Make it different.

The Idea of a Catholic University George Dennis O'Brien University of Chicago Press, $28, 239 pp.

George Dennis O'Brien is the former president of Bucknell University and president emeritus of the University of Rochester. He is also a philosopher. A graduate of primary and secondary Chicago Catholic schools, O'Brien never attended or worked in a Catholic university. But as a Catholic and a philosopher, he has given considerable thought to what should make a Catholic university distinctive. He is convinced that a truly Catholic university offers the promise of a more adequate and existential approach to "the real" than do secular universities. His argument pinpoints a number of the troublesome moral aspects of the modern research university, such as its inability to assert the relative value of different types of knowledge.

O'Brien believes that the ideological assumptions typical of today's research university are incompatible with the idea of a genuinely Catholic university. A Catholic university should be contrarian in the sense that it embraces "the real" in nonreductive ways, affirms the importance of participatory knowledge, does not hesitate to describe "the real" as revelatory, and sees in the story of Jesus who is "the Truth" a reality important for all humanity. The distinctive "Truth" that Catholic universities can explore is personal (not subjective), grounded in history, and illuminates at the deepest levels the meaning of life as a vocation, that is to say, life as something more than a job or even a successful career, but rather as what God wishes for us: life in abundance in Jesus. O'Brien does not believe that God calls anyone to be rich and powerful, which is precisely what most prominent universities prepare their students to be. Thus, few of the educational tasks of a Catholic university fit easily into the intellectual assumptions of the modern secular university.

In setting out the tasks of a university, O'Brien argues that we need to distinguish three understandings of truth: the scientific, the artistic, and the religious. These need not be opposed to each other, but unless they are distinguished, the scientific will marginalize the other two. Science brackets all factors that might compromise its objectivity: history, gender, race, religious belief, and time. This bracketing, most multiculturalists would argue, removes precisely what is important to understand. By contrast, Christianity locates truth historically and personally in Jesus Christ, who is "the Truth."

The appreciation of art, for example, requires a different understanding of truth than does science. Art is not just subjective; at its best, it aspires to be transcendent and universal. Art is at the same time historical and personal, originating as it does from a particular person in a particular time and place. Judging art requires that people compare it with works already judged to be great. O'Brien explains how over the past century the humanities and art have replaced the teaching of specific religious traditions and the work of moral formation in most major universities. O'Brien further argues that the Christian religion requires us to encounter "the real" in all its particularity and messiness. Typically, universities teach students how to abstract, make generalizations, and exercise control over "variables." Even art may be described as luminous and clear--a visible abstraction--but religion is all "inclusion and confusion." Whereas science strives at great cost to be neutral, and art to shape and control visual expressions, religion confronts a person with existential truth, an "Other," whom mere spectators and critics never encounter. At the heart of religious truth for the Christian is the person, Jesus, who claims to be "the Truth." How does a university bring its students to a greater capacity for encountering the "Other"? Not through abstractions and criticisms, but by reverent exposure to religious realities, texts, and the encouragement of practices that support commitment and personal knowledge.

What of the university's relationship to the church? O'Brien makes extensive use of Avery Dulles's five models of the church, finding all but one--the sacramental--flawed in relating adequately to the various truths the university seeks to explore. It is the sacramental model that allows a Catholic university to pursue both science and revelation.

Finally, O'Brien argues for the central importance of theology. Echoing Cardinal Newman, he shows how theology defends the university since it takes seriously "the real" and provides a basis for organizing the curriculum according to the importance of, and the proper relationship among, the disciplines. It defends faith by preventing it from being hardened into abstractions. A Catholic university should give priority of place in its curriculum to theology, but distinguish between fundamental and dogmatic theology. The former might take the form of an introductory course titled "Love, Commitment, and Decision." These are prerequisites for personal knowledge, best acquired when they are linked to service, and reflected upon in the context of faith. In more practical terms, O'Brien argues that a Catholic university can and must teach more than science and art. In attending to "the real," it should also provide students with an ordered hierarchy of study as opposed to the current indiscriminant credit system. To graduate, students now need only to accumulate a certain number of value-neutral units. This tendency to turn students into consumers in a kind of academic supermarket will be curbed only when it is made clear that not all areas of study are of equal value. Of extracurricular involvements, O'Brien favors robust and open debates among speakers invited to campus (with one speaker always representing positions from within Catholic intellectual traditions), though he believes a case can be made for banning speakers who advocate racial supremacy and "hate speech." Student organizations that advocate positions other than those of the church can be permitted insofar as they accept the ethic of dialogue essential to the work of any university.

O'Brien writes clearly, with timely internal summaries that prepare the next step in the argument. His clarifications about the different types of truth should liberate theologians and people in the arts and humanities from what Richard Rorty once referred to as "physics envy"--that is, a misplaced desire for empirical proof. And he has succeeded in placing theology (again, a discipline that deals not first with abstractions and truths locked into propositions but with Jesus) at the center of the Catholic university.

O'Brien might, in dialogue with theologians, find that his treatment of infallibility would benefit from greater attention to the historical conditioning of all--even infallible--statements (clearly affirmed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's statement, Mysterium ecclesiae). His treatment of the sacramental model of the church would be enriched by a more extended reflection on the nature of tradition as developed by Yves Congar and, more recently, Terrence Tilley and John Thiel. Indeed, Catholicism embodies a rich sacramental tradition, graced moments of encounter with another that can never be adequately expressed in propositions. At the same time, Catholicism is also a tradition of the existential Word and of his teachings. Finally, some of the contrasts O'Brien draws between the research university and the Catholic university are too sharp. Perhaps he is comparing the warts of the actual secular university, which he knows intimately, with the virtues of an ideal Catholic university. Perhaps the philosopher's tendency to deal with types rather than complex historical realities allows O'Brien to overstate differences.

Despite these limitations, O'Brien makes a very important contribution: a philosophically based and highly readable reflection on the nature and mission of a Catholic university. His analysis makes it clear that the Catholic university should attend, more than it has done, to its theologically grounded distinctiveness.

James L. Heft, S.M. (Marianist), is University Professor of Faith and Culture and chancellor at the University of Dayton. He is founding president of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.