Every subject can be an opportunity for teaching the faith

    “Getting to heaven is like solving an equation – multiply love and compassion, subtract negativity, and add Jesus over our life equals heaven.  [(LC)-N+J over X = H]”
    Logan Williams wrote this in her Catholicity essay submission for Algebra II at St. Charles Catholic High School. Catholicity essays are how students at St. Charles Catholic relate the curriculum to their faith in each course they take. Essays are submitted with every exam.
    In response to her religion exam question about what our human vocation is, Ridge Tully wrote: “God did not put a single person on this earth just to watch his or her brothers and sisters slowly crash before his or her eyes. Each one of us is supposed to make a change.”
    “Dear God, Thank you for my enemies. They have shown me how to forgive like you have forgiven me.” That  was written by Lexi Tran for her religion exam essay, based on a question that asked why we are called to forgive our enemies.
Seeing the connections
    In seeing every subject as an opportunity for religious education, students seek the wisdom contained in each concept they learn. Brittney Jacob wrote, “The use of rhetoric in certain diction choices can be harder to locate, but an experienced reader can still find these strategies.  Similarly, a devout Christian can find Jesus in unlikely places that are more difficult to spot. God can be found in the kind acts of strangers or even one’s enemies.”
    In English V AP class, Gracie Millet had to defend a point of view by choosing from a list of quotes. She chose a quote from Albert Einstein, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Gracie wrote, “(Einstein) knows how to balance religion with science, and he realized that having one without the other was pointless.”   
    Christopher Bergeron was asked to reflect on the similarities between Spanish conjugations and the Christian life. He described his thoughts about it this way: “In this analogy, God is the subject, and I am the verb. If I do not ‘agree’ with God, then I am living incorrectly.  This is like being incorrect if I put the wrong form of the verb after the subject.”  
    People often wonder how math can be an opportunity for religious education. Alayna Melancon put it this way, “In geometry, a converse is switching the sentence to have the last part of the sentence first and the second sentence last.”  Her religious interpretation: “We have to flip our lives to make God come first and us second.”
    Jordan Favorite wrote about the concept of “liability” from financial math as it relates to choosing friends wisely:  “Some people in our lives may be good friends to us, but their company is a liability to us.”
    Mr. Madere asked his physics students to draw a position-time or velocity-time graph of their relationship with God. Tyquan Johnson transferred to St. Charles Catholic in his junior year. When writing about his transfer, he said, “Then just when I lost almost all faith in God, he shined a light on me. I was blessed, and I was sent to St. Charles Catholic. Students often don’t appreciate how blessed they are. My faith shot up like a rocket. I was sent to a school where my talents can flourish and allow my past to become my teacher.”
    Douglas Triche is assistant principal at St. Charles Catholic.