The DARPA Investment Strategy in Quantitative NDE

Some of the contributions that quantitative NDE may make in support of the mission of the Department of Defense are presented. In addition, the general DARPA investment criteria is reviewed along with the current and possible future directions of the DARPA NDE program

Mission in Companionship: Of Jesuit Community and Communion

Jesuit communities come out of a historical paradox, one which has been with the Society since its beginnings and which has marked almost every subsequent attempt to form and foster a local community: The order came into being at the very moment when its members were to separate. Jesuits emerged as Ignatius\u27 early companions were dispersed forever into missions. The Society of Jesus became the permanent community of men who would never be together again

The Catholic University and the Promise Inherent in its Identity

On the noon of September 16, 1992, Boston College, led by its president, was at prayer. The Mass of the Holy Spirit, celebrated on the steps of the O\u27Neill Library, was not a time for the president to address the faculty nor for administrators to make welcome incoming students nor for instructors to inaugurate their classes in semester requirements and contents. This had all been done-at faculty convocation, over many meetings, and in initial classes. Now this complex of president and administrators and students and doctoral candidates and faculty-this university-turned formally and explicitly as a university to address God. The prayers and readings that floated on the air of that brilliant autumn afternoon spoke repeatedly of the influence that is the heart of academic inquiry and learning, the Spirit of Truth; and the Scriptures gave focus to the petitions threading their way through the liturgy: that the Spirit of Truth would descend upon this university over the coming year, that this Spirit would mark its teaching, guide its inquiry and research, and permeate its collective life as a colle9ium, that this university as a Catholic university would realize the promise of the gospel: the Spirit of Truth who will guide us to all truth (see John 16: 13). That the Mass of the Holy Spirit was being celebrated indicated a Catholic university, conscious of its past and faithful to its identity, possessed of a conviction that the religious and the academic belong in concert, that their union is to be celebrated in beauty and worship; that classes remained in session, that sundry students made their way indifferently through the congregation to reach the library, and that the university community attended only in the middle hundreds, bespoke a detached disinterest and problems unresolved but pervasive in Catholic universities throughout the nation. I found myself wondering during the liturgy: What is this upon which we invoke the unspeakable mystery of God? What are we who are at prayer? The question did not seem a distraction. It seemed pressing, a question upon which we might well have meditated as we worshiped as a university. For many voices state with increasing urgency that the Catholic university will disappear; that it is already disappearing as a specific reality in American higher education; that the Catholic university will repeat the secularizing history of so many of the very great universities in the United States; that this evanescence of its religious character is inevitable, disclosing gradually the unfaced irrelevance of the religious to the intellectual; that as the university becomes more authentic, more academically distinguished, its Catholic character will proportionately dissipate and disappear. Only last February in a widely remarked article, David R. Carlin wrote that the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities has since the 1960s grown increasingly tenuous ... Catholic colleges seem to be traveling the same road many Protestant colleges journeyed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-a road leading to complete secularization, to complete loss of religious identity. 2 Many of the greatest universities in the United States and Europe have already written such a history of religious atrophy. One can wander about their campuses and remark the chapels and statues, the maxims on the gates or the portraits on the walls, and confront symbols that speak of a former religious intensity now long since dead. There one can paraphrase something of the cultural diagnosis of Friedrich Nietzsche: What are these universities now if not the tombs of God-monuments to the death of God within academic culture? 3 It would be unwarranted to imagine that we are not liable to the same influences, naive to believe that we cannot repeat their history. Catholic universities have already repeated much in the history of their secularized academic peers

The Charism and Identity of Religious Life

The limitations imposed by the nature of this conference do not allow for anything more than a fragmentary set of reflections upon a topic of such critical importance to the understanding of religious life. This paper, then, can do no more than attempt three of the many tasks which fall under so general a title: ( I) To sketch something of the development of the magisterium \u27s teaching on this subject; (2) to indicate some of the problems which this teaching entails; and (3) to suggest a manner in which these problems might be understood and moved towards resolution. The paper proposes the following three theses: ( I) The fundamental identity of religious life must be grasped in terms of charism; (2) This understanding of religious life as charismatic raises profound problems that touch every aspect of its reality; (3) The office of the hierarchy is to discern an authentic charism from its counterfeit, while the exercise of this office is subject to the very real danger that excessive legalism will quench the Spirit

Discernment of Spirits

The capacity for the discernment of spirits responds to a profound expectation and a pervasive temptation within Christianity. All human beings who search for God want God to guide their lives, and Christians have been taught normatively to expect to be guided by the Spirit (Gal 5: 18; Rom 8: 14)

The Confirmation of Promise: A Letter to George Ganss

Dear George: Peace! Your request for my impressions on the 32nd General Congregation of the Society is here on my desk. A letter is a better form for my remarks. It indicates their character: personal, impressionistic, tentative, and somewhat hesitant. They come out of my random experiences and out of my own attempts to read these experiences. They draw into a unity my personal interpretation of the General Congregation, especially what it might mean for the Society within the United States. They are tentative because they possess all of the shaky particularity of the prudential interpretation, that amassing of so many singulars, of so many hunches and guesses and half-understood conversations, that any claim to certitude would be exaggeration. They are hesitant because the winter of 1974-1975 remains a very recent memory, and more time is demanded for that definitive judgment of value which only the lived reaction of the Society can furnish. And so, my friend, let me write a public letter to you, the director of the Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality—this letter to say something about the meaning of the Thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus

The Study of Religion and the Rise of Atheism: Conflict or Confirmation?

\u27Religion\u27 and \u27theology\u27 are not terms with fixed meanings and invariant applications. They are rather copies or commonplaces - not in the sense of the familiar and the trite, but in the classical sense of linguistic variables, terms ambiguous and capacious enough to house a vast diversity of meanings, arguments, and referents.1 The interconnection of such topics constitutes neither a determined problem nor an exact proposition. It constitutes what John Dewey called \u27a problematic situation\u27, an indeterminate area out of which problems and their resolutions can emerge only if these ambiguous terms are given specific meanings and definite applications within particular inquiries. 2 Recognising the ambiguity of both \u27religion\u27 and \u27theology\u27, this paper proposes to obtain a greater purchase on the problematic situation they together delimit, first, by offering a few precisions on \u27religion\u27 as its meaning developed through history co reach its generic consensus in late modernity; and then, by exploring how the scientific study of religion, so understood, came to engage one of the arguments of modern theology: the existence or non-existence of God