Benedictine College essay leads up to 2026 culture symposium

Our Lady of Guadalupe is becoming more than a devotional image on Benedictine College’s campus. In Atchison, the college is using the theme to connect its Catholic identity to the people around it, including parish communities, students and Latino families, as it looks ahead to a fall symposium that will put faith and technology in the same conversation.

On June 14, Benedictine published The Culture Our Lady of Guadalupe Transformed, a reflective essay by Fr. Nick Baha. The piece is part of a series presenting papers from the last Symposium on Transforming Culture, which carried the theme “Only the Lover Sings, on Beauty and Wonder,” and it sets up the next gathering, scheduled for Sept. 4-5, 2026, on the Benedictine College campus in Atchison, Kansas.

Benedictine says the annual conference brings together scholars, business leaders, field professionals and students for fellowship, reflection and dialogue on questions tied to the Catholic faith and its role in society, culture and business. The 2026 theme is “The Church in an Algorithmic Age,” and the call for abstracts says Pope Leo XIV has urged Catholics and all people of good will to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by technology and artificial intelligence.

Baha’s essay turns to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and the beliefs of the Nahuas, opening with Saint Augustine’s view that even pagan stories and false myths can contain material worth studying when Christians are trying to understand culture and communicate truth. Benedictine’s summary describes it as a deep dive into Nahua Indian culture, and the college presents the work as part of its effort to treat scholarship, evangelization and cultural analysis as one Catholic intellectual project within a community of faith and scholarship.

That framework fits the way Benedictine has long described Our Lady of Guadalupe. The college says the image appeared miraculously on Juan Diego’s tilma on Dec. 12, 1531, near what is now Mexico City, and it has pointed to St. John Paul II’s description of her as the “Star of the New Evangelization” in The Church in America. In that telling, Sahagún’s effort to record indigenous beliefs becomes part of conversion and discernment, not just academic collecting.

For Atchison, the larger point is immediate. Benedictine’s archives preserve the histories of St. Benedict’s College and Mount St. Scholastica College, and the school’s broader Transform Culture in America vision has already been linked to politics, economics, science, art and philosophical reflection. The Guadalupe essay shows how the college wants that vision to reach beyond the classroom and into the city around it, with the September symposium serving as its next public test.