Raised by Jesuits: Reason, Conscience, and Complexity in the Modern World

Going to church can be a good thing and still be misunderstood. It’s easy to assume that regular church attendance places us on higher moral ground than those who don’t show up. We may never articulate it, but it lingers in our unconscious, reinforced by habit and familiarity. Jesuit spirituality has always pushed back against this instinct, not by dismissing religious practice, but by asking what it actually does to us. In essence: if churchgoing doesn’t make us more honest, more tolerant, and more aware of our own limits, then it hasn’t done its work. Ignatius Cared About Movement, Not Marks Ignatius of Loyola was far less concerned with outward conformity than with interior movement. The point was never to perform faith correctly, but to be changed by it. The Spiritual Exercises don’t reward us with certainty; they leave us aware of how often we mistake comfort for grace and routine for conversion. That awareness makes it difficult to look down on anyone else without first confr...

My childhood didn’t have many examples of healthy, open conflict. When conflict did surface, it came with drama. Raised voices. Hurt feelings. The sense that something had gone wrong and might not be repaired. What I did not see was disagreement handled calmly. So I grew up associating disagreement with failure. Moral failure. Relational failure. If people disagreed, someone must be wrong in a deeper way. Someone must be at fault. It took years to learn that disagreement is not a moral failing. The Presumption of Good Faith Jesuit formation helped clarify that, though not always directly. One of the quieter assumptions in Ignatian spirituality is what’s often called the Presupposition. Ignatius of Loyola writes that we ought to be “more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it.” In practice, that means assuming sincerity before malice. Thought before corruption. Humanity before threat. That assumption alone changes the shape of disagreement. If the p...