Written by Brett Salkeld, Ph.D., archdiocesan theologian, Archdiocese of Regina, SK, [email protected]
When I explain to folks that my work with Catholic school teachers is about helping us to approach every subject from a Catholic point of view, it is very common for the first objection to be something like, “But what about math?”
It is not hard to imagine a Catholic approach to literature or music or art or even history or social studies. In these disciplines, it is easy to just add some Catholic content. And, of course, we want our graduates to know something about their own incomparable artistic heritage, their own history and their Church’s social teaching. We absolutely should be teaching plenty of Catholic content across the curriculum.
This gets trickier, though, as we move toward math and the sciences. Of course, there is content here that we might call math or science adjacent. We can learn, for instance, about Catholic contributions to math or science. And if students learn that the Big Bang was first theorized by a Catholic priest, the notion that it undermines the Catholic doctrine of creation doesn’t pass the smell test.
But the truth of the Big Bang is independent of the religious identity of its originator, just as the truth of the Pythagorean theorem is independent of Pythagoras’ own religious ideas and identity. There might be Catholic mathematicians and scientists, but there are no Catholic mathematical equations or scientific theories.
And so, as important as it is for our students to learn all kinds of Catholic content, this does not constitute the heart of teaching every discipline from a Catholic point of view. If we limit our approach to adding Catholic content, we leave the world to define how we understand the disciplines and their value. Catholicism, then, becomes valuable insofar as contributes to things whose own value is articulated, explicitly or implicitly, from a secular point of view. Catholicism may show up in every class, but it will have the feel of decoration. In a Catholic school, it should be the foundation.
So, how can we approach all the content we teach, Catholic or not, from a Catholic point of view, from within what we might call a Catholic context? There is certainly plenty to say about each discipline and its place in a Catholic worldview, but space does not permit such detailed work here.
Instead, I want to propose that we “zoom out” and practice asking certain kinds of questions— big picture questions—about our subject matter. We need to train ourselves and our students to ask not just “What is the answer?” or even “How does this work?” but “What does this mean?” and “Why does this matter?” The content of math class might be, in a certain sense, neutral, but there are math questions that do not admit neutrality.
A first question you can ask about any discipline to try to articulate a Catholic context is “Why should I study this?” How you answer this question about any subject tells you and your students not just what you think about the subject, but what you think about the human person, their role in creation and the meaning of their life.
When a student asks, “Why should I study math?” they are really asking “What is my life all about and what does math have to do with that?” And so, any answer we give to that first question will be interpreted as an answer to the second. If you have not yet figured out an answer to why students should study your discipline that goes beyond basic economic concerns, you are not yet teaching it from a Catholic point of view.
After “Why should I study this?” there are other questions we can use as prompts to get us thinking about our discipline from a Catholic point of view. One of my favorites is “What does it mean that humans do this?” Humans are, after all, the only creatures we know that pursue the academic disciplines we teach in school.
So, if humans study health or phys. ed., we can reflect on embodiment from a Catholic point of view or the relationship between health and other goods. If humans do math or art, we can reflect on the relationship between the physical and the spiritual in those practices. Math abstracts from the physical to the spiritual, art moves in the other direction, literally incarnating the spiritual in the material. If humans study literature or history, we can consider what kinds of stories we tell and why.
Another angle is to ask what the subject itself teaches us about God and God’s relationship with creation. This may seem most obvious in science, where the beauty and order of God’s good creation is the direct object of our study. But we can think about language here too. The Bible’s preferred metaphor for God’s relationship to both creation (Genesis) and to Godself (the prologue to John’s Gospel) is speech, words, language. This matters for teaching English, but also in world languages. Think about Babel and Pentecost and what they teach about both diversity and communion.
And, of course, there are always ethical questions that can be approached in light of Church teaching. What is the difference between art and propaganda? How should we best organize social life and politics? What is the relationship between human capacity and human responsibility in science?
This list does not pretend to be exhaustive. There can be other prompting questions that would be generative as well. But when we learn to ask the following, we can approach every single discipline—and every topic within each discipline—from a Catholic point of view:
- Why do we study a given discipline?
- What does the practice of that discipline teach us about the human person?
- What can that discipline show us about God and God’s relationship to creation?
- What kinds of ethical issues does that discipline involve?
Come see Brett Salkeld, Ph.D. in April at NCEA 2025: Be the Light in Orlando, FL!
