Why have I changed the theme of my blog posts from confronting Nihilism to confronting Secularism?
From September 2024 through February 2025, I am dedicating a page of my blog site as the instructions and information page for The Priestly Vocation Essay contest of the Serra Club of Columbus. I manage the contest. Parents, teachers and students might be confused by a title about a Catholic philosopher confronting nihilism when they are looking for information about writing essays on a vocation to the Catholic priesthood.
The Columbus Serra Club challenges eighth grade boys to write an essay of five hundred words or less answering a question about whether God might be calling them to the priesthood. Writers of the ten best essays are awarded a $1,000 tuition assistance grant to a diocesan Catholic high school for the 2025/2026 academic year. The Serra Club encourages participation from all schools in the diocese. The mere fact of writing the essays helps form a culture of vocations. The 2024 essays, even those written as an extra credit assignment, were very well written while showing serious thought about what God might have in mind for them. Most of the essays were analyses of why they did not think God was calling them to be a priest. Nonetheless: A boy who settles down to write out what he thinks about his future in light of God’s will, forms in himself an antidote against secularism.
An antidote against secularism is an antidote to nihilism. For in a secular outlook a boy thinks about his life as if God is irrelevant to what he should become. There is heavy pressure to think as a secularist in our culture. If he continues to think as a secularist and becomes aware of his secularist outlook, he will either become an explicit nihilist, continue as a secularist while suppressing thoughts about the meaning of his life or return to thinking of God having a purpose for his life. Rememberance of having written, way back in the eighth grade, how it was not all about him but God and him, might protect him from the nihilism of “It’s all about me.”
There are pedagogical as well as philosophical ways of combatting nihilism.