Why Do It This Way?

Everything That Rises: the name and the sense of possibility it suggests are inspired by two great figures of the modern Catholic imagination.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – Jesuit priest, paleontologist, mystic – sought to reconcile creation history and the theory of evolution through the image of a spiral that turns upward toward an Omega Point where “everything that rises must converge.”   Flannery O'Connor – Catholic novelist – applied Teilhard’s expression as the title of a short story and made it an image of the conflict-ridden convergence of people of different races in the South during the civil rights era.  We take it to mean that in the fullness of time, seeming opposites will be reconciled and all good things will be found side by side.  That’s the promise of our Catholic and Jesuit heritage; that’s our everyday experience at Georgetown.  And that’s our aspiration here: to bring together our interests and convictions as they bear on current affairs, literature and the arts, Catholicism, spirituality, and the Jesuit adventure.