The specific concern in What We Hold in Trust comes to this: the Catholic university that sees its principal purpose in terms of the active life, of career, and of changing the world, undermines the contemplative and more deep-rooted purpose of the university. If a university adopts the language of technical and social change as its main and exclusive purpose, it will weaken the deeper roots of the university's liberal arts and Catholic mission. The language of the activist, of changing the world through social justice, equality and inclusion, or of the technician through market-oriented incentives, plays an important role in university life. We need to change the world for the better and universities play an important role, but both the activist and technician will be co-opted by our age of hyper-activity and technocratic organizations if there is not first a contemplative outlook on the world that receives reality rather than constructs it. To address this need for roots What We Hold in Trust unfolds in four chapters that will demonstrate how essential it is for the faculty, administrators, and trustees of Catholic universities to think philosophically and theologically (Chapter One), historically (Chapter Two) and institutionally (Chapters Three and Four). What we desperately need today are leaders in Catholic universities who understand the roots of the institutions they serve, who can wisely order the goods of the university, who know what is primary and what is secondary, and who can distinguish fads and slogans from authentic reform. We need leaders who are in touch with their history and have a love for tradition, and in particular for the Catholic tradition. Without this vision, our universities may grow in size, but shrink in purpose. They may be richer but not wiser.

No other living tradition has been thinking about thinking longer than the Catholic Church. With carefully selected readings from classical, patristic, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources, Renewing the Mind proposes the Catholic tradition as the noblest and best hope for a recovery of humane learning in our time. Edited by theologian and philosopher Ryan N.S. Topping, this anthology draws from a range of classical and contemporary philosophers - from Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Newman to Chesterton to Benedict XVI - to reconstruct and illustrate the enduring vitality of the Catholic tradition of thinking about thinking. Parts One, Two, and Three take up the essential characteristics which define all learning activity: its purpose (or end), its form and content (or curriculum), and its method (or pedagogy). With an eye to meeting the challenge of the present crisis in education, Part Four illustrates the contemporary renewal of Catholic education. Included are selections that speak not only to liberal or general education but to a variety of contexts in which Catholics are called to study or teach: at home, at school, in college, or in the seminary. Renewing the Mind includes an introductory essay on the history and renewal of Catholic education, followed by 38 selections each with an introduction, biography, and study questions; adorning the text throughout are illustrations from the National Gallery of Art. Educators of children and college students will find this an essential guide to the best of what has been said about what it means to be conformed to the mind of Christ.