Dean's Message Spring 2025

Spring 2025

Jesuit schools have long embraced a “civic spirituality.” From the first Jesuit school in Messina in the sixteenth century to Boston College today, the focus on the liberal arts at the heart of Jesuit education has aimed to serve the greater glory of God by promoting the good of the city. In the words of the Jesuit historian John O’Malley, the civic spirituality animating the early Jesuit schools hoped to contribute to the moral, spiritual, and cultural upbuilding of the city, “especially by forming good citizens and leaders” for the civic community. Engaging the world and the fullness of what it is to be human through music and theatre and art, while asking enduring questions about how best to recognize and respect human dignity and promote the common good, are all part of the Jesuit formative educational mission that strives to form students who are well-prepared to build up the communities in which they live their lives.

This issue of Arts and Sciences invites you to explore how the mission of formative education animated by a civic spirituality is alive and well in the Morrissey College. Sofia Burke’s passion to integrate musical performance with her study of sociology, theology, and philosophy and her commitment to service, justice, and human rights embodies that civic spirituality. As she explains, in the classroom “[w]e talk about entering into communion with people, about humanizing the other, and about seeing human dignity in any scenario…. And when I’m performing, music is how I experience human dignity most strongly.” From Sofia’s performance at Pops on the Heights to the upcoming graduation of our first class of Human-Centered Engineering majors, and from the consumer protection policy implications of Prof. Michael Grubb’s research on overdraft alert systems to seniors in a new Capstone course coming to understand themselves as discerning pilgrims, the Morrissey College is striving to build up the moral, spiritual, and cultural good of the civic community. In the midst of all that we are living through in these tumultuous times, the Morrissey College will remain faithful to this distinctive mission, animated by a civic spirituality, of preparing students to enter into a humanizing communion with other people and to see human dignity in any scenario—the mission of forming good citizens and leaders for the city, for our nation, and for the world.

Gregory Kalscheur, S.J.
Dean, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences