virginia, Tennessee, Minnesota, southern Italy, and beyond. Though many of us are college teachers, others are farmers, retirees, homeschooling parents, or office workers. For most of us, what drew us here was the Catholic mission of the university. We answered the Church’s call “to be present, as signs of courage and intellectual creativity, in the privileged places of culture, that is, the world of education—school and university,” as John Paul II says in Christifideles Laici and repeats in Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Others initially would have preferred to teach at an institution with more prestige or closer to the comforts of city life, but came here because it was the only place they were able to find a permanent or semi-permanent job. Others ended up here purely by accident.

In all cases, what has kept these people here is the community. I recently asked Nate what he would do if he were offered a job at his alma mater, where he would have a better lab, more funding, a bigger research group, a six-figure salary, and much closer proximity to family. He told me, to my surprise, that he’d already floated that hypothetical to Hannah and that both had decided that they would stay right where they are. They had been given a community of very good, very smart people, all of whom were seeking to follow Christ and to lift each other up on the path to sainthood, a treasure beyond price or sum celebrated in Sirach’s sixth chapter. When I have spoken to others in the community here, they have unknowingly echoed Nate. Many have received more lucrative job offers or have had the opportunity to move closer to where they were born but have chosen to stay because of the friendships they have made here.

The choices of Nate, Hannah, and our community expose a tension for the Church’s lay university teachers between the necessity of remaining faithful to local culture and the need to follow the call of Catholic higher education. On the one hand, many (myself included) empathize with Berry’s point. Local communities in America are dying out, a process accelerated by two years of societal isolation. We have a responsibility to the places that formed us; we cannot simply leave them behind, or abandon the first community in which we participated, our parents’ families. Similarly, it seems impractical to suggest that you need to work at a Catholic university to find a good Catholic community and naïve to rely on a community centered around something as volatile as religious higher education.

On the other hand, if we take John Paul II’s argument in Ex Corde seriously that the “future of Catholic Universities depends to a great extent on the competent and dedicated service of lay Catholics,” it is almost impossible to remain in the community you were born in and pursue a life of service in Catholic higher education unless you grew up in a university town and are lucky enough to get a job there after graduate school. Which local culture, then, takes higher priority? The one that you were born into or the one that you find yourself in?

Students complicate this problem even further. Over the past few years, I’ve encountered many freshmen who come from situations challenging Berry’s appeal for children to return home. Last year I taught a student, John, who came from a city in West Virginia infamous for being the opiate capital of the state. John was a bright African-American student who frequently participated in class. However, I noticed changes in his behavior after breaks or certain weekends—he would become withdrawn or show up hungover to class or would simply not come to class at all. When I confronted him about this, he revealed that he had been back home. He told me that whenever he went back to West Virginia, he felt himself become a totally different person, drawn into conflicts with his parents or habits with his old friends that he left behind when he came to college. He dreaded having to return home; at home, he felt tempted not to come back to school.

I never undermined John’s parents in our conversations—Berry is right that teachers have a responsibility, although they act in loco parentis, to not misuse their authority by driving a wedge between parents and children—but I would never, in good conscience, recommend that John return to his hometown after college, at least not without far more spiritual growth than a person can undergo in four years. How do we square the need for local cultures with the fact that, for many young people, their local cultures are part of what’s keeping them away from God?

The solution to reconciling Berry’s critiques and the demands of Catholic colleges is found in Nathan and Hannah’s rhubarb. I, Nate, Hannah, and all the members of the community we’ve been blessed with around the university are transplants. We have been uprooted from the culture in which we were originally planted and brought by God to new soil. To be in this new soil requires us to root ourselves in a new place, the place where we are, not the place where we have been. Like all works of love, this requires fidelity, a chosen commitment frequently renewed to the place and people that surround us.

Also like the rhubarb, we bring history and traditions with us. Nathan and Hannah’s children will grow up learning the history of this plant, where it came from, its ties to their family, and in so doing they will learn about their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. They will know that, like their family, this living thing is from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, but it now flourishes in Maryland. The rhubarb would not reject its new place out of a sense of loyalty to the old. That would cause it to wither and die, which would do no good to the soil that formed it and the human hands that cared for it. Instead, it continues—like all natural, God-given, gratuitous things—to live. As Nate put it when I showed him the first draft of this piece, Christ is the vine and we are the branches. Some branches will stay near their roots, while others will push outwards, directed by the Divine Steward who tends to us as a farmer does his beloved crops.

Not all transplants are successful. Unlike the rhubarb, human beings must choose to follow the will of God in moving from one place to another. Berry is right that uprooting yourself from a place to follow a desire for material wealth is foolish. We must seek, instead, places with communities that exert a healthy centripetal force. The communities Berry celebrates, in his account of the way things used to be, had at their center love, which, like gravity, drew those who left temporarily back to itself. In the modern world, there are few communities like this, bound together by mutual trust and affection. The destruction of small-town America over the course of the twentieth century suggests that for a community to survive economic and social dissolution, it must be rooted in a love which goes beyond civic institutions or a general sense of neighborly goodwill. It must be rooted in a transcendent love.

In this light, it makes sense that healthy and lasting local cultures would grow up around Catholic universities, which seek the truth which is indistinguishable from love. At the heart of a flourishing local culture around Catholic universities, there are the twin centers of the church and the classroom, both of which seek the same divine end. Choosing to follow a vocation to teach at a Catholic institution does not betray your heritage; instead, it is an invitation to help build up a new local culture, outside of the university but always in its orbit. To ask which local culture is more important, where you were or where you are, is to fall into the very supercessionary mindset Berry critiques. The call to holiness is the call to live a Christ-like life in the present time and place. You also don’t need to work at the university to be a part of this community. The love around which the community revolves is not an institutional commitment but the love which, to paraphrase Dante, moves the sun and the other stars.

Note that I say that local culture springs up “around universities” and not “in universities.” Even the best colleges are forced to walk the line between being a community of learners and being an employer. As Josef Pieper observed, the search for truth is an inherently atransactional action, an act of otium (leisure) and not neg-otium (work). A healthy local culture, one centered around the search for truth, cannot be in any way transactional. This is why we teachers talk about classroom communities (as stewarding a group of students towards a better understanding of the truth is not, properly understood, transactional), of student communities (as seeking the truth through the examples and friendships of others is not, properly understood, transactional), but never of administrative communities. At the heart of every modern university is an administration which essentially sees the institution as a business, an economic and transactional venture. This is not necessarily a bad thing—especially if a college has an administration that recognizes that the priorities of the school lie primarily in the pursuit of something that cannot be commodified.

It is admittedly a perilous prospect to tie so much of your life to higher education, especially Catholic higher education, which neither pays well nor is free from the cultural and economic crises affecting all academia. Then again, the Christian life has never been free from peril. This will likely not satisfy any on the fence about the long-time financial prudence of a career in higher education and, as a graduate student and adjunct professor who would be making more money from unemployment than from any of my current academic ventures, I empathize. I will elide, however, the hydra-headed discourse surrounding Catholic social teaching’s demands on how much the Church’s universities should be paying the teachers who steward them and the anthropological problems with using at-will faculty. Instead, I will say only this: even at the richest institutions, college teachers of the Catholic intellectual tradition could make more money elsewhere or doing something else. Many of the people in my community have still chosen this life of hardship because they feel, to quote Berry’s essay, “they [have] everything but money.” This life is not for everyone, but for those who are called to it, it is a rich life indeed.

What then should Catholic universities do to enhance the vital, human local cultures which surround and sustain them? I have three suggestions. First, Catholic institutions should hire those who have a commitment to place. As part of the application process, prospective teachers, administrators, and staff should propose a way they will contribute to the immediate local community outside of the university. This will force applicants to consider what they are bringing to this community, to research the place where they plan to live, and to reach out to people who are already living there.

Second, Catholic institutions should incentivize alumni to return to the local community. Some colleges are already doing this by giving alumni applicants for university positions preferential hiring treatment. If students like John who should not immediately return to their original communities are given the opportunity to continue living in a place where they are able to grow spiritually and communally, their lives will flourish. (When I’ve proposed this idea in the past, I’ve received the critique that institutions would gain reputations for being too “parochial.” Parochiality is precisely what we should be trying to achieve.)

Third, Catholic institutions should in all things remember the transcendent core of their mission. There is no faster way to destroy a local culture than to remove its centripetal force. Neither money, nor prestige, nor society’s praise will keep a place of higher learning or its community alive. Only the truth can do that.

If Catholic institutions remain faithful to their mission, they will become a source of cultural and communal renewal. It is well known that in the wake of the Roman empire’s decline, monasteries became bastions of learning dedicated to the preservation of truth, including the retention of human knowledge. Often overlooked, however, are the towns and communities that sprang up around monasteries. These places rarely became prominent cities—Citeaux and Cassino were never as big as Paris or Rome—but in this lack of prominence grew local cultures that sustained the rebuilding of western culture. We can learn something from this model and from the natural, gratuitous capacity of transplants to blossom and prosper, no matter how humble the garden, given the right soil.