My first year back in a classroom after teaching virtually for nearly a year and a half was…“a moment,” as my then-students might have called it. In addition to having to figure out how to get back into the groove of teaching actual humans in a classroom, I had to learn how to face the new set of psychological needs my students brought with them, as well as a new and rather intimidating set of ideological barriers I never encountered before.
The summer of 2020 did a number on all of us, especially young people—many of whom were cooped up alone in their rooms absorbing conflicting information from TikTok videos having to do with social issues ranging from the vaccine and presidential politics to racism and police brutality.
It was easy for a theology teacher to have approached such a tumultuous cultural moment with a curriculum centered on moralistic and sentimental platitudes about how Jesus loves us and wants us to be kind to our neighbors. Of course these claims are true, but when their concrete implications aren’t clearly articulated, they run the risk of being dismissed as mushy, useless abstractions. They are rendered easy to dismiss, the same way one swipes up a TikTok video that doesn’t immediately stimulate them.
Thanks to the enormous amount of freedom afforded to me by my then-school’s administrators, I made the executive decision to teach Catholic Social Teaching in my senior religion class. Seeing the types of political and social ideologies they were being bombarded with, I felt it would be most prudent to attempt to go to the root of “the social question” and understand, firstly, what does it mean to be human, and how we might go about building social structures that have a deep regard for human needs.