Jesuit Heritage

Seeking God in All Things

At the beginning of his religious conversion, Ignatius discovered that God worked with him through his deepest desires, and as his faith grew he recognized that God worked in all that was good in the world around him. This world, "charged with the grandeur of God,"5 is, as the current Jesuit Superior General writes, "the arena of God's presence and activity." Moreover, "we can find God if we approach the world with generous faith and a discerning spirit."6 Because Ignatius believed that we can confidently seek God in all peoples, he sent Jesuits around the world to spread the gospel. Jesuits remain the largest missionary order in the Catholic Church. Georgetown likewise educates students to respect cultural values and practices other than their own and to look beyond the comfortable confines of its campus to the wider world. Students at Georgetown have ample opportunities to study in other countries, and every day they move beyond Healy Gates to learn from and serve the citizens of Washington, D.C. Georgetown's location in the nation's capital offers a privileged opportunity to students. The political, economic, cultural, and intellectual facets of the city enable students to learn the lessons of history and the complexities of the contemporary world. When they participate in the life of this city, students embrace the "gritty reality of this world," so that in a very Ignatian way "they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering, and engage it constructively."7 Georgetown students also benefit from faculty members and classmates who represent the human experience in all its complex diversity. An education in the Ignatian tradition encourages students to recognize that everything good in the world can be celebrated as the locus of God's loving activity.

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