Education

The Summer 2025 issue of Communio is dedicated to “Education.” Many of its essays are the maturation of insights first presented at a conference at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America during the fall of 2024, with the theme, “The Rediscovery of Reality: Education and the Catholic Imagination.” Prominent among the many questions considered by our authors are the importance of the “transcendent horizon” within which genuine education must take place, the relationship between the teacher and the student, the self-disclosure of being to the intellect through tangible and incarnate realities, and the maturation toward truth and freedom that education facilitates.

“It is precisely in being initiated into tradition that we are humanized, that what is most human in us—the capacity to see, attend, remember, understand, judge, and love—is cultivated and strengthened.”

“Education is the continuation in time of the mystery of our own birth. This means that we have been given the task of brining finite being to completion—ours included—through our knowing it, loving it, and unfolding the design and project it contains.”

“To see the form and contemplate it is to come to participate in the full form of reality more deeply and through the mediation of a concrete form that is never dissolved or left behind.”

“The most important thing we may learn from performing the signs of literature with our bodies and minds is not so much true ideas about reality, but habits of love.”

“A good education is a soul-shaking discovery of what was always-already there, always-already given—which is precisely what it means to receive the real as a gift.”

“The logic of the Incarnation demands not only that Mary and Joseph taught Jesus, but that he learned from them in such a way that heals, elevates, and perfects all familial learning.”

“As intermediary guide, the philosopher’s service of likening another to his own measure consists in giving himself in the inspired word whereby he gives heaven to the other and, within this, gives the other to heaven.”

“The radical hope that will allow us to move beyond cultural collapse will be that which, thanks to a sacramental imagination, anticipates the eschatological human fulfillment in new cultural practices.”