Intersection: Urban African-American Youth, Mathematics, & Religion

Once in a while, something comes up in class that just begs for questions, discussion, and dialogue. Recently, the name Pascal came up (not unnaturally, since it’s a senior math class). This time, however, I mentioned the fact that he was not merely a mathematician, but a mathematician turned theologian and philosopher, whose departure from academia was greatly lamented and even resented by many of his 17th century contemporaries. They were particularly interested to hear me say that I thought his thoughts are more substantial and helpful than many of those published today.

This last claim piqued my students’ curiosity such that they demanded proof. So I went home that night and put a page and a half of my favorite quotes of his from his work, Pensees. The one that caught the greatest attention was the following:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

It must also account for such amazing contradiction.

Of the many observations that could be made after reading such a statement, I chose to note that Pascal is not making any explicit claim about God or religion, or even why those who disagree with him are wrong; rather, he’s making a claim about what the truth will do for people existentially. The truth, he says, will give an adequate explanation for why we see so much glory and so much blight, not on the world itself, but within man himself. The “true religion” will make sense of this paradox called man, and anything that doesn’t isn’t true.

Questions of how we determine truth are so unpopular in academia today (and are growing more and more out of favor even in pop culture) that criteria for truth are rarely discussed. But here I am, in a public institution filled with young black students, many of whom think that dead people know less than they do simply because the dead people came before them, who are intrigued, even captivated, by the truth-criteria of a 17th century European Catholic mathematician-turned-theologian. It’s enough to take my breath away. They are beginning to think existentially and reflectively about themselves as human beings.

We went through several other quotes over the next half hour, gaining their meaning before trying to decide whether or not Pascal had anything to say worth hearing, and in every case someone found what he said to be insightful, true, helpful, or corroborating their own experience. By the end of our time, they were wistfully lamenting that our school doesn’t offer a philosophy class.

Of course, I’m not so naïve as to think that if they took such a class that every moment would be so rewarding for them or their instructor; these kinds of discussions happen only infrequently, and usually only gain momentum on days when they’d rather find some reason not to do “work” (a pep-rally was scheduled for this particular day and had lightened the mood enough to make “work” optional and philosophy tolerable). However, it affirms again my convictions about them, as unlike myself as they are: if we are all, in fact, made in God’s image, then we ought to expect that such images wonder, even if only from time to time, who (or what) the Original is that they can’t help reflecting, and what's its all about.