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Love of Learning: Desire for Justice. Undergraduate Education and the Option for the Poor . Edited by Reiser William S.J., Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 1995. 138 pages. $22.00.

This book is a creative collection of eleven papers presented to faculty, students, and administrators at Holy Cross College in 1993. The occasion was the anniversary of the deaths of the Jesuit educators and women at the Catholic University of El Salvador on November 16, 1989. The topic was the "option for the poor" and how that was linked to justice, directed toward what meaning it has at a Jesuit college in the United States. The topic was generated by the faculty in 1992 as a way of focusing the College's Mission Statement. The process was one of analysis of the topic by a person engaged in a discipline followed by a discussion afterwards. To this end, the papers are both part of a larger conversation and written to provoke critical responses by all participants. Some of the papers were given to honor students in advance for their written reaction; a summary of sorts appears in the final chapter where we hear the students' voice. The strength of this book lies in its creativity on several levels. It is a model of interdisciplinary cooperation to examine critically a major question of human importance: justice and the poor. It also demonstrates a community model of scholarship where students, administrators, staff, and faculty are on an equal human plane in their search for understanding, whereby the expertise of the faculty is really called forth to analyze the various dimensions. It is also participatory learning where knowledge cannot remove itself, as if in an ivory tower, away from the action demanded by justice. The shape of that response engaged the presenters in a wide variety of analyses. Some chose personal challenges that belonged to their lives and disciplines (e.g., mathematics, biochemistry), others used the tools of their trades (e.g, sociological analysis of how to interpret governmental data on poverty), and still others used history or theology to explain the background and religious context for the importance, meaning, and centrality of this topic. The papers are short, clear, and provocative. Although we do not have the benefit of the discussions that followed, there is no reason to doubt that these papers would evoke discussion in any classroom. They are thoughtful, honest, driven with passion, and do not resort to easy solutions. In their own way these papers demonstrate the art of academic conversation at its best; intelligent, critical, open, passionate, involving others. It is the type of inquiry engaged in by the Salvadoran university teachers that resulted in a government's killing them. Knowledge is dangerous and its demands deep. Hence, it is worth the time to learn from this book how others can address these and other important topics in an academic setting.