protagonists within one’s own reality

True for All the World
Judging the “Jena 6” case, an example of how to face reality without reducing everything to just another intellectual exercise

by Jack Greaney, Nick Krause, and Monica Liddi

One Friday night, as part of an effort to understand better the events that come into the sphere of our experience and judge these in light of the CL charism, the Washington, DC, GS community held a discussion of the recent “Jena 6” controversy involving racial discrimination at a high school in Jena, Louisiana. In order to learn more about the history of civil rights in the United States, Stephen Sanchez introduced a brief documentary film as a prelude to the discussion, in which it became clear that part of what motivated many early civil rights workers, like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, was the sense that a human being has an infinite value which transcends skin color or any other reductive categories, and that the education to defending this in light of racist policies in the U.S. had its provenance in many Christian churches throughout the South.
Subsequently, we worked on a flyer attempting to articulate a judgment on the now-famous “Jena 6” case, stressing the fact that the starting point for confronting evils like racism must come from the deeper understanding that what defines a human being is a relationship with the Infinite–even in the face of our sins and the crimes we commit.
The following week at St. John’s College High School, we began to hand out these flyers to teachers and friends. The flyer generated a lively dialogue among teachers and students alike. Ken Cooper, a religion teacher, told Dino D’Agata, the GS responsible at St. John’s, “This is the way we are supposed to educate.”
Dr. Ray Nighan, a specialist in English Renaissance literature and J.R.R. Tolkien, asked our permission to make copies of the flyer, because he felt it was perfect for what he was trying to get across in one of his classes.
One African-American friend of ours, Michael Jackson (no relation to the singer!), responded by saying, “Keep on writing things like this. I want to read more, because what you guys wrote was so true.”
T.J. Curry, another religion teacher, discussed the flyer with D’Agata and invited him to a class he was teaching on how we can discern the existence of God through the questions about meaning that are in us–almost a paraphrase of Fr. Giussani’s view that if the questions are there, they must posit the fact that Someone placed them in us.
On the whole, rather than dismiss the flyer, many saw that we were different from stereotypical teenagers in that we actually paid attention to our surroundings, to what was going on in the world around us, and looked for something in it.
This experience served as an affirmation that our judgment stood true in front of the world, that it was not just an intellectual exercise. When we take the risk of proposing the judgment we’ve learned in the School of Community to our teachers and friends, we see that the hypothesis Fr. Giussani gives us is true in front of everything. Moreover, it is true for all the world, as was witnessed by the fact that the flyer became a starting point for deeper relationships with our teachers and our friends. Their excitement and the correspondence they felt in reading our judgment is not a coincidence.