Why I'm working on a Saturday

Procrastination mainly.

But also magis, or “the more.”  Each year Rockhurst picks one of its six core Jesuit values to focus on as a community.  This year the selected value is magis.  If magis were an action movie star he would be the Rock.

I say this because at one point in early summer he had four movies out simultaneously (Snitch, G.I. Joe Retaliation, Pain & Gain, and Fast & Furious)!  Also, he has 5.5 million Twitter followers and follows no one back; which, though unbelievably arrogant, is epic.  

 https://twitter.com/TheRock

But I want to be careful throwing out the word magis like I’m repeating some kind of catchy new One Direction lyric or yelling YOLO to encourage a group of friends.  The word, and more importantly the outstandingly rich idea is serves as a placeholder for, needs some context.  Timothy Hanchin, a teacher at Boston College High School wrote that there is a danger in reducing a Jesuit institution’s mission down to a few single words or phrases (America, May 8, 2006).  He brought up the example of a Jesuit high school that reduced “man for others” to M.F.O.  So, lol btw.  (Fortunately, the the set of first letters of Rockhurst's six chosen values contains no vowels, thus making acronyms unpronounceable). 

G.M.R.C.C.W.

The beauty in what the Rockhurst campus does is in its providing an ongoing community dialogue about the idea of magis.   And more important than that, we actually strive to live out the value in practice.  There are student and staff reflections on the meaning of the concept sent out to the campus community electronically, and the faculty is encouraged to incorporate it into their teaching. 

Though it might surprise some of my current students my approach to magis does not entail more reading and more assignments.  Rather, working magis into how I teach can be as simple as talking about the concept in terms of a political decision, and it can also be so pervasive as to not require continual reintroduction.  This value is now serving as a guiding framework to how I’m talking about the Constitution and the Founding in my Honors American Government course: the founder’s striving for “more” in the balance between personal economic interest and principled ideas.  Their structured response, the Constitution, is after all their best bargaining and compromise to reach for more in a new nation.  I see James Madison, in this one respect, as a late 18^th century Rock.

He didn’t have the Rock’s agent though, or Twitter cache.