Michael Naughton

Michael Naughton, PhD, in his chapter Crisis Recognition, Tradition Comprehension, and Institutional Innovation, examines the 2,000-year trajectory of Catholic education, highlighting how its leaders—monks, priests, religious, and laypeople—have historically navigated various crises by drawing upon their profound convictions. Throughout history, these crises have sometimes led to the creation of new institutions or the adaptation of existing ones to meet contemporary needs. This dynamic continues today, underscoring the need for leaders within Catholic educational institutions who can recognize current crises, deeply understand the traditions upon which they stand, and prudently innovate to enhance institutional effectiveness. Naughton articulates a tripartite model essential for contemporary leaders in Catholic education: crisis recognition, tradition comprehension, and institutional innovation. While there is widespread consensus about the existence of an educational crisis, the challenge lies in achieving a common understanding of its nature and devising effective responses. This chapter posits that the key to addressing our current educational crisis hinges on our perception of the history of Catholic education. By thoroughly understanding our educational narrative and traditions, we gain the necessary insights to more clearly identify the nature of the current crisis, which in turn guides us toward the wisdom required to innovate and develop new forms capable of addressing these challenges effectively.

RECOVERING PRACTICAL WISDOM THROUGH THE INTEGRATION OF LIBERAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION The Problem: The Disordered Relationship between Liberal and Professional Education Of all the virtues that we hope to find in a university-educated person, wisdom should stand out as pre-eminent: that noble quality whereby knowledge and information are ordered to the good of the whole. Law was examined not as a specialty unrelated to inquiries of a liberal education, but as a discipline that related to the nature of the human person and society, to virtue and in particular justice, to the meaning of civil and ecclesial authority, to the social nature and private ownership of land and property, and others. The same is true of political scientists and foreign policy experts who have failed to take seriously an understanding of religion to evaluate developments in the Middle East or in Africa, a failure with enormous and continuing consequences for a right understanding of cultural and political realities in those regions of the world.7 And more recently, universities increasingly speak about the importance of social justice as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), but little about wisdom. Universities are subject to what G. K. Chesterton calls modernity's temptation of "wild and wasted virtues": The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. [...]some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.9 For Chesterton and the Greco/Roman and Christian traditions, there is a unity to the virtues, and our temptation is that we isolate certain virtues where they become unhinged from other virtues and a larger understanding of the human person.

As with any proposal for institutional reform, and especially one that has gained so much ground in such a short amount of time, this paper asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is good for corporations. Are businesses stronger with DEI practices and ideas or weaker? We believe that the DEI movement is asking the right questions: How do we create more just and equitable institutions? The challenge, however, is whether this movement is giving the right answers to such questions. The main premise of our paper is that without deeper principles than DEI itself, these qualities of corporate life will be misunderstood, misused, and disordered in our increasingly fragmented and politicized culture. We propose in this essay that "subsidiarity" serves as one of those deeper principles that can order and enrich our understanding of DEI. It serves as a gift principle that begins to reveal the deepest nature of our work, namely, that our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others.

The specific concern in What We Hold in Trust comes to this: the Catholic university that sees its principal purpose in terms of the active life, of career, and of changing the world, undermines the contemplative and more deep-rooted purpose of the university. If a university adopts the language of technical and social change as its main and exclusive purpose, it will weaken the deeper roots of the university's liberal arts and Catholic mission. The language of the activist, of changing the world through social justice, equality and inclusion, or of the technician through market-oriented incentives, plays an important role in university life. We need to change the world for the better and universities play an important role, but both the activist and technician will be co-opted by our age of hyper-activity and technocratic organizations if there is not first a contemplative outlook on the world that receives reality rather than constructs it. To address this need for roots What We Hold in Trust unfolds in four chapters that will demonstrate how essential it is for the faculty, administrators, and trustees of Catholic universities to think philosophically and theologically (Chapter One), historically (Chapter Two) and institutionally (Chapters Three and Four). What we desperately need today are leaders in Catholic universities who understand the roots of the institutions they serve, who can wisely order the goods of the university, who know what is primary and what is secondary, and who can distinguish fads and slogans from authentic reform. We need leaders who are in touch with their history and have a love for tradition, and in particular for the Catholic tradition. Without this vision, our universities may grow in size, but shrink in purpose. They may be richer but not wiser.

In this paper, we propose that unreflective use of the term social entrepreneurship may perpetuate the idea that “entrepreneurship” is largely a financial and private reality and that this view of entrepreneurship will eventually trivialize or perhaps undermine the important benefits and the real intentions behind the social entrepreneurship movement. We believe that Catholic Social Teaching can shed important light on this dilemma by emphasizing three specific strategies inherent to entrepreneurship when assessing the moral contribution of the firm. As a result, we argue for the principles of good goods, good work and good wealth as an alternative framework for all good entrepreneurial venture.

Integral ecology is an increasingly important term in Catholic social teaching. This paper brings this term in relation to business drawing upon the integral relationship between human and natural ecology. Pope Francis and his two predecessors believe that the current ecological conversation can increase our sensitivity to our impact on the natural environment as well as help us to rediscover the moral and spiritual consciousness of humannature and development that has been weakened and disordered in the wider culture. An integral ecology can enlarge our notion of the good, especially the good in business. Without the cultural and environmental insights from an integral ecology that has the capacity to provide deep moral and spiritual roots, business will always be prone to see itself within its own autonomous and utilitarian sphere failing to connect to the natural and human realities in which it is embedded.