May 1, 2025 | By Raleigh Adams YDS ‘26

“What if the sadness never leaves?” That’s the question I couldn’t stop thinking about after ChatGPT told me my patterns and blind spots based on our chat histories. Number one was “your emotional residue lingers”; that “your heartbreak still shows up—beautifully, honestly—but it may color other aspects of your life more than you intend. Whether it’s in your theology of longing, or your cautious approach to new people, there's a tension between your mind's clarity and your heart’s ache.”

May 1, 2025 | By Isaac Oberman BF ‘26

What does it mean to be an adult? To define it against time, adulthood is the state after childhood. It follows then that adulthood results from growth and development, in which one progresses past the state of childhood that one is born into. From here, we have to ask the question: growth and development toward what? Growth and development are ordered toward membership in a community. As Plato firmly stated in The Republic, man is a social animal who is naturally drawn towards life in society with others.

May 1, 2025 | By Emma Ventresca BF ‘26

Transformation is a “coming into” ourselves, a metamorphosis rather than discrete change that fundamentally alters who we are. In the words of philosopher and theologian Karl Rahner, “True 'becoming' must be conceived as something 'becoming more', as the coming into being of more reality, as an effective attainment of a greater fullness of being.” What it means to ‘become’ oneself “must be understood as a real self-transcendence, a surpassing of self or active filling up of the empty.”