ABSTRACT
I was born and grew up Roman Catholic, went to Catholic schools, and entered the seminary just after my eighteenth birthday. As part of my training, I studied philosophy and theology in a Jesuit university and Jesuit divinity school. During these years, professors and religious guides inculcated high intellectual and practical expectations regarding the Catholic intellectual life, theology included: intelligence, critical reading and reasoning, taking seriously faith and what we learn by study, allowing the implications of our study to influence how we live our lives. Presented to us in an ideal form, theologizing moves from what people said about God to knowledge of God and then to encounter with God. Good theology opens into prayer as personal practice and as a communal shared enterprise. Although this theology is itself a mode of religious practice, the path to wisdom, a kind of sādhana, being a Catholic theologian is not a privileged role possible only for a chosen few. Or, more directly, one might say that the chosen few are those who have not only been chosen but who have more basically chosen to involve themselves deeply and centrally in the Christian community in this manner.
