SynThink and the Jesuit / Ignatian Tradition

As expressed in its Mission Statement, Loyola Marymount University cultivates "the education of the whole person." SynThink makes its contribution by furthering a holistic education that helps each person become more wholly holy--holy in the encompassing sense that to see oneself as embedded in the universe's story is to honor the holiness of being human.

At Loyola Marymount (as well as nationally, not to mention in Rome) there is great concern for how to maintain or reinvent the university's Catholic and/or Jesuit/Marymount character as fewer religious-affiliated people shape its day to day life. SynThink walks a delicate line between shunning doctrinal affiliation or limitation of any kind, while also working in the Jesuit/Marymount spirit of dedication to issues of social justice, a commitment to education based in human values and respect for all creatures...well, most of them, anyways...and creating the climate of openness to other people and ideas which many of us treasure at our university.

St. Ignatius of Loyola was apparently an impetuous and enthusiastic man. Only such a person could have founded a radical religious order and, dissatisfied with the distribution and disciplining of knowledge available to him in his day, then decide to set in place a new educational model and mode of intellectual practice. Loyola's Spiritual Exercises exemplify the dedication and rigor with which he believes the mind's train of thought can be invested. It is in a playful spirit of revolt against contemporary configurations of knowledge that we reinvent the Spiritual Exercises as a "Meta/Physical Pragmatics." The Ignatian emphasis on integrating deep contemplation with assertive practice provides an antidote to both opportunistic amateurism and narrowminded specialization so readily found today. As opposed to such fluff or pedantics, Loyola espoused a positively visceral mode of thought: "It is not abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul," he writes at the opening of the Spiritual Exercises, "but to feel and taste the matters interiorly." Similarly, SynThink believes nothing less than the ingestion of new tools for thinking will make it possible to build a more integrated, fruitful niche for humanity in the cosmos.