The "Gen X" Theologian Is Now At Fordham

Boston College, Santa Clara and now Fordham Bound

Author: Tom Beaudoin

This coming week, I make the transition to another Jesuit university. I taught at Boston College from 2001-2004, then moved to Santa Clara University where I have taught for the last four years. Now I am honored to be taking a position in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham University in New York City.

When I consider that I also spent five years at Boston College on my Ph.D. (1996-2001), I realize that I have become a stakeholder in Jesuit higher education, having now spent a dozen consecutive years in these fields. I did not set out to become so immersed in Jesuit higher education, but am deeply grateful that it has happened this way: an "Ignatian" way of life, a rich constellation of friendships, a considerable network of resources, and a cross-culturally shared set of interests and questions have irremediably become part of my identity as a result.

With anticipation, the next stage of my theological life approaches, and I look forward to being a New Yorker, a Fordham faculty member, and to understanding more comprehensively what this multi-decade immersion in Jesuit higher education means for my life as a lay, married Catholic and theologian. When I decided to follow the strange "call" into a preoccupation/obsession with theology and practice, I never expected that I would owe so much to Boston College, Santa Clara, and now Fordham, and through these institutions, to the Society of Jesus. Now will be seen how these gladsome immersions let on to theological education in a new, East Coast, key.

Tom Beaudoin
San Jose, California

Link to more Tom Beaudoin

The Gen X theologian - Tom Beaudoin By Arthur Jones

Some of Tom's quotes from the article.

"It wasn't Jesus I had a problem with. I've simply never heard a description of the church I could trust....."

"The church misses out not only on Christ present in contemporary music, but Christ present in a young woman who feels called to ordination. For our generation there's a deeper issue. Not taking popular culture seriously means the church is not taking the experience of our interior lives seriously,"

Talk That Diminishes Faith By Tom Beaudoin

October 22, 2004

An excerpt from his editorial.

"Now, I'm no Scrooge or atheist. The reasons I want Bush and Kerry to keep quiet about their faith are religious in nature. Why? It comes down to this: Today a public confession of faith by a presidential candidate is so deeply enmeshed in the calculating politics of manipulation that it simply should not be believed. Anyone who thinks a modern major-party candidate can talk about faith in a way that is not seen as angling for some political advantage, some movement in the polls, is asking the impossible."

The anti-Christian 'Passion of the Christ' By Tom Beaudoin

March 19, 2004

An excerpt.

"Gibson’s Jesus sheds more light on us than on the Passion. His Christ could only ascend to this heroic action antihero status in a culture where we neither encounter nor take responsibility for our own violence. If we Americans regularly saw, for example, the bloodied corpses of Iraqi women and children, or American soldiers’ mangled bodies in the papers and on television, this film would not have the same shocking and exclusivizing hold on our imaginations that it does. Brutal physical violence would be more immediately connected to real pain, to authentic devastation, and to our own complicit tolerance for a faraway war on the condition that we are not drafted and are not told how much of our tax money pays for each Iraqi civilian death."

An interview with Tom Beaudoin by Josh Spencer.

A small portion of the interview.

Question:

You say that the sensual sexuality of Gen X pop culture is a search for God -- how is it different from the sensuality the Scriptures speak of as drawing us away from God? Where is the line?

Answer:

Well, one would have to consider particular scriptural verses, first of all. I understand the desire for "a line," but there are very few such lines that hold up, I'm afraid, in Scripture or in life. That is not to say that there are none. But the basic question is what sorts of sexual experiences are more or less self-gift and self-transcending, and which are more or less self-absorbing or other-controlling? You'll get no simple "line" with those criteria, but you will get invited into what I think is a genuine adult

Dear Readers
I guess this is what passes for Ignatian these days.
J.F.