One of my more recent experiences with heartbreak was when a Catholic priest told me I wasn’t living a very Christian life. I was twenty-four years old, single, childless, and, according to him, too focused on my academic career. This was the evidence he used to make his final assessment at the end of my twenty-minute spiritual-direction session. He welcomed the next person in before I had the chance to process his judgment. I muttered a half-hearted, sarcastic “thanks” through tears. He responded with a smirk, and I ran out the door.

That brief session, that one priest, upended a life’s worth of regular Mass attendance and reception of the sacraments. My reflections on that encounter gradually, and then completely, wore away the already fragile thread keeping me attached to the Church I had been raised in.

Long before that day, though, I had ceased to agree with the Church’s positions on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, gender and sexuality, premarital sex, and cohabitation before marriage. I had already been wondering whether I should be setting foot in a Catholic church or receiving the Eucharist with these views. But still I went, and still I tried everything to restore what had eroded during that session. I went on a pilgrimage throughout France, including to Lourdes, where I went into the holy baths. I persisted with Sunday Mass. I joined my university’s Catholic group. I reread St. Augustine’s Confessions, parts of the Summa Theologica, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal—the books that had influenced my faith in college.

But each attempt felt hollow. Moments of grace—my persistent plantar fasciitis did permanently go away after my dip in the holy baths—no longer moved me. Instead, I became incensed by what I perceived as wrongdoings, almost as if I was searching for tangible confirmation of what I already felt. The line in the Bible about wives being submissive to their husbands enraged me. A woman at my Catholic-novel book club blamed a victim for her sexual assault. A different priest wondered why I was single. A professor I hadn’t talked to in years told me over lunch that I should be more like my classmates who were getting married and having babies. Didn’t I know my eggs were dying?

It was as if I could feel myself slowly becoming what Charles Taylor refers to in A Secular Age as a “buffered subject”: a person who lives in and accepts a disenchanted world. To be buffered is to be invulnerable “to spirits, demons, cosmic forces” and to become the “master of the meaning of things.” You alone control the course of your life; you move for yourself and no one else; you don’t let anything, or anyone, lead you astray. After all, my move away from the Church only happened after I felt personally aggrieved—after I was forced to confront what I saw as an irreconcilable difference between my own self-understanding and the Church’s perception of me and of women.

A buffered subject, according to Taylor, is supposed to be defined by “a kind of cross-pressure.” On the one hand, one becomes invulnerable to forces beyond the self, and in my case this was certainly true. Nothing done or said at Mass affected me. No one’s advice landed. I didn’t want to be told what to read, do, or think. I became frustrated with anyone who offered their opinion on my future plans and with anything that disrupted my meticulously crafted schedule. But on the other hand, a buffered subject is supposed to feel a kind of loss. But the loss I was feeling wasn’t a loss of faith; instead, it was a loss of a connection to the education that made me who I am.

As an undergrad at Villanova University, I majored in humanities, a program steeped in the Catholic intellectual tradition and motivated by big questions: Is there a God, and what difference does it make if there is? What does it mean to be a human being? What can I know about the natural world around me and my place in it? How do I relate to my family, my friends, society, and politics? Being a student in Villanova’s humanities department was one of the most intellectually satisfying experiences of my life—far more so than graduate school. Some of the department’s professors have been role models to me, their pedagogical habits and mentoring styles always in the back of my mind as I pursue my own academic career. And several of their classes shaped not just my thinking—my senior essay laid the foundation for my dissertation—but also my life.

But I have changed since college, and now my relationship with my education is complicated. Can I still keep using this Catholic education to understand the world if I’m no longer Catholic? Can I even still ask the curriculum’s questions if I’m no longer professing the faith that animates them? And does this kind of education actually produce the dogmatism I encountered?

In my freshman year at Villanova, I was lost and miserable. My pursuits felt purposeless and my days directionless. I had earned the field-hockey scholarship I’d been chasing since eighth grade, but the transition from a top-tier high-school program to a middling college one hit me harder than I anticipated. How was it possible that my high-school practices were more demanding than those at a Division I university? My team proved better at starting drama than scoring goals, letting feuds follow us onto the field. I switched positions from midfield to forward, and I was riddled with anxiety that I didn’t have the explosive speed a forward needs. I should have been thrilled I was starting, was named Villanova’s Athlete of the Month, and was making our conference’s weekly honor roll, but the thing I loved most became the thing I most dreaded. Not even schoolwork, my usual escape, provided comfort; my professors were making assumptions about my intellectual abilities because I was a student-athlete. I stopped participating in class. I put minimal effort into my assignments and somehow still got A’s. Why did any of it matter?

On the first day of my second-semester required freshman class, the professor handed out the lyrics to Lily Allen’s song “The Fear” for us to analyze. “I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore / And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore / And when do you think it will all become clear? / ’Cause I’m being taken over by the fear.” Allen is critiquing consumerism and celebrity culture, but she is also capturing the malaise of modernity, a feature of a buffered existence. Uncertainty looms. Numbness is all-consuming. Meaning is hard to find. It’s almost always impossible to recover what’s been lost.

The texts on the class’s syllabus were intended to help us examine the reasons for the condition Allen described—a condition I was experiencing—as well as lay the foundation for discussions about possible remedies. And they did. What stuck with me more, though, was the way we engaged those texts, the style of inquiry we pursued.

In the spirit of St. Augustine, Villanova’s patron saint, texts were presented as avenues through which we could answer the question of who we are in relation to ourselves, others, the world, and God. We read Hobbes’s Leviathan not just to understand his argument but to put it in conversation with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, asking what makes life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We turned to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to consider how reading and art can help combat an otherwise lonely existence. And we analyzed Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to question when our lives might cease to be meaningful. Though this style of inquiry was, like the humanities department itself, grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition, I never felt I needed to believe in God or even be Catholic, though at the time I did and I was. Rather, I saw it as a way of seeing and encountering the world, a way of approaching life separate from any belief system.

The next semester, I followed the professor of that course to her class about the Catholic novel. The collegial and inquisitive spirit in which she conducted our class discussions helped me remember—and also recover—what I loved most about field hockey. I cherished team sports because they valued collective goals more than individual ones. I could be mentally, physically, and emotionally tested every day, meaning I could work to be better, stronger, and sharper with each practice, training, competition, or game. The on-field successes and failures, the highs and the lows, helped me think through interpersonal dynamics, various learning and teaching styles, and methods of communication. Meanwhile, in my academic pursuits, I was encouraged to never be satisfied with easy answers or interpretations of texts but to use my discoveries as grounds for further inquiry. Learning about literature was a collective pursuit, one that put me in daily conversation with my classmates and constantly challenged, excited, and inspired me. In the ways that field hockey disclosed things about life, I learned that literature could, too.

Since taking those classes, I’ve been deeply engaged with questions about novels, human relationships, and the inner lives of literary characters. I even ended up getting a PhD in English, writing a dissertation on how characters’ aesthetic experiences impact their interpersonal connections.

But for most of graduate school, I experienced the malaise that had consumed me when I had fallen out of love with field hockey. This time, though, I was falling out of love with reading, writing, and even thinking. Reading scholarly article after scholarly article and monograph after monograph put me to sleep. Many of them made it seem as if literature was merely the street on which scholars could ride their hobbyhorses. Worst of all was that no one—in my classes, in what I was reading—seemed to care about other people’s perspectives. One person’s interpretations weren’t offered for the sake of deepening our collective understanding of a text but for proving that your point was better, stronger, more innovative than someone else’s. After class—and I’m guilty of this—people gathered not to continue conversations about literature but to talk about other people. Can you believe what they said? What were they thinking? Surely so-and-so won’t want to work with them? These anxiety-fueled discussions would inevitably lead us to wonder, Does the professor think I’m smart? Will she want to work with me? Did I sound dumb? Are others talking about how dumb I am?

Perhaps this is what happens when you make literature your job. In an ideal world, a PhD program is supposed to prepare you for an academic career. You teach to figure out how to manage a classroom and design syllabi; you write seminar papers for your courses that you hope will become academic articles, which you need to publish before you graduate to be competitive on the job market; you take exams to develop deep knowledge of your very specialized field; you write a dissertation to prove your expertise and lay the foundation for your first book, which you need to get tenure. All the while, you’re racing against the funding clock. That clock adds pressure—finish, finish, finish, it seems to tick—and exacerbates anxiety. You forget why you care about what you’re reading, you worry what your advisor thinks of your writing or your argument or you yourself because you can’t afford for your progress to be stalled, you fret over the one negative course evaluation you received, you lose sight of the purpose of your dissertation, of the PhD program, of teaching. Your work becomes mere boxes that need checking, completed for the sake of impressing others. During my first year, I spent more time dissecting my interactions with my would-be advisor than the texts I was reading for her class.

But asking questions, valuing creativity, sparking conversations, and learning for the sake of learning defined my college experience. No one tried to outsmart their classmates. No one insisted that they were right and you were wrong. We challenged each other’s positions and had heated debates, but it was all for the sake of deepening our understanding of a text and wrestling with the questions that guided the curriculum. Our collective commitment to learning meant we also allowed other students’ perspectives to influence our own and to change our thinking. Isn’t this the goal of a liberal-arts education? Isn’t this porousness the opposite of the bufferedness that Taylor sees as characteristic of modern life?

The bufferedness I had both witnessed and experienced in graduate school—being closed to perspectives that aren’t your own, acting and moving for yourself and no one else, caring more about how intelligent you sound than the literature you supposedly love—seemed more damaging and debilitating than the bufferedness Taylor describes of a life lived without belief in God. Good conversations, let alone good communities, were hard to come by. Your friends become your competitors. You become riddled by crippling anxiety. Or perhaps what I experienced in graduate school only proved Taylor’s point: an existence devoid of God will be an existence filled with anxiety, doubt, interpersonal fracture, and self-centeredness, whereas one in which God is present will be full of community and rigorous, thoughtful dialogue. Yet even though all paths began and ended with a Catholic God in Villanova’s humanities department, not all of my classmates were Catholic or even believed in God. Was this style of inquiry, then, more about a shared disposition—to one another and to the texts we read—than a shared ideological vision?

When I encountered secular thinkers in graduate school who asked the same kinds of questions that my humanities education did, I began to think it was a disposition that I would be able to hang onto. In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa suggests that “a sociology of the good life” depends on “stable axes of resonance that allow subjects to feel themselves sustained or even secured in a responsive, accommodating world.” These axes can be horizontal (relationships, politics), diagonal (material items), and vertical (the world, the metaphysical). They provide stability when, say, a connection between two people is relational rather than utilitarian, meaning “a resonant wire of sympathy and trust vibrates between them,” or when a goal during a soccer match is preceded by a beautiful passing sequence, with every player’s movements perfectly in sync. After all, though it’s been nine years since I finished my last class at Villanova, not a day has gone by in which I haven’t asked one of the department’s four big questions.

I last returned to Villanova to celebrate the humanities department’s twentieth anniversary. Professors planned a weekend of conviviality, conversations, and cheer—just like I remembered. But it was also a weekend of reckoning. I had changed, certainly, but I felt that things there had changed, too. A few years before, a professor who no longer teaches in the department co-wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal condemning questions on course evaluations that asked how well a professor had cultivated an inclusive community, claiming such questions were antithetical to a liberal-arts education. Other departments at Villanova spoke out against this article, but his colleagues in the department remained silent. I wondered if their silence was a form of agreement. A few months later, other questions came up. Are they celebrating Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination? “What do you think our professors are saying about this?” I texted a friend who had graduated with me after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I’ve feared for a while: What would they think of me if they knew I was no longer a practicing Catholic?

Conversations I accidentally found myself a part of or overhearing that weekend only exacerbated my fears that I could never recover what I had loved about my classes because I no longer subscribed, and perhaps never completely did, to the ideology animating the curriculum. One alumnus joked that a woman’s place is in the home. Another alumna talked to a professor about the perils of contraception. A reading in the packet by an author who often appears on course syllabi suggested we shouldn’t see race.

But at the same time, I was having the most exciting, refreshing, intelligent, challenging conversations I’d had since I graduated. Over post-dinner drinks and brunch the next day, a group of us found ourselves wondering: What is the relationship between the curriculum’s background assumptions about God and the style of engagement the curriculum promotes? I see four possible paths—an adaptation of Pascal’s wager. One: you enter a Catholic, the curriculum confirms your views, and you leave a Catholic. Two: you enter a Catholic, question the religion because of the kind of examination you’ve been asked to engage in, and leave no longer subscribing to Catholicism. Three: you enter a nonbeliever, take everything in the curriculum seriously, and leave a nonbeliever. Four: you enter a nonbeliever, take everything in the curriculum seriously, and leave a Catholic. All four positions demand restless curiosity, constant self-examination, continuous questioning, and a willingness to challenge others’ convictions and have your own challenged in return—the very things that made me fall in love with learning again and have gotten me out of my malaise. The curriculum succeeds, I think, when even the most devout Catholic stops and considers why they choose to stay when another person leaves. It also succeeds when a lapsed Catholic reconsiders why they left while their friends, mentors, or loved ones stay.

Dogmatism arises when this restless curiosity and constant self-examination stop. Modernity isn’t the only thing that can make you buffered. It can also happen when you no longer interact with ideas, perspectives, or opinions that conflict with your own—when you become thoughtless.

The priest who caused what feels like my irreparable break from the Church showed no interest in dialogue, no interest in learning my motivation for pursuing a PhD or anything else about me. He didn’t ask questions that would help me discern my vocation. He cared only about my marital status—about judging me for not fitting his definition of a “good Christian woman.” He wanted me to convert to his vision of the world, so different from the Catholicism I had known in my time at Villanova, and especially to his vision of what women could be. Perhaps I would still be Catholic if he had applied the humanities way of life to his religion. Perhaps I would still be Catholic if I encountered more Catholics committed to self-examination and the pursuit of truth than to dogmatism. Or: perhaps I would still be Catholic if I accepted what the priest said to me uncritically, without questioning my own convictions. But then, I would still be buffered—and I would have turned away from the education that shaped me.