Title:The Last Word — Fall 2023

One of the things I love most about my job as vice president for Mission & Ministry is inviting students, faculty, and staff to consider the role of the imagination in living out the Jesuit values that animate the spirit of Georgetown. For it is through our imaginations that we come to understand our faith, our values, our world, and our place in it. The imagination is a central component of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. When, for instance, Ignatius invites an individual to begin their retreat, he counsels, “here it will be to imagine the great capacity and circuit of the world, in which there are so many and such different people.” He asks us to consider with awe and wonder the vastness of our world and our small share in it, placing us in a spiritual vision larger than just ourselves.

At my first audience with Pope Francis in 2013, the Pope noted that the key to Jesuit education is “nurturing a magnanimous heart and putting it at the service of one’s intellect, one’s imagination.” For if you have a small or cold heart, he said, so too will your imagination be cold and deformed, oblivious to the needs of the world. On the other hand, a big and gracious heart can help us imagine new possibilities for making our world a better place. I think this is what we offer students at Georgetown: the opportunity to shape and nurture their big hearts so that they will do wonders with their particular gifts and talents in serving the common good.

This past May, I had my second audience with Pope Francis. At this meeting, he imparted to a room full of writers, poets, and professors that “we need the genius of new language, powerful stories and images, writers, poets, and artists capable of proclaiming to the world the message of the Gospel.” This is also part of our mission at Georgetown. Whether in history or literature, science or technology, medicine or law, business or politics, we are here to share new ways of exploring the human condition, new ways to understand the issues of contemporary life, and new ways of responding to the hunger for spiritual and transcendent significance in the world.