What kind of life is worth living?
Wearing a black hoodie over a collarless clerical shirt, Father Jim Heft, S.M., poses that question in his Religion 250 class. He explores it in deep one-to-one conversations with students trying to figure out their calling. He ponders it during homilies and talks. The question weaves throughout much of his prolific writing — 14 books and 200 articles and book chapters, at last count.
For more than eight decades now, he’s wrestled with that question, even as he’s lived what I and many others would portray as a life chock-full of meaning.
I’m delighted Father Jim has returned “home” to the University of Dayton community as scholar-in-residence in the religious studies department after 17 years at the University of Southern California, where he founded and led the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.
“I’m 106, though I don’t look it,” he joked to a packed classroom of students.
They’ve enrolled in “What Kind of Life Is Worth Living?” — what the syllabus describes as an “unusual” course because it combines philosophy, theology, history, poetry and contemporary events. Father Jim expects his students to engage in class discussions in “an open and even vulnerable way” after turning in a single-spaced one-pager twice every week on the readings. He writes personal responses to every one of his 34 students as he grades their reports. He challenges them to think deeply and write and speak honestly.
He leads the way: “People say you can’t talk about religion in the public square. Yes, you can. Martin Luther King did,” he told the class, urging them to come together to help resolve complex issues like the widening gap between the rich and poor. “You can’t separate a sense of God without relationships to others. If you don’t have a connection to others, it’s a ticket to spiritual selfishness.”
No topic is off limits. In a recent class, students talked openly about the difference between loneliness and solitude, intimacy and their faith — and why some men find it so hard to talk about their feelings.
“The greatest self-help is other help,” he said at one point. “We find love through loving other people. Life is not a solo performance.”
A wonderfully pastoral presence, Father Jim is a gifted teacher, an approachable mentor, a brilliant scholar, and quite a conversationalist on just about any topic. He told me he reads two or three books at any given time and professes a fondness for biographies, like that of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, who studied the intersection between politics and religion. He shares a house with eight other Marianist brothers and priests in the student neighborhood, where they welcome students of all faiths for home-cooked meals and lively conversations.
While he’s held many UD titles over the years — student, University professor of faith and culture, provost, and chancellor — he’s a disciple of the Catholic intellectual tradition at heart. And his approach is deeply human.
“I try to keep things together that are best understood as being together, things like faith and reason, grace and freedom, the past and the present, dogmas and daily life, and Scripture and tradition. Put simply, I am a sort of both/and thinker and shy away from most sharply made distinctions,” he told a full Kennedy Union ballroom of friends and colleagues who gathered to honor him when he received the prestigious Marianist Award from UD this fall.
Not surprising words from a man who has taught interdisciplinary faculty seminars, fostered respectful dialogue across differences, championed interreligious understanding, and recently collaborated with six young adults, including some who no longer practice the faith, on a book in which he tries to make a credible case for why belonging to a healthy religious tradition, Catholicism, makes sense in the world we live in today. During the writing process, they told him what they thought of his thoughts, and he told them what he thought of theirs.
What kind of life is worth living?
As I listened to Father Jim talk, I realized one of the greatest lessons we can impart to our students may be this — be a both/and thinker. Perhaps that’s the answer to his persistent question. A life worth living is one that looks at the world with both a curious mind and an open heart.
(Photo by Sylvia Stahl '18)