The Rev. Daniel S. Hendrickson has written a brilliant book. In Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age: A Response to Charles Taylor and the Crisis of Fullness , Hendrickson diagnoses the problems plaguing higher education. He then offers a plan to save it.

Jesuit Higher Education is, as the title says, a response to the book A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. Taylor’s book argues that the modern university “breathes secularism,” resulting in self-absorption and disenchantment. As one reviewer put it, Taylor argued that in the modern age, “intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control.”

We are, Taylor wrote, “specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart.” Our schools have lost what Taylor calls “fullness,” which is a grace-filled feeling of spirituality and purpose. Such feelings come naturally to human beings, and the dour secularization and drab wokeness of the modern university kill off what was once nurtured. Without spiritual vision, we become our own boring, awful gods.

In Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age, Hendrickson, a Jesuit himself and the president of Creighton University, offers three things to help restore Taylor’s “fullness.” They are “study, solidarity, and grace.”

As I see it, the most important of the three is the last one: grace. Hendrickson describes it this way: “The pedagogy of grace represents what is not planned, or what is unprepared, or surprising. It is a pedagogy that cultivates an availability — or appreciates in students the kind of openness cultivated by study and solidarity — whether for inexplicable and phenomenal moments of wonder, awe, inspiration, gratitude, consolation, or confirmation. They are experiences that I regard highly.”

Hendrickson is right to highly regard them because moments of grace, or what Hendrickson calls an engagement with “the Other,” are the things that transform lives. A moment of grace can be the time you look into your future spouse’s eyes for the first time. Or when a teenager steps onstage with her guitar and realizes she has found her life’s passion. It can be the awe of standing in front of an ocean or looking into the starry sky at night or a spiritual seizing brought about by a book, song, or encounter with a saintly person.

Hendrickson, like Taylor, argues that grace is still very much in the world; it just often finds expression in ways that are different from traditional religion. It’s why a fan recently described a Taylor Swift show as “not a concert but a religious event.” We see it in loved ones and in nature.

Social media and the ubiquity of phones and the digital realm have made it more and more difficult to connect with the outside world and thus more difficult to have moments of grace. Digital addiction has also, Hendrickson convincingly argues, caused a crisis in the basic ability to think critically, a skill that can take years of study to develop fully.

University education once helped lay the groundwork for these moments of engagement with the world. Opening our eyes to it once meant practicing the other two steps in Hendrickson’s plan: study and solidarity.

Grace is facilitated by the difficult work of self-examination, or “study.” By study, Hendrickson does not mean simply memorizing books, although that can be a part of it, but rather a rigorous self-examination that finds its source in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. The spiritual exercises encourage us to examine our own flaws, examine our conscience, and seek God. Further, Hendrickson reminds readers that the early Jesuit curriculum was based on the Ratio Studiorum, a program of studies, and included Latin, Greek, reading, writing, arithmetic, and French. It did not mean taking courses such as “Feminism, Gender, and Racism 101.” (The Jesuits themselves have often gone off the rails in pedagogical political correctness.)

Finally, there is “solidarity.” By this, Hendrickson means “seeing the world as your home.” It doesn’t mean approaching the world as a colonizer on one hand or a far-left globalist on the other. It means both empathy with the poor and the understanding that, as Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkin wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” a place at once familiar and new and exciting.

Taken together with study and grace, solidarity means being a spiritual adventurer who is self-aware, educated, cognizant of the miracle of life, and curious about, and enchanted by, the world. It means being a student, both in college and in life.

Such students don’t shout down speakers or obsess about their own sexuality or refuse to read books they think they might disagree with. They are not imprisoned by their own secular belief systems but illuminated by grace and wonder.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.