The week opened on October 2 with a Thanksgiving Mass at the Sancta Maria Stella Orientis (SMSO) Oratory, offered in gratitude for the founding of Opus Dei. A merienda cena get-together for employees and students followed at the Business Lounge. On October 3, Atty. Yvette Valdez led “Well-Being in a Wired World,” a parenting workshop at the Li Seng Giap Auditorium on the family as a school of virtue. The Community Rosary at Our Lady’s Shrine in the CAS Garden followed on October 5.

The week also had a service component. With the Month of the Holy Rosary under way, the University launched “Donate a Rosary,” inviting community members to hang new or unused rosaries on the Tree of Prayer at the shrine. Each rosary is blessed and given, with a simple guide on how to pray it, to contracted employees, including security and service personnel, and to food concessionaires and their families. The Tree of Prayer also holds written intentions, which will be given to the University Chaplaincy at the end of the month.

The October 7 program drew NSTP freshmen and employees to the Li Seng Giap Auditorium. Dr. Gladys Golo, Vice President for Academic and Faculty Affairs, introduced the afternoon by linking St. Josemaría’s teaching on work and study done with love to the NSTP spirit of service.

The audience then watched about 25 minutes of footage. It began with St. Josemaría’s get-togethers with university students, including a 1974 meeting in Argentina. Clips of Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz, the current Prelate of Opus Dei, on pastoral visits to New York, New Zealand and Argentina followed.

A one-hour panel took up the questions raised in the videos. It featured Fr. Raffy Quinto, a priest and computer science graduate; Sailah Guerra, an IMC alumna who leads the youth formation initiative Project Ignite in Quezon; Carlo Quijano, a Management student; and Syamie Gambe, a Political Economy student and president of Alab. Rounds included a Myth or Fact segment, a “Hot Seat” of everyday dilemmas, and an open forum capped by “Ask Fr. Raffy.” UA&P President Atty. Philip Yeung closed the panel discussion by presenting tokens of thanks to the panelists.

Alab, the student arm of the Chaplaincy, led a Community Rosary on October 8 at the SMSO Oratory, while the Donate a Rosary initiative continued until October 9. When the donation, the blessed rosaries, each with a simple guide on how to pray it, will go to the security guards, service personnel and food concessionaires who keep the campus running, and to their families.

Back then, I laughed at his quick remark. And he laughed even louder. Now, I think I know why using the real one mattered more.

He passed away recently, and I never got the chance to show him again how much I improved. He was mostly quiet. I was fortunate to have had the chance to talk about anything under the sun with him. Whenever I slept over at my cousins’ house, he was the first person I saw awake, even before the sun had gleamed through the window. He would fix up something exquisite near the counter with tablea, milk, and sugar. He would mix it all up with a batirol and serve me his signature refreshment.

It was these little things that are now precious to me.

When his body became ashes in an urn and his smile remained still in a photograph, I couldn’t help but think that he was, in some ways, a gift here on earth to many people. The laughter and presence of different strangers made his funeral a lively event. It’s as if the Holy Spirit gave him another banquet, not that there should have been a lot of silence and cries, but the people that knew him continued his warmth in a few nights. He was gentle on many of our minds and hearts.

I thought gratitude was simple. One can imagine a “thank you” or a bow. It could even be a cute reply to a friend, family member, or crush. But there is more to gratitude than gestures.

I am reminded of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in my own interpretation of the ending (spoilers ahead). Just one quick trigger from the Punisher almost killed Peter with a Sniper rifle bullet, ramming through his body. The reaction of Jon Bernthal was priceless. A cold faced killer such as the Punisher became a big baby, crying over someone who reminded him so much of his son (if he were still alive). When Peter wakes up bruised and tired, the Punisher was there waiting for him (in fact sleeping). After a few exchanges, Peter laughs at the Punisher’s apology for shooting him. Then, they both end up laughing.

It is a small and almost ridiculous moment. Someone shot Spider-Man, nearly killed him, and yet the scene ends with laughter. But perhaps that is precisely what makes the moment meaningful. Laughter becomes a way of saying, “I am still here. You are still here. We can move forward.”

These moments remind me that laughter can be a form of gratitude. Roger Scruton elaborates on laughter, containing “the ability to accept our all-too human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment.”1 I was never the one who laughed. In fact, I frown a lot. My family would keep telling me to smile more often. In my adulting years, I’ve begun trying to just smirk. Authentically, it’s never natural. When I pondered on Scruton’s quote, especially in relation to the passing of my tito, I considered his laughter something that I should continue with others. I think the real challenge is to find joy despite moments where it’s just hard and frustrating to move on.

Perhaps this is why I keep thinking about my tito and his surfboard.

The “real” surfboard means nothing if it isn’t used. Even if it is used badly, it still serves a purpose. If it’s left on the corner of the room to collect dust with more items that pile around it, then that is even worse, letting it die in its own space, turning to mere junk.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about gratitude. We often recognize its object only after the moment has already passed. While we are experiencing something, we think it is ordinary because we have not yet experienced its absence. We do not realize that a person has become another home in our rugged and often chaotic lives until one day we notice that a family lunch has become quieter than usual even if he was the quiet one.

That is what I feel when I think about his tablea.

I can probably make hot chocolate myself. I have the tablea that he gave me as a gift during Christmas. I even have the milk and the sugar to complete his recipe. I could even learn how to use a batirol properly online. But I know it would not be the same.

The ingredients were never the whole recipe.

He was.

“Grief must be a reflection of love.”2 This was what Peterson wrote reflecting on his own trials and tribulations of his family and the stories of his patients that influenced his book 12 More Rules for Life. Despite the sadness, some part of me has learned to acknowledge that it’s okay to cry sometimes. The opposite of grief is forgetfulness. I don’t want to forget him. If every instance there’s something that triggers a memory again of seeing him, I would just let it fall again. May I cry inside or smile better on the outside, part of life is carrying these memories with meaning. Take for example one of our bayanis, Marcello H. Del Pillar. While he was situated in Barcelona, he saw the daughter of one of his fellow Filipino propagandists, and this triggered his nostalgia, homesickness for his family. Del Pillar got the chance to return to the Philippines but he died of tuberculosis. He passed away from his homeland. Above the clouds maybe, there lies a home we all seek, one where we would be reunited with something much more transcendent than we have below here in the now.

I find it strange that in our darkest moments we find a glimmer of light that still shines. I imagine my tito surfing somewhere beyond our atmosphere. Using the real surfboard matters now more than before. It must be love persisting despite all the hardships life might throw at us. Memories after all become ingrained in objects that we once took for granted. They remain while we may not even get the chance to say a proper goodbye. Going back to that beachfront, perhaps that memory shall remain gentle on my mind.

I wanted to be an architect. I enjoyed the focus it took to design something useful and the idea that drawings could turn into real places for people. The summer before college, I even had the tools to make blueprints and floor plans. I did not want to be a teacher. As a naturally introverted person, I hardly considered it an option. I enjoyed studying, but I could not picture myself studying to prepare lessons and then spending the day explaining them to a room full of people. I imagined work that would allow me long stretches of quiet concentration. Teaching seemed to require an energy I was not sure I had. Philosophy was not even on my horizon. My undergraduate degree was not in education, and neither the subject nor the profession belonged to the future I had pictured.

But life appears to have its own sense of humor. These days, I spend hours reading philosophy, making outlines and conceptual maps, and considering how to explain an argument clearly. Then I walk into a classroom and teach it. I used to picture myself designing rooms, but I never expected to become so connected to the people inside them.

A room worth returning to

I am still introverted, even though some friends believe otherwise. I like quiet moments, time to think, and conversations where I can really listen rather than talk. Teaching often pulls me in many directions at once—a question here, a discussion that’s drifting, an explanation that needs to be clearer, or a student who suddenly looks confused. Even on good days, I end up tired. I usually need some quiet time afterward, but by the next morning, I look forward to returning.

The joys of teaching are often simple. Sometimes, a student has a story to finish. Or someone brings back a joke from an earlier lesson. A question we left unresolved gives us somewhere to begin. These small continuities make the classroom familiar through the people in it. Teaching philosophy has its own pleasures, too. Students ask why, offer a counterexample, or notice a consequence I passed over. An explanation that looked tidy in my notes becomes something we have to examine together. I sincerely enjoy that exchange. Sometimes their questions send me back to the reading, looking for something I had not thought to consider, and thus make my weekend an exciting quest for justifications and answers, and even more questions.

I once studied to follow my own questions. Now my students give me reasons to keep studying. There are difficulties, too. I sometimes move too quickly or mistake a nod for understanding. Students hesitate before asking for another explanation; I have to remember how much effort can be hidden behind their silence. Who has not watched a discussion move on while still trying to understand the previous point? Remembering that experience helps me look beyond whether I have finished the lesson to whether anyone has assimilated what was just said.

When the care comes back

When I began in academia, I didn’t doubt that teaching would demand my attention. I didn’t expect, however, how often students and mentees would offer theirs in return. They remember me on special occasions or when I have deadlines to meet. They send greetings on Teacher’s Day or my birthday, ask how I am doing, or check in without needing help, simply to see how I am going with my deadlines. Sometimes the conversation begins with their concern for me. I appreciate those gestures because they are freely given. Someone with a full life of their own has paused to remember you. Now don’t tell me that isn’t wonderful.

A greeting cannot tell me everything about the teacher I have been. But it lets me know that something of our time together has remained. I especially enjoy hearing from students after our daily classroom encounters have ended. I learn what they are doing, which plans have changed, and what questions have followed them into another stage of life. Their attention makes me want to give more of mine. I find myself spending longer over feedback, reconsidering an explanation that did not work, or making time for a conversation because I know what it means to be taken seriously. The desire grows quietly. Someone trusts me with a concern or returns to tell me what happened next, and the work becomes more personal. I am preparing for people whose lives I have begun to know.

When someone opens their world

Sometimes, students and mentees share more than just their schoolwork with me. A talk that starts about an assignment can turn into a conversation about a tough decision, a dream, or what comes next. They might feel pulled toward something but aren’t sure if they can go after it. Or they might be trying to meet someone else’s expectations without knowing if it’s right for them. When they open up like this, I picture an unfinished blueprint on a table. Some parts are clear; others have been erased and redrawn. Their own hopes mix with what others want for them, and they’re still figuring out which is which.

It takes trust to let someone see your unfinished plans. But being trusted with those plans doesn’t mean it’s my job to finish them. The person in front of me is growing and changing, and she might discover something new that neither of us expected. Her situation can change, her interests can grow, and something she sets aside today might be worth trying again later. I need to listen and understand before I suggest what to do next.

Sometimes I can share information that helps someone make an informed choice. At other times, I can gently point out an assumption they may want to examine more closely. Often, simply listening gives students or mentees the space to hear their own thoughts, recognize what matters to them, and decide what they want to do next. Taking someone’s dream seriously means more than expressing enthusiasm; it also means talking candidly about the steps, resources, and effort it may take to reach it. Encouragement is most helpful when it is honest about the challenges, limitations, and responsibilities involved, while still respecting the person’s ability to choose their own path.

What we are made for

Teaching has strengthened a belief I want to share with my students: we are made for truth. I see this in the questions they ask about why something works, in their frustration when things don’t add up, and in the satisfaction they feel when they find a solid explanation. Students can tell the difference between something that just sounds convincing and something backed by real reasons, especially when they have time to think it through. Dante gives the human desire to know a memorable expression:

I translate it to: “You were not made to live as beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”

These words are spoken by Ulysses in Inferno, whose powerful speech leads his friends into a disastrous journey. In context, they are more challenging than just a celebration of ambition. Wanting to know more takes good judgment, and even a strong invitation can lead people the wrong way. That’s important in teaching. I have to be careful with how my explanations, advice, or encouragement influence others. Just being confident doesn’t make my guidance right.

Architecture gives us a good example. An architectural drawing must answer to dimensions, materials, weight, and use. In teaching, an explanation must answer to evidence, and guidance must answer to the circumstances of the person receiving it. If I want students to care about truth, I must welcome questions that complicate my account and acknowledge when I need to reconsider. The search becomes personal as well. What can they do well? What do they need to learn? Which commitments are genuinely theirs? What is worth pursuing, and what will it ask of them?

Discovering what they are made for may begin with learning to ask those questions honestly.

Walking alongside my mentees

My own changed plans make me sympathetic to uncertainty. I once had a fairly definite picture of my future, and my life took a different turn. That experience cannot tell a mentee which direction to take, but it reminds me to leave room for possibilities I have not understood. A student may be good at something without wanting to build a career around it. Another may be drawn toward work they do not yet do well. What appears sensible from my position may look different from theirs. Have I understood their reasons, or have I already begun comparing their plans with the future I would choose?

Sometimes, we move forward by just looking at the next steps—a skill to practice, a class to try, or a conversation to have. These small steps help someone make decisions without having to figure out their whole future at once. And it is always a joy when mentees come back and can explain a choice in their own words. They might still have doubts, but they’re starting to tell the difference between what they know, what they fear, and what they still need to learn.

Near the end of Purgatorio, Virgil tells Dante:

Or “Do not wait any longer for my words or signals; your will is free, upright, and sound.” The poem describes a spiritual journey far beyond anything I could claim for teaching. Still, the scene offers an image of guidance I find worth considering: a guide recognizes that the person he has accompanied no longer needs to wait for every instruction. One can only hope that our work as teachers helps students and mentees develop something of that independence. Their growing ability to judge, make sense of life, and find meaning in it is part of what makes the time together worthwhile.

When former students check in, I am glad to hear from them. When they tell me what they have decided without asking for my approval, I am glad of that, too.

A vocation in daily practice

On Teachers’ Day, people often talk about educators in grand terms, but the work itself can feel much more ordinary. Teaching is mostly about preparing, grading, meeting deadlines, repeating explanations, meeting with students, and making decisions when you’re tired. Still, the calling shows up in these everyday tasks. Feedback helps students know what to work on. A thoughtful answer can make it easier for someone to ask a tough question. Clear and consistent expectations help students understand what’s needed. This is how I see teachers helping to shape people’s character. We help develop attention, judgment, conscience, and imagination through what we teach and how we live.

Of course, our role is just one part of the picture. Students are shaped by their families, friends, backgrounds, and beliefs. Their growth belongs to them, and we’re fortunate to be trusted with a part of their education. That trust calls for care and brings genuine joy. My students and mentees ask thoughtful questions, share ideas worth hearing, and make plans that deserve our attention. They remind me that teaching means seeing each person as a whole, with their own relationships, hopes, responsibilities, and choices. Sometimes, I get to witness something click—a challenging idea, a decision, or a new possibility someone feels ready to explore. Those moments bring a special kind of excitement I never expected from this job.

What remains of the architect

I still love architecture. I still see the child in myself who studied floor plans and wanted to create something useful for others. Teaching has become another way to do that. I plan carefully, figure out what’s needed, and change what doesn’t help. The real reward comes when someone can use what we’ve worked on together. Both architecture and teaching are ways to serve others by paying attention to the people they’re meant for. In the classroom, those people are right in front of me. They have their own voices, dreams, doubts, and the freedom to question what I suggest.

My students and mentees open their worlds to me, sometimes cautiously, sometimes with an enthusiasm that makes me reconsider my own limits. Their trust makes me want to prepare better, listen longer, and give more of myself. Their care reminds me that this relationship has helped shape my life as well. As a child, I imagined standing inside a building that had begun with my drawings. Now I find satisfaction when someone takes what we have worked on together and uses it to make a choice I could never have made for them.

I once wanted to draw places where people could live. Teaching brought me alongside people as they discovered how they want to live—and helped me discover how I want to live my own life.

A small tribute, with gratitude, to my students and mentees, whose company makes even the demanding days feel like days well spent.

Hey there!

Yes, it’s me again, with yet another letter. Looking back, I realize I’ve written my students so many letters, at least two for each batch I taught. I always tried to keep my rambling to a minimum, but I won’t hold back today.

It’s strange that this letter has been so easy and so difficult to write. I seem to never run out of things I want to tell you, but also I can never find the right words to do so.

Maybe it’s because I can’t quite figure out what I’m trying to say. I think it’s a goodbye (with many tangents and asides) — a final one to you, and a momentary one to teaching. I think it’s also a reminder, a record of a time in my life that I will treasure for a long time.

As a farewell, this letter has been writing itself at the back of my mind for quite some time, earlier and more frequently than you may have expected. It’s odd, isn’t it, to describe a farewell as “frequent”? Those things usually only happen once, but not in my case I guess. In one sense, it was always almost happening, a potential departure that was hanging over me for a long time. At the same time, it was happening often, repeatedly, at the end of every semester. It was always a relief and a surprise to find out that I would have one more sem of teaching a subject that, as I’m sure you have been able to tell, I care about so much. But that’s the thing. A person can take only so many farewells, and this person reached her limit.

But I digress.

It’s probably been a while since you’ve thought of me or about my class. I suppose our relationship has always been a bit disproportionate like that. Perhaps it is the blessing and curse of a teacher to think about your students more than your students think about you. Or is that just me?

I loved this subject so much that it was always on my thoughts, which meant I ended up thinking about you a lot. While I was teaching, my teacher mode was always on. What I mean is that I’d be doing lecture prep by just living my life. Whether I was reading for fun, talking to friends, or watching movies, I would often think to myself, “Hey, I should tell my students about this in class tomorrow!” In a way, to be a teacher is to see one’s students everywhere.

Now that I’m not teaching anymore though, I just keep adding to a very long list of things I should have said and done. The teacher mode is still on, but that just leaves me with many thoughts and insights and no one to share them with. Maybe that’s why I’m writing you a letter (again).

Many of you are walking into a classroom today, but I’m not. Not anymore.

During the first few weeks of class, there was always a weird feeling in my chest as I passed a row of classrooms and heard other teachers discuss their syllabi and class policies and knew I wouldn’t be doing the same. I felt it when I realized that my name wasn’t in the subject offerings for enlistment this sem and when I hesitated to delete the Canvas Teacher app off my phone. It hit me most strongly when I found out about a Rizal-themed breakout room for Buwan ng Wika and History Month. It was about the manuscript of Makamisa, and I think you guys would have had fun if we went. It would have been a really good bonus activity, but there is no longer a class that I teach for that to matter.

Why does it sting to speak about teaching in the past tense? It also doesn’t help that my office is at the end of a hallway full of classrooms.

Every time I walk by, I hear the strain in teachers’ voices as they try to make themselves heard above the rain and the electric fans. I hear the rustle of students shaking out umbrellas and turning notebook pages. I hear (and feel!) the teacher’s relief when a joke lands, and the students’ relief that hey, maybe this subject won’t be so bad after all. Somehow, as much as these things are removed from me, they are still so dear to me, all the more now that they are things of the past.

So melodramatic! You might tell me, “Miss, it’s not that deep.” But to me, it was. It is.

It is said that you only realize how precious something is when you are about to lose it. I guess that’s why teaching was always so precious to me — because I always thought that I was about to lose it. This letter is a goodbye that I have said many, many times.

It feels so silly to mourn something for so long and so deeply even if sometimes I feel like I was teaching only in a shallow, watered down way. I was a part-time lecturer with a part-time subject load, I had only one prep for the year and a half I taught in university, making the time I spent in a traditional classroom a measly total of two and a half calendar years. But this letter isn’t about proving to myself that I have a right to this heartache. This letter is for telling you all the things I wanted to say but never did, and I’ll start with this:

I cared about you a lot.

I probably came off as distant because I intended to. Experience taught me not to share even more of myself than I already do share given I’m a teacher. That’s why I tried not to talk about myself, I tried to be approachable but not too approachable, and I only added you all on Facebook after I left the school and was absolutely sure that you can no longer be my students.

But in ways you didn’t see, I think I really still did care way too much. I spent an unreasonable amount of time writing and rewriting my announcements, emails, and feedback so as not to wound. My comments on your essays were essays in themselves. I agonized over every requirement I assigned, checking over and over (on my own but also with my colleagues, and even my siblings and friends) that it was structured in a way that made sense and was useful to you. I wanted you to take my class seriously, but not too seriously. I wanted my class to be a meaningful experience, but not one that weighed too heavily on your academic and personal lives.

Until now, I can’t figure out what to do when I see you outside the classroom or outside school. I’m always trying to gauge the appropriate reaction, but I’m also always so happy to see you. If I look a little panicked or frantic, you’re either seeing my default stressed and frazzled mode or I’m trying to remember your name. I think I’ve said several times that I’m horrible with names, and I feel so guilty that my colleagues seem to memorize your names so effortlessly, and that my own teachers still remember my name after all these years. I kid you not, when I see you outside class and realize I can’t recall your name, I genuinely pull up my class list to review. I do remember some things, like where in the classroom you’re seated (on my left with your blockmates), where in the class list your name is (somewhere around M),or whether you’re in a morning or afternoon class (my last class of the day, and also yours, but your tiredness didn’t show in the quality of your recitation).

In a way, I still try to carry you with me. I already told you that I still think about you when I chance upon things it would have been good to discuss in class, but I also do that in a literal sense. The two origami cats, an amigurumi bee, and a crocheted coaster that you gave me sit on my work desk. A crocheted flower keychain hangs on my lunchbox, and a cat keychain guards the books on my bookshelves. On pages of my journals and planner and in the notes app on my phone, I keep all the funny and profound things you shared with me in recitation or in your essays. There is a box in my room full of all the letters I’ve ever received from you, and even if it seems ridiculous, it was so hard for me to throw away the rubrics for your oral exam midterms, because I wrote down your nicknames on them. (Yet another failed attempt to memorize your names.)

On the last day of the sem, I asked you to write down what I hoped you’d remember about this class. I also gave you a survey on your experiences of this class to document my teaching approaches. But I haven’t read them, not really. I skimmed through them enough to assign bonus points when necessary. I’m hoarding them, happy knowing I have them secreted away in my shelves and in my Google Drive. At the same time, I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I look through them. What if my worst fears are true, and I was a terrible teacher and you thought my class was pointless? But I think that would be just as heartbreaking as finding out that I was a good teacher and that you did have a meaningful experience in my class, and that I made a grave mistake by deciding not to teach for another school year.

Teaching meant, and means, everything to me. I never took this job lightly, even if I tried to temper my idealism so I wouldn’t end up burning myself out (again). I worry I’ve left behind something essential to the person I am and want to be by stepping away from the teaching profession, even if I don’t intend to do so permanently. As I was writing you this letter, some of you heard I’d no longer be teaching this school year and asked me what happened. I didn’t go into detail, because at times, when I think about my decision, I stray dangerously close to something like regret. I just desperately hope that my decision didn’t cheapen everything I said and did as a teacher.

What is my class like, in your memory? I can never know, but in my imagination, it was where you realized what it could mean to see a person as a person and treat them as such. It was where you explored your place in building a more just world. It was where you had a change of heart. That is all I can really ever hope for as a teacher, because no matter what I say or do, only you can make your choices for you.

I only ever wanted the hours of your lives that you spent in my class to mean something to each of you, and for that to make itself felt in the people and situations around you.

This letter is embarrassingly long, and I don’t know how to end it. I feel I’ve said too much, revealed too much. I think I’ll just end it with yet another embarrassing letter, which I left anonymously at an exhibit I visited days before I decided to leave teaching (for now):

To my students —

I know it doesn’t seem like I do, but I care about you a lot. I’m always regretting the things I didn’t do and the things I could have done better. Many times a day, I remember you and it makes me smile. I hope it somehow means something to you to have been loved so clumsily. I don’t know if you’ll know it or feel it though.

— Ms. M.

ViARE’s The Anti-Color Division, written and directed by Ally Solis, an alumna of the Political Economy program, imagines that shift inside a paint company where color starts becoming an inconvenience. Staged at Dizon Auditorium from September 28 to 30, with the final show on October 3.

The story begins before anyone sits down. Each ticket handed to the audience is a time card—the kind workers use to clock in and out of a shift—and robot workers roam the audience in their seats. By the time the lights dim, the audience themselves become employees of Rainbow Paints. The future the play warns about has clocked in before us.

Inside, the stage becomes the workshop factory of Rainbow Paints, humming with old, nostalgic music. Workers tune the dials in the workshop and create new colors. One worker briefly breaks character to stretch her sore neck, as if doing the job really aches. The company’s slogan promises that “life could be a little less dull“, yet its neutral division gets raises and nicer workshops, while the color division gets nothing new.

Mr. Whitman, played by Rafa Racho, provides the play with an unsettling presence. He asks Reese Garcia’s Julia to create a dark white or a light black, and presents it as a simple task. In truth, it is part of his scheme: each shade moves the neutral division a step forward, while the color division is slowly phased out. Each step sounds reasonable on its own, which is how the color division disappears without anyone ever announcing it. Gray is practical. Gray is cheaper. Gray is what you get when everything is made interchangeable. It’s hard not to see our own world in that, where more tasks are automated, more experiences are streamlined, and “efficient” has quietly become another word for “good.”

Against that stands Art, played by Kay Cabacungan, who believes color is more than just pigment. To him, it carries memories, sceneries, and emotions—the things that make life feel lived. When he is told to desaturate his teal with more white, he refuses to make a gray. Julia sees the same teal differently. Where Art finds feeling, she finds deadlines and shades to make, and when she is offered a place in the neutral division, she chooses to take it. The play never casts her as wrong. Her gray is the choice most of us would make quietly; the practical one, trading wonder for something useful.

The production’s lighting does much of the arguing. Colors wash across the stage to set each mood or to paint the scene itself, so when the lights cut out mid-performance and return blindingly bright, the loss of color is felt rather than explained. The ensemble (Kyri Maramo, Tobey Perez, JD Caparas, Abram Erna, Mar Suemith) deserves its own credit. As the robots and machines of Rainbow Paints, they turned the factory itself into a performance, and later became the whirlwind that swallows Art’s fight. The robots who greeted us at the door were not only a warning about a duller future; they were part of the system that stops anyone from resisting it.

Then comes the ending. Art storms into Mr. Whitman’s office, shows off the new color he created after a week of strain, and the answer he gets leaves him with nothing to hold onto. In protest, he sprays the newly-made paint across the room and lunges at Mr. Whitman until the ensemble swarms him in a whirlwind of fighting.

Then everything stops and rewinds. None of it happened. It was all in his head, and then he quietly left.

It was the saddest moment of the night, and the most honest. Holding a belief is easy; acting on it is hard. The play suggests that dullness rarely wins by force. It wins because the people who care most are the ones who stay silent.

As the lights came back up and as my eyes adjusted, one thing was clear: I understood Art the most, yet part of me felt for Julia. Her decision to join the neutral division may have seemed like the wrong choice because of how important the color division is in preserving the sliver of whimsy and wonder in people’s lives. We might have mixed feelings about her decision, but we still understand it—even Art did. To believe in something takes determination, but standing by it takes more than that. And sometimes the world makes giving in look like the only practical choice.

Maybe the lesson is that the fight Art imagined, loud and all at once, isn’t the only way to stand by something. Sometimes it is smaller and quieter, like refusing to make a gray when we could make our own color, or keeping the things that make life feel lived even when no one has time for them. Art’s fight ended where it began, in his head, and that is the part worth taking home. A belief we never act on, even in the little ways, will fade just as surely as the ones we abandon.

So as the lights fade, the question lingers for everyone in the audience. What memory, what feeling, what color will you fight for before it fades?

But sometimes, a song gets left behind.

It stays inside an old notebook in the corner of a room, untouched because life gets too busy. The chords become harder to remember. The lyrics that once came so easily begin to feel unfamiliar. Days become months, months become years, until one day, you find yourself returning to the same song you once promised you would finish.

For Rain and River, that song is KasLoy.

Dulaang Rock Opera Company’s (Dulaang ROC) KasLoy: Bukas Itutuloy, written by John Custer and directed by Ricci Ferrera, follows two friends who meet at a mountain peak with guitars in hand and a song they have been trying to complete for years. The play moves between their past, present, and future as they revisit the memories that shaped their friendship and everything that has changed since they first began writing the song.

At first, KasLoy feels deceptively light.

Rain, played by Manuel Casapao, arrives at the mountain carrying an oversized bag for a picnic. River, played by Airyn Jace Santiago, greets him with a birthday surprise. What follows is a string of teasing, complaints, jokes, and arguments over food and lyrics. Rain has gone all out with the picnic setup, inspired by one he saw online, but after everything is unpacked and the food is gone, all that is left are sandwiches and water.

These small exchanges establish the friendship before the play asks us to understand its weight.

Rain and River use small, shruggable interactions to show that they know each other. They interrupt one another, remember old jokes, and bring up embarrassing habits. River can imitate Rain’s old voice asking to make a song together, while Rain can immediately answer with the same irritation he had years ago. When the two return to KasLoy, even their unfinished lyrics become part of their familiar rhythm.

Instead of simply telling the audience that these two have been friends for years, the production lets their history surface through their dialogue and manner. Their friendship feels lived-in because the audience is allowed to see the little things that have accumulated between them over time.

And then, almost quietly, the jokes begin to mean something more.

The mountain is more than the setting where the play happens. It is a place Rain and River have returned to in different parts of their lives. Over the course of the play, the mountain becomes a witness to their friendship, holding memories of birthdays, conversations, arguments, and moments when the outside world felt too heavy.

The production need not change the setting of the mountain to show that time has passed. The place remains familiar, while the people who come back to it do not. They return with different stories, different plans, and different versions of themselves.

The play moves through these memories through conversation, silence, and especially music. A familiar guitar introduction brings Rain and River back to the song they started years ago. Lyrics are repeated, changed, challenged, and built upon. What begins as something playful between two friends slowly becomes a record of everything that has happened since they first wrote it.

Even the title captures this idea.

KasLoy plays on “Bukas Itutuloy,” turning tomorrow into something active rather than distant. It is not simply a promise that something will happen someday. It is a decision to continue. That idea keeps returning throughout the song, especially as Rain becomes determined to finish it before leaving for another country.

This is where the play’s message begins to unfold.

KasLoy is not really about finishing a song.

It is about what happens when life interrupts the things we thought we had more time for.

Rain and River’s conversations gradually reveal how much can change when we assume that things will eventually return to normal. Their lives have moved in different directions. Their plans have changed. The pandemic has left losses that neither of them can simply undo. Yet they still return to the same mountain, the same friendship, and the same unfinished song.

There is something painful about that repetition.

The mountain, the song, and the memories are still there.

But the people who return to them have changed.

For me, that was where KasLoy began to feel less like a story happening onstage and more like a feeling I recognized outside of it. There is a particular kind of grief in returning to something familiar and realizing that familiarity does not mean permanence. A classroom can look the same while the people who once sat in it have moved on. A restaurant can still serve the same food while the person you used to eat with is no longer beside you. Even a song can remain unchanged while the person who first sang it with you has become part of a memory.

The production gives these ideas room to settle instead of rushing toward them.

Its pacing is one aspect that may require patience from its audience. KasLoy lets conversations linger, pauses remain, and memories surface gradually. There are moments when the story feels deliberately slow, but that rhythm ultimately fits the subject it is exploring. Memory rarely arrives in perfect order. One joke can bring back an entire afternoon. One place can remind you of someone. One unfinished sentence can suddenly mean something years later.

The play understands this through its music.

The song does not simply appear as an interlude between scenes. It develops alongside the relationship. A lyric that sounds playful in one moment can carry a different weight when repeated later. The audience hears the same melody but slowly understands more of what sits behind it. By allowing the song to grow with the story, ROC makes music feel less like decoration and more like a record of what Rain and River have shared.

The performances benefit from that same restraint. The protagonists’ actors are given space to establish Rain and River as friends before asking the audience to sit with the heavier parts of their relationship. Their humor gives the emotional moments somewhere to come from, making the shift feel earned rather than sudden.

And perhaps that is why the ordinary parts of their friendship matter so much.

It is not the grand moments that first convince us that Rain and River care about each other. It is Rain bringing too much food. River complaining about it. Their constant teasing. Their arguments over lyrics. The fact that they keep returning to the same mountain.

The production lets these ordinary moments accumulate until the audience understands that this is what friendship often looks like: not a collection of dramatic declarations, but years of small memories that become meaningful precisely because they seemed insignificant when they happened.

That is also what makes the play’s grief feel familiar.

Watching KasLoy, I found myself thinking about my own unfinished things. Not necessarily songs, but conversations, plans, places, and versions of myself that I thought I would have more time to return to.

The play does not tell us that we should remain in the past. Instead, it asks what it means to continue while still acknowledging what came before. The past can remain part of us without becoming the place where we stay.

We spend so much of our lives waiting for the next thing to begin. But perhaps tomorrow does not ask us to become someone entirely new. Perhaps it only asks us to take what mattered with us and take the next step.

That is what KasLoy left me with. After watching Rain and River return to the same mountain, the same memories, and the same unfinished song, I found myself thinking about all the things I have been putting off for “someday.”

Maybe someday does not have to remain someday. Maybe all we have to do is take one foot forward and begin.

Bukas, itutuloy.

Dulaang Rock Opera Company’s KasLoy: Bukas Itutuloy runs at Telengtan Hall, ACB (Apex Communications Building), from October 1–3 and 9 at 8:00 PM, and October 10 at 3:00 PM and 8:00 PM. For anyone who has ever returned to an old place, an old memory, or an unfinished part of themselves, KasLoy is a story worth sitting with.

A renewed partnership

The seminar grew out of a courtesy call by H.E. Felipe Díaz, Ambassador of Chile, on UA&P President Atty. Philip Yeung, in which he expressed interest in renewing the university’s institutional ties with the Embassy. The Embassy later proposed a seminar on regionalism in Asia and the Americas, particularly South America, in the context of the Philippines’ ASEAN Presidency. On April 7, Ambassador Díaz and Diplomatic Officer Mr. Pedro Pizarro met UA&P representatives to settle the concept of a joint academic seminar.

Ambassador Díaz opened the program, and Atty. Allesandra Fay Albarico, Dean of the School of Politics and Governance, welcomed the diplomatic corps on behalf of UA&P.

Lectures and ambassadorial presentations

Dr. Bernardo Villegas, UA&P co-founder, economist, and University Professor Emeritus, delivered the opening lecture.

The first block of presentations featured H.E. Ricardo Bocalandro, Ambassador of Argentina, and H.E. Daniel Hernández Joseph, Ambassador of Mexico. A question-and-answer session then followed. The second block heard from H.E. Gilberto Fonseca Guimarães de Moura of Brazil, H.E. Eduardo Young Virzi of Panama, and H.E. Carmen Azurín Araujo of Peru.

Dr. Benjamin N. Muego, Full Professor of International Relations and Diplomacy at Philippine Women’s University, gave the closing lecture. Ambassador Díaz then offered closing words before guests moved to a cocktail reception.

The discussions were organized around two themes. The first, international politics and regional governance, covered models such as ASEAN, the OAS, the Pacific Alliance, APEC, RCEP, CPTPP, and MERCOSUR, along with strategic competition, middle powers, and regional order in the Indo-Pacific. The second, economics, resilience, and digital transformation, covered regional trade agreements, supply chain resilience, open rules-based trade, and new avenues for Asia-Latin America commerce in the digital economy.

A call for closer collaboration

The seminar is the first stage of a longer initiative. At the close of the event, organizers released essay prompts drawn from the two tracks. Philippine undergraduate and graduate students may submit essays of up to 1,000 words in English until October 28. Selected authors will then present 10-minute papers to a panel of diplomats and academics at UA&P at a date to be announced. The top essays will be edited and published in a commemorative volume under the ASEAN Presidency 2026 banner, expected after October–November 2026.

The event was organized by UA&P’s Marketing and Corporate Experience office in partnership with the Embassy of Chile.

On September 23, 2026, the College of Arts and Sciences, through ARTS 111: Fine Arts – Visual Arts, held Reading the Camarín, an Artist Talk on the ceiling paintings of the Camarín de la Virgen at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Abandoned in Santa Ana, Manila. Members of the UA&P community took part in the event.

The resource speaker was Mr. James Rainz Morales, Chairperson of the Santa Ana Church Heritage Commission. He guided participants through the camarín, a chamber behind and above the main altar where the image of Our Lady of the Abandoned is kept and venerated. Its ceiling holds eleven panels depicting scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and of Christ. Painted in the 1720s, they are the oldest datable oil-on-wood paintings in the Philippines and have been declared a National Cultural Treasure.

The panels belong to a wider story. They were made at a time when Manila stood at a crossroads of exchange linking Asia, the Americas, and Europe, and when images, devotions, and artistic forms traveled across oceans. They are works of faith, and they reward the patient work of reason: reading them closely shows how a local community received a visual language shared across the world, reshaped it, and made it its own.

The talk traced the devotion that gave rise to the camarín, offered a reading of the panels, and turned to the work of conserving them today. Mr. Morales showed that the paintings have survived nearly three centuries because two things have worked together. One is a community of devotees that has kept the room in use and in prayer. The other is careful, skilled conservation carried on in the face of present-day pressures.

This speaks to a question that heritage practitioners around the world increasingly share: how can heritage be sustained not only as an object to be protected, but as something living, held in trust by the people for whom it still carries meaning? The camarín offers one answer. A work endures when its materials are cared for, and also when each generation learns to see it, value it, and take responsibility for it as part of the common good.

The College extends its gratitude to Mr. Morales, the Santa Ana Church Heritage Commission, and Fr. Virgilio del Mundo, OFM, Parish Priest, for entrusting this treasure to a new generation of viewers. Special thanks as well to Mr. David Neil Joseph Lumba, who served as the event’s emcee, and to Ms. Eri Kondo and Ms. Tanaya Reverie Rafanan, former ARTS 111 students who joined the panel of reactors.

Sa makabagong panahon ng digital media, paano nga ba natin magagamit ang wikang Filipino upang makabuo ng makabuluhan at responsableng komunikasyon? Ito ang pangunahing tanong at layuning sinagot sa Agora na inorganisa ng klase ng Fil111A o Lìka-Likhâ: Sining ng Content Crfeation mula sa block ng Fil111A-4 at 6 noong Setyembre 24 sa Room 401 at 25 sa PLDT Hall, parehong gusali ng ACB. Bitbit nito ang temang: “Sipat at Suri: Ang Papel ng Bagong Henerasyon Bilang Edukampeyon sa Content Creation.”

Sa kasaysayan ng sinaunang Gresya, ginagawa ang Agora noon bilang sentral na pampublikong espasyo. Dito nagtitipon ang mga mamamayan upang talakayin ang mahahalagang bagay, makisali sa debateng pampulitika, magsagawa ng negosyo, at makihalubilo. Sa modernong konteksto, ang terminong Agora ay kumakatawan sa isang plataporma o espasyo kung saan malayang makapag-uusap, makapagdebate, makapagpalitan ng mga ideya, at makalalahok ang mga tao sa makabuluhang mga pag-uusap tulad ng nito.

Ang gawaing ito ay ideya at pinangunahan ni G. Albert Lagrimas, guro ng FIl111A, bilang bahagi ng pagpapalalim ng kaalaman ng klase kaugnay sa Sining ng Content Creation at mga hamong kinahaharap sa paglikha nito. Ang Fil 111A ay isa sa mga bagong asignatura na inaalok ng CLE o Center for Liberal Education ng College or Arts and Letters. Ang pagtatag ng CLE ng unibersad ay sa layuning mas patataganin at paghuhubog ng kabuuang pundasyon ng pagkatao at pagkatuto ng sinomang mag-aaral ng unibersidad.

Tinalakay sa dalawang araw na ito ng programa ang sining ng content creation at ang tama at etikal at tamang paggawa ng content batay sa 4Es - Educate o Magturo, Engage o Makipag-ugnayan), Entertain o Magbigay-aliw, at Empower o Magbigay-lakas, maging ang prosesong pinagdaraanan nito. At higit sa lahat ang responsableng pagbabahagi ng impormasyon at ang mahalagang papel ng wikang Filipino sa kasalukuyang paraan ng pakikipagtalastasan online.

Sa unang araw ng Agora ibinahagi ni G. Johan Kyle Ong na isa ng alumus ng unibersidad na may kursong Integrated Marketing at nakilala sa paggawa ng content sa Filipino Fashion, ang kanyang mga karanasan sa pagsisimula niya ng content creation. Nagbahagi siya sa klase na inorganisa ng block 4 sa pangunguna ng kanilang overall project head na si Bb. Riza Alana Phoebe Merencilla, mag-aaral sa 36YP ng MAHUM. Nag-iwan si Ginoong Johan ng apat na mahalagang payo para sa mga mag-aaral: “Be yourself, be delusional, be consistent, and find your purpose.” Higit sa lahat, ibinahagi niyang bago pumasok sa mundo ng paglikha ng content, napakahalagang unahin muna ang pagiging totoo sa sarili.

Sa ikalawang araw naman ng programa, ibinahagi ni G. Yukio Estrella, isang 3rd Year student mula sa kursong MEM at kilalang Fashion and Lifestyle Content Creator. Nagbahagi siya sa klase na inorganisa ng block 6 sa pangunguna ng kanilang overall project head na si Bb. Hailey Rochine Mekairi Mendoza, mag-aaral sa 36YP ng MSIE. Kasama rin niyang nagbahagi si Bb. Aira Miu, mag-aaral sa ikatlong taon ng MEM, at content creator tungkol sa mga sasakyan.

Ipinaliwanag ng dalawang tagapagsalita ang pagiging tapat at totoo sa pagpromote ng mga produkto o brand ay ang mismong pundasyon ng kanilang kredibilidad hindi lamang bilang content creator, kundi bilang isang mabuti at responsableng tao. Ipinaalala nila sa mga dumalo na hindi kailangang maging perpekto sa social media. Ang pagpapakatotoo sa sarili at sa kanilang mga viewers at followers ay nagdudulot ng mas kritikal na content na mas tinatangkilik sa internet.

Higit sa Akademikong Gawain: Ang Wikang Filipino bilang Kasangkapan ng “EduKampyon.” Ang AGORA ay higit pa sa isang kinakailangang kahingian sa paaralan. Nagsilbi itong malinaw na patunay ng intelektwalisasyon ng wikang Filipino kung paano ito nagagamit sa edukasyon, pampublikong komunikasyon, at sa digital na mundo. Naipakita ng kaganapan na ang ating wika ay isang buhay, malikhain, at epektibong instrumento upang makakonekta sa makabagong henerasyon ng mga manonood.

Pagtugon sa hamon ng digital na lipunan

Sa huli, kinatawan ng dalawang symposium ang mismong kahulugan ng pamagat nitong AGORA bitbit ang tema. Nagsilbi itong malayang palitan ng ideya at kaalaman upang ang bawat mag-aaral ay maging isang ganap na “EduKampyon,” isang indibidwal na hindi lamang naghahangad na lumikha ng content, kundi gumagamit ng sariling boses at edukasyon upang mag-iwan ng positibong epekto sa lipunan.

Sa pamamagitan ng patuloy na pagtangkilik sa wikang Filipino sa digital na espasyo, ang mga mag-aaral ng UA&P ay patuloy na makikipag-ugnayan at mag-aambag sa isang mas masigla, may layunin, at makabuluhang komunidad online.

The 2.7-hectare facility will feature a 50-bay driving range, short-game facilities, golf simulators, practice areas, a golf-specific gym, pickleball courts, sports retail, dining, and other lifestyle amenities.

But more than a driving range, the project aims to help raise the next generation of Filipino golfers.

A partnership built on sport and education

The partnership builds on the relationship between UA&P and Villaroman Golf Academy.

UA&P has integrated golf into its Physical Education program, becoming the first university in the Philippines to do so in 2025, with VGA providing coaching and training expertise. The program reflects the University’s belief that sport can help form not only athletes, but also individuals of character—developing qualities such as integrity, patience, focus, discipline, and perseverance.

The University is taking this commitment further. UA&P President Philip Yeung recently revealed that the University now offers a bespoke educational program for high-level athletes, allowing them to pursue a UA&P education while accommodating the demands of a rigorous training and competition schedule.

The program is designed to give elite athletes greater flexibility in managing their academic requirements alongside intensive training, travel, and competition—allowing them to pursue excellence in both sport and education.

The initiative reflects UA&P’s belief that young athletes should not have to choose between developing their athletic potential and receiving a quality university education.

Coach Carito Villaroman’s legacy

At the center of the project is Coach Carito Villaroman, a former touring professional who has spent decades developing Filipino golfers.

Villaroman’s coaching career includes working with some of the Philippines’ most accomplished golfers, including Yuka Saso and Bianca Pagdanganan, who were part of the Philippine team that won the women’s team gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games.

Villaroman has worked with many other Filipino golfers who have gone on to compete at high levels, building a coaching legacy centered on developing players from their formative years.

His experience gives VGA a strong foundation for creating a structured pathway for the next generation of Filipino golfers.

Raising the next generation

The Maple Grove facility is envisioned as a comprehensive training environment that can support golfers at different stages of their development—from beginners discovering the sport to competitive athletes preparing for national and international competition.

Training will cover the full range of what it takes to become a better golfer: full-swing development, short-game skills, physical conditioning, technology, and performance preparation.

The facility’s dedicated short-game area will allow players to work on an aspect of golf that is critical to competitive performance but often difficult to practice properly. Golf simulators and other technology will complement traditional practice, while the facility’s gym will support the physical demands of high-level play.

VGA will offer structured programs for beginners, enthusiasts, and competitive golfers, expanding access to quality coaching and facilities.

For VGA, the project is ultimately about giving young golfers a place to discover the game, develop discipline and confidence, and pursue opportunities in junior, collegiate, national, professional, and international competition.

Monsieur to a convict is like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy thirsts for consideration.

– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

There is a kind of person we find easy to forgive: someone who made one careless mistake, admitted it quickly, apologized sincerely, and never did it again. Then there is everyone else: the person who lied for years, the friend who betrayed us, the relative who keeps repeating the same harm, or the offender whose apology comes only after the consequences become painful. It is easy to support forgiveness as an idea. It is much harder when a real person stands before us carrying the weight of what they have done. So, should everyone get a second chance?

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Pope John Paul II’s 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy) do not give us a simple yes or no. Both treat mercy not as softhearted denial, but as a response that holds together human dignity, truth, responsibility, and the possibility of change. The better question may be this: Must a person’s worst act become the whole truth about them?

The man society had already judged

At the beginning of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean has been turned into a verdict. He has spent nineteen years in the French prison system: five for breaking a window and stealing a loaf of bread for his widowed sister’s hungry children, and fourteen more added because of four escape attempts. On release, he must carry a yellow passport identifying him as a former convict. It is not quite accurate to say that he is rejected by literally everyone, but the pattern is unmistakable: doors close, lodging is denied, and even the work he finds is underpaid.1

Valjean has served his legal sentence, yet society treats that sentence as his permanent identity. In Hugo, we see an interest not only in crime but also in what happens after punishment. What future does a society offer when it tells a person to reform while blocking nearly every path back into ordinary life? Valjean’s bitterness does not come from nowhere. Years of brutal confinement and rejection have deepened it. That history helps explain his conduct; it does not excuse it.

Then Bishop Myriel offers him a meal, shelter, and a bed. Valjean repays him by stealing the bishop’s silver plates. When the police return Valjean, the bishop says the silver was a gift and adds two candlesticks. After the officers leave, he tells Valjean to use the silver to become an honest man. In one English translation, he declares: “You no longer belong to evil, but to good.”2

We should not flatten this scene into a general rule that victims must conceal crimes or refuse legal help. It is one character’s radical, freely chosen act in a novel. Myriel takes a personal risk with his own property; he does not volunteer someone else’s safety or erase someone else’s loss. Nor does he simply announce, “Nothing happened.” He knows that Valjean stole from him. His gift changes what can happen next. The silver becomes both material help and a moral demand: build a different life. Here, a second chance is not a prize for innocence. It is an invitation to become responsible for freedom.

Mercy does not mean that harm was harmless

This is where Dives in Misericordia offers an important correction to the idea that mercy is merely being nice. Reflecting on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, John Paul II does not deny that the son has wasted his inheritance and hurt his father. The son himself recognizes what he has done. Yet the father sees that something fundamental remains: his son’s humanity and dignity. The son has acted badly, but he has not become worthless.3

Mercy, then, is not pretending that an injury caused no harm. It does not erase victims, cancel every consequence, or require trust to return on command. As the encyclical puts it, mercy differs from justice but is not opposed to it.4 Later, it states plainly that generous forgiveness does not cancel “the objective requirements of justice.”5 That question is uncomfortable because punishment can feel final, while restoration is usually slow. Restoration may include restitution, treatment, supervision, changed behavior, and limits that last for years. In some cases, safety may require permanent separation.

John Paul II warns that a world stripped of forgiveness would become a world of “cold and unfeeling justice.” He also calls forgiveness a basic condition for reconciliation.6 Read in context, this is not a call to abandon boundaries. It is a warning that justice alone cannot create healed relationships or a humane society.

Our language can work against that possibility. We say that someone is a thief, a liar, an addict, a criminal, or a failure. Such words may point to real acts or patterns. But when a description becomes a person’s permanent name, it can deny even the possibility of change. The label becomes a second prison, one with no release date.

Valjean changes, but not all at once

It would be easy to make Valjean’s story too neat: the bishop forgives him, Valjean sees the light, and from then on, he is a different man. Hugo does not make transformation that simple. Soon after leaving the bishop, Valjean encounters Petit-Gervais, a young traveling chimney sweep from Savoy. When the boy drops a forty-sou coin, Valjean plants his foot on it and drives him away. Only afterward does he fully grasp what he has done. He calls for the boy and searches for him, but cannot find him.7

Before we get lost in the succeeding events of the novel, let us pause before the scene because it matters. Valjean is not instantly perfected. He is a man caught between an old, hardened self and a new moral possibility. Mercy has opened a door; it has not carried him through it.

Years later, under the name Monsieur Madeleine, he has become a successful manufacturer and the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He creates jobs and uses his wealth generously. Yet even his good intentions cannot prevent every injustice: Fantine is dismissed from his factory by a supervisor without his knowledge, and Valjean realizes too late how badly she has been failed. He then cares for her and commits himself to rescuing her daughter, Cosette.8

Later still, he risks his safety for other people, including Marius, the young man Cosette loves. His life does not become spotless or simple, but its direction changes. Valjean’s second chance matters because mercy does not stop with him. Mercy received becomes mercy practiced. That may be one of the clearest signs that change is real: not a dramatic promise, but a sustained difference in how a person treats other people.

What if the person does not change?

Not every life follows Valjean’s arc. Some people apologize and repeat the harm. Some use the language of forgiveness to avoid accountability. Some demand the same access to our lives without doing the work required to become trustworthy. No one is morally required to make themselves, or anyone else, unsafe in order to prove that they are merciful.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, and trust overlap, but they are not the same thing. Forgiveness can mean giving up revenge or refusing to let hatred govern one’s life. Reconciliation rebuilds a relationship and requires participation from both sides. Trust concerns what it is reasonable and safe to rely on; once broken, it must be earned through consistent conduct.

These distinctions are a practical interpretation of mercy, not definitions supplied word for word by Hugo or the encyclical. They matter because careless talk about “second chances” can pressure victims to resume contact, restore authority, or ignore danger. Yet Christian mercy cannot be reduced to keeping one’s distance and then forgetting the person who caused harm. Mercy must remain joined to charity: the steady desire for that person’s good, conversion, and restoration to a life of truth, even when prudence requires separation.

A person may therefore be forgiven without being welcomed back into the same role and treated as fully human without being given the same access. Refusing revenge does not require pretending that trust has been repaired. Love may take the form of prayer, honest correction, fair treatment, help offered through safe channels, or support for genuine reform. It does not mean shielding someone from the consequences of what they did; those consequences may be part of how responsibility and change become possible.

In that sense, a boundary need not be the opposite of mercy or charity. It can protect the wounded, restrain further harm, and leave room for the wrongdoer to seek a better path. The aim is neither easy reinstatement nor cold abandonment, but a love governed by truth, justice, and concern for the good of everyone involved.

The risk and discipline of hope

The bishop’s mercy is risky. He has no guarantee that Valjean will change. Valjean has just stolen from him. That is what makes the scene unsettling. The bishop acts before he has proof of reform. Most of us want the proof first: an honest account, restitution, treatment, years of changed behavior. Often, that caution is wise. Yet people also need some real way to demonstrate change. A society that demands rehabilitation while permanently excluding people from work, housing, community, and civic life creates a contradiction: “Become different, but we will never treat you differently.”

This tension lies at the heart of a second chance. Hope says, “You can become more than what you have done.” Accountability says, “You must still face what you have done.” Without hope, justice can harden into vengeance. Without accountability, mercy can collapse into indulgence. In Dives in Misericordia, mercy restores a person “to value” and helps draw good from evil without calling evil good.9 Hugo turns that idea into a life. Bishop Myriel not only spares Valjean from arrest; he confronts him with the possibility, and obligation, of becoming someone new.

So, should everyone get a second chance?

Everyone should be regarded as more than their worst act. That does not mean everyone is owed the same kind of second chance, from every person, in every setting. For someone leaving prison, a second chance may mean a fair opportunity to find work and housing. In a damaged friendship, it may mean one honest conversation—or respectful distance. In a workplace, it may involve supervision and a gradual return of responsibility. After abuse or repeated harm, it may mean recognizing the wrongdoer’s humanity while maintaining a firm, even permanent, boundary.

A second chance does not make the past disappear. It means the past need not dictate the only future available. Jean Valjean is not transformed because someone tells him that theft does not matter. He begins to change because someone sees that theft is not all he is, and then calls him to live according to that larger truth. That may be the hardest form of mercy: not excusing a person, not trusting them blindly, but leaving room for accountability, repair, and moral growth. Second chances matter because none of us is only the sum of our failures. We may not be innocent or untouched by consequence, but we are still unfinished. In Christian theology, that unfinishedness rests finally in God: like the loving father in the parable, he keeps open the way home, calling the sinner to repent and receive mercy again.10

Kabilang sa mga isinagawang aktibidad ang Natatanging Kasuotan, Tagisan ng Talino, at Timpalak sa Pagsulat ng Tula, na nagbigay ng pagkakataon sa mga mag-aaral na ipamalas ang kanilang pagkamalikhain, kaalaman, at pagpapahalaga sa kulturang Pilipino.

Isinagawa ang seremonya ng pagpaparangal noong Setyembre 16, 2026, kung saan kinilala ang mga mag-aaral na nanguna sa iba’t ibang patimpalak. Lalo ring naging makulay ang programa sa pamamagitan ng mga musical number mula sa mga mag-aaral ng Grade 11, na tampok ang mga kontemporaryong awitin at Original Pilipino Music (OPM).

Binigyang-pugay ni Dr. Moreal Camba, Vice Dean for Faculty and Student Affairs ng College of Arts and Sciences, ang sama-samang pagsisikap ng mga guro, hurado, kawani, at higit sa lahat, ng mga mag-aaral na naging bahagi ng pagdiriwang.

Sa kanyang mensahe sa pagtatapos ng programa, binigyang-diin ni Mrs. Elerosa Caparas, Direktor ng Junior College Program, na ang tunay na diwa ng Linggo ng Wika ay higit pa sa isang linggong pagdiriwang.

“At ’yan naman talaga ang dahilan ng pagdiriwang ng Linggo ng Wika. Hindi lang ito tungkol sa pagsusuot ng Filipiniana o Barong. Hindi lang tungkol sa pagbigkas ng ‘Mabuhay!’ o pagsali sa isang programa. Sana hindi lang siya isang Linggo o isang Buwan.

Dahil ang dapat araw-araw na isinasabuhay ang pagnanais nating ipagmalaki kung sino tayo at ang diwa ng pagiging Pilipino.

Ang tanging hiling ko: saanman kayo makarating, huwag kayong maging sobrang global na makalimutan ninyo kung saan kayo nagmula.

Maaari kayong maging world-class at manatiling pusong Pinoy.

Maaari kayong maging mahusay at manatiling mapagpakumbaba, at kilalanin nang may pagmamalaki ang tatak Pinoy.

Maaari kayong mamuno—at marunong pa ring maglingkod.

Sapagkat ang pagiging Pilipino ay hindi isang bagay na iniiwan natin kapag tayo ay umaalis sa Pilipinas. Bahagi ito ng kung sino tayo, at dala-dala natin ito saanman tayo mapunta.”

Sa pamamagitan ng mga gawaing ito, ipinamalas ng UA&P community na ang pagpapahalaga sa pagka-Pilipino ay hindi nagtatapos sa isang programa o pagdiriwang. Sa halip, ito ay isang pagpapahalagang patuloy na hinuhubog at isinasabuhay—kasabay ng paghahanda sa mga mag-aaral na makibahagi sa isang pandaigdigang lipunan nang hindi kinakalimutan ang kanilang pinagmulan.

Sa UA&P, ang pagiging world-class ay maaaring sabayan ng pagiging pusong Pinoy—mahusay ngunit mapagpakumbaba, handang mamuno, at higit sa lahat, handang maglingkod.

Every so often, it is worth returning to the word education itself.

Education is easily associated with schools, classrooms, teachers, lessons, and degrees. Understandably so. But the work of education extends well beyond the classroom.

Two Latin words are often associated with its meaning: educare, to nurture or bring up, and educere, to lead or draw forth. Taken together, they offer a compelling way of thinking about what an educator is called to do.

To educate is, in part, to nurture what is already there. A child comes into a classroom with interests, questions, relationships, a temperament, and a particular way of making sense of the world. A university student does, too. So does a teacher who has been in the profession for twenty years. Education does not begin with an empty person waiting to be filled.

But education also asks that something be drawn forth. There is always the possibility of becoming. Young children make this particularly visible. Watch a child spend a surprisingly long time trying to balance blocks, negotiate with a classmate, make something work, or explain an idea that is still taking shape. An adult may know how to fix the tower. A teacher may already know the word the child is searching for. It is tempting to step in.

Sometimes, though, the better act of teaching is to wait.

There is something of educere in that moment. The educator does not always need to stand in front, pulling the learner toward a predetermined answer. Sometimes the work is to create the conditions, pay close attention, ask a good question, and trust that there is something worth drawing out. This also gives fuller meaning to the idea of holistic development. It can easily become a list: intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral. But that is not how development is experienced. A person does not develop one domain at a time. Each aspect influences, and is influenced by, the others, all within the development of the same person.

A child learning to take turns is learning much more than a social skill. A university student struggling through a difficult project is learning about the subject, certainly, but perhaps also about frustration, judgment, responsibility, perseverance, and grit. An experienced teacher returning to graduate school brings years of practice into conversation with new ideas. An employee learning to lead a team is also learning how to understand people.The years spent in school are only one part of a much longer life of learning and growth.

This understanding has long been part of the work of the UA&P School of Education and Human Development. As SED marks its Foundation Anniversary this September 15, the occasion offers an opportunity not only to look back on the years that have passed but also to return to a basic question: What does it mean to educate a person?

SED works with children and families. It forms future teachers and accompanies practicing educators. It studies human development and prepares people who will lead learning in schools, communities, and organizations. The settings change. The learners do, too. Yet underneath these different forms of work is one conviction: the human person remains capable of growth throughout life.

Perhaps this is what it means to form leaders of learning across the lifespan.

A leader of learning need not always have a classroom. It may be a preschool teacher who knows when to intervene and when to observe. A parent learning to see a situation from a child’s point of view. A school leader creating the conditions in which teachers can do good work. A human resource professional thinking carefully about how people grow within an organization. Or a university professor who understands that teaching never removes the need to remain a learner. There is something worth noticing in the word educere. To lead out suggests movement. Education should take a person somewhere. Yet educare reminds us that how a person is accompanied along the way matters just as much.

Nurture and draw forth. Care for the person who is here now, while recognizing the person who is still becoming.

Good education can take many forms, and there will always be debates about methods, curricula, and what learners ought to know. Beneath these questions, however, lies something more enduring.

Education begins with seeing the whole person, both as one who is and one who is still becoming.

And, perhaps, that is also where it must always return.

There is a growing paradox in education: Schools must teach students how to use artificial intelligence because they will need it in the workplace. But if students become too dependent on AI, they may fail to develop the very skills employers will need most — critical thinking, creativity, judgment and the ability to solve problems independently.

For the Philippines, getting that balance right is important.

The country continues to lose ground in the global competition for talent. From 54th place in 2022, it slipped to 64th out of 69 economies in the 2025 World Talent Ranking of the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD), scoring just 34.72 out of 100.

Industry leaders and human resources practitioners have long complained about the mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. Curricula simply cannot adjust fast enough to rapid changes in technology and the workplace.

AI has made that challenge even more urgent.

Schools are now expected not only to teach AI but also to use it in teaching. At the same time, concerns are growing that excessive dependence on technology could weaken, rather than strengthen, learning. Some countries have already reconsidered heavy reliance on digital devices in classrooms and restored greater use of paper, pencils and physical books.

The issue becomes more complicated as AI evolves from generative systems that produce text and images to agentic AI capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks.

For educators, the question is no longer whether students should use AI. They already do. The real question is how to prepare them for an AI-driven workplace without allowing technology to undermine the skills that education is supposed to develop.

The debate concerns something more fundamental than technology: the role of the human person.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the landmark encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” emphasizing human dignity, the dignity of work, social justice and the common good. On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” bringing those concerns into the AI age.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in education, where AI has already become part of everyday academic life.

The 2026 Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education survey found that 57 percent of US college students use AI for coursework at least weekly. Students in business, technology and engineering are among its most frequent users.

They use AI to understand difficult lessons, check assignments, improve their writing, summarize lectures and notes, generate ideas and conduct research. Some also use it to write papers.

The benefits are obvious. AI can save time, explain difficult concepts, and help students become more productive.

And when these students graduate, many will enter workplaces where AI will be routine. Schools that refuse to teach students how to use it responsibly risk producing graduates who are poorly prepared for the jobs awaiting them.

But unrestricted AI use presents the opposite danger.

If AI writes the paper, summarizes the readings, supplies the ideas, and answers the questions, what intellectual work is left for the student?

Middle ground

That is where the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) offers an interesting middle ground.

UA&P President John Philip R. Yeung recognizes that students will inevitably use AI and other technologies in the real world. The university’s response is not to ban technology outright but to protect authentic learning, higher-order thinking and active engagement. Technology should serve education rather than replace independent thought. Unless specifically permitted by instructors, UA&P’s junior college and undergraduate classes are generally gadget-free. Students refrain from using mobile phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, and other personal electronic devices during class.

This is not a rejection of technology. It creates periods when students must concentrate, participate in discussions, listen, reflect and interact directly with teachers and classmates.

The university still uses digital platforms and its learning management system for communication, administration and learning resources. AI also has a place, but students must acknowledge AI-generated material rather than present it as entirely their own work.

I like this balanced but cautious approach. Students need to learn how to work with AI because employers will increasingly expect them to. But they also need to know how to work without it.

A graduate who knows how to prompt an AI system but cannot independently analyze an argument, write coherently, solve a problem or defend an idea is hardly prepared for the future.

The goal of education should not be to produce humans who can compete with machines. AI will inevitably perform many tasks faster and better than we can. Education should instead strengthen what remains distinctly human: judgment, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, empathy and ethical responsibility.

AI should make students better thinkers, not do their thinking for them.

For Philippine education, that distinction could become increasingly important. If we want to reverse our decline in global talent competitiveness, embracing the latest technology is not enough.

We must make sure that as our machines become smarter, our students do, too.

This article originally appeared on 10 September 2026 in Manila Times, Campus Press

Six months into the US war against Iran which began as a joint Operation Epic Fury with Israel, the world has been plunged into severe economic turmoil, accelerating a shift in the global order. Prior to the conflict, 20 percent to 25 percent of global oil supplies and roughly one-third (30 percent to 38 percent) of seaborne fertilizer exports passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Today, those maritime flows have dwindled to a fraction of their pre-war levels.

Ironically, the aggressors appear most damaged by this military misadventure, remaining entangled in a conflict with no clear path to victory. Meanwhile, Iran’s strategic position has only strengthened.

The United States — under President Donald Trump — stands as a primary casualty of the war. Despite campaigning in 2024 on a promise to end “forever wars,” President Trump, in fact, has dragged the nation into another “no-end-in-sight war.” Operating with a casual personal style of governance that sidesteps democratic norms, the American President assumed he could intervene in Iran much as he did when capturing Maduro in Venezuela. He entered the war — initially framing it as a brief “few-weeks excursion” — without consistent strategic objectives. Over six months, Washington’s stated goals have oscillated wildly: regime change, degrading military capabilities, dismantling the nuclear program, or liberating the Iranian populace. Furthermore, rather than relying on seasoned diplomats and national security experts, President Trump delegated critical peace negotiations to trusted personal associates, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

This unilateral approach has created a severe rift with traditional Western allies. When European nations refused direct military participation, President Trump responded with harsh economic threats. For instance, after Spain denied US forces permission to launch strikes from Spanish bases, the American President threatened a full trade embargo. When France blocked American supply transports bound for Israel from using its airspace, President Trump publicly chastised Paris for being “unhelpful.” His frustration culminated in public attacks on NATO allies, labeling them “cowards” and branding the alliance a “paper tiger” for declining to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. In social media outbursts, he warned European capitals to “go get your own oil!” and “start learning how to fight for yourselves” — raising fundamental questions about the future of the once impregnable Western alliance and the rise of American isolationism.

While official figures remain undisclosed, the financial toll on the US could be staggering given the immense depletion of munition stockpiles and sustained operational costs — further pressuring an economy already burdened by rising energy prices. Though Washington can claim tactical superiority through relentless bombing, its lack of an exit plan means it is losing strategically.

Iran appears well-prepared for a prolonged war of attrition, aiming to draw the US into a quagmire reminiscent of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Recognizing that it can win simply by not losing, Tehran has utilized effective asymmetric tactics — deploying drone swarms, striking US bases across the Gulf, and mobilizing its regional proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis).

This strategy has transformed the conflict into a broader regional crisis affecting key Gulf states — including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. Highly dependent on oil exports, fertilizer trade, aviation hubs, data centers, and tourism, these nations face severe economic disruption. Doubting Washington’s security guarantees, several are quietly seeking bilateral accommodations with Tehran; Oman, for instance, has already initiated independent negotiations. Furthermore, Iran’s effective leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the limits of the American naval blockade. Domestically, the foreign invasion has consolidated the power of the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), rallying even Iranian moderates around a nationalist defense, solidifying Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and permanently damaging US diplomatic credibility.

Globally, the war’s geopolitical fallout is widespread. With the US heavily involved in Iran, Russia continues its destructive military campaign in Ukraine, and could actually justify its actions by citing Washington’s war. China has adopted a high-ground posture, presenting itself as a neutral mediator advocating for diplomatic resolution while continuing its expanding aggressions in the South China Sea at the same time. Pakistan has elevated its global standing by mediating between both sides, emerging as one of the few diplomatic bridges trusted by both Washington and Tehran.

The global order is shifting rapidly, and one man is at the center of the fracture.

This article originally appeared on 5 September 2026 in Dr Alviar’s Manila Bulletin column, “Inciting Insights.”

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Publication and the University.

This article was a homily delivered during the Mass for athletes before the pep rally, September 11, 2026, at the Sancta Maria, Stella Orientis Oratory.

Good afternoon to everyone.

I greet all the varsity players of UA&P who are present here. This mass is being celebrated on the occasion of the pep rally to usher in a new season of competition.

The first reading of today’s Mass, from the first Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, is quite fitting for the occasion.

He writes, “All the runners at the stadium are trying to win, but only one of them gets the prize. You must run in the same way, meaning to win. All the fighters at the games go into strict training; they do this just to win a wreath that will wither away, but we do it for a wreath that will never wither. That is how I run, intent on winning; that is how I fight, not beating the air. I treat my body hard and make it obey me, for, having been an announcer myself, I should not want to be disqualified.”

I would like that we reflect on St. Paul’s words which are applicable not only to sports, but also to life.

Before anything else, I would like to say that I also am a fellow athlete. I was in the varsity track and field team for one year in high school and two years in college. In high school, I ran the 1,500- and 3,000-meter races. In college, I ran the 1,500- and 5,000 meter races. Me and my other teammates running the long-distance races would also regularly run 20 km for training, as well as a mix of other distance runs. I can identify with you athletes and what I will say comes from my experience of competing.

“You must run...meaning to win.” We have to have the attitude of a winner. We may not win all the time, but we should want to win. Anyone who enters competition with the fear of losing won’t cut it. However, we should not be out to win at all costs. We need to compete honestly and gentlemanly, with great respect for our competitors. We are sportsmen who see the need to live virtue.

Life, too, requires a winner’s attitude. We should want to win heaven, our final goal. God has given us this capacity to be holy and we should treat life like a race towards our heavenly goal. This is the “wreath that will never wither”.

“That is how I fight, not beating the air.” Athletes need a strategy, not only in team sports, but also in individual sports. In a team, they need to coordinate with their teammates in order to put a play into effect. Runners need to plan out their race. Players have to plan their game.

In life, we have a clear goal, namely, heaven, holiness. We should live our lives with that goal in mind and never lose sight of it during our day. We ought to have a strategy, which means planning how we will grow in virtue and remove our defects.

“I treat my body hard and make it obey me.” Athletes train for their sport and that requires sacrificing the time they would have spent doing other things. An athlete cannot live a comfortable life. He or she will need to sacrifice for the sake of the game and their teammates. This requires discipline.

Reaching for heaven requires sacrificing what will prevent us from coming closer to God each day. One needs to sacrifice to overcome temptations. We need to sacrifice to help others.

Remember the advice of St. Paul as you train and compete. Have it in mind also as you live through the day. Don’t lose sight of the “wreath that will never wither”, that is union with God in heaven. Do everything for God’s glory.

This present essay was highly edited by the author to meet the standards of Universitas and be more relevant to the UA&P community. The original, simpler version was presented in the 59th UNIV Conference in Rome in April 2026.

A generation that hesitates to speak

People born from the late 1990s up until the early 2010s are collectively referred to as Generation Z or “Gen Z.” They are a generation that has spent all their life in the age of the digital revolution accentuated by smartphones, social media, and internet from childhood. Currently, it is the largest cohort in history, accounting for about a quarter (26%) of the world’s population (Wandhe, 2024). Gen Z has shown a unique set of values and priorities, such as taking more interest in social justice, environmental sustainability, and inclusivity than the previous generation. These concerns are shaped largely by their experiences amidst rapid changes in technology and fluctuations in the economy. In addition, rising violence and social justice movements have consistently populated their social media and thus significantly defined their upbringing (Seemiller & Grace, 2017).

However, Gen Z’s most defining characteristic is their digital ecosystem and dependence on technology. Unlike previous generations, Gen Z does not know a world without the Internet and is constantly accompanied by their smartphones. They use social networks as their main communication tool, mainly Instagram (Martínez–Estrella et al., 2023), and define this generation by the rule of the ‘four i’s’ first coined by Vilanova and Ortega (2017). In the original Spanish, that would be internet, irreverencia, inmediatez, incertidumbre; in English: internet, irreverence, immediacy, incertitude (uncertainty).

This connection to the internet and consequent immediacy of information have given rise to a greater global awareness – and this is perhaps a good thing. Ironically, however, the upshot has not been a stronger sense of community but rather of individualism. This would have something to do with the smartphone – the main source of information – having become an extension of oneself, i.e., a very private and personal tool. The resultant phenomena are more enclosed echo chambers and greater polarization, as the digital ecosystem often filters out dissenting and diverse youth voices. As noted in the Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, “Persons or situations we find unpleasant or disagreeable are simply deleted in today’s virtual networks; a virtual circle is then created, isolating us from the real world in which we are living” (Pope Francis, 2020).

This virtual isolation brought by technology, combined with a volatile and increasingly political climate, leads Gen Z to continually seek digital safety through the comfort of their screens while observing a “safe and sure” level of anonymity. Because of issues deemed unsafe, combined with the lack of readiness to confront them, they have learned to use technology to build a wall of privacy. One student in a study by Seemiller & Grace (2017) shared, “There is considerable comfort behind a computer screen ... as long as I am being very careful of the information I divulge” (p. 22).

Causes: Social climate, psychological fear, digital environment

Gen Z’s preference for digital safety and controlled self–presentation affects their approaches to communication in both the academic and social contexts. It is most probably not a big surprise that the practice of curating one’s presence online, in which one is assured of comfort and protection, has made young people more averse to the risks of speaking openly in public or face–to–face settings. These situations don’t even have to be externally adversarial, just those in which one is not in full control of everything. Research on the so–called “spiral of silence” shows that these environments encourage caution, selective expression, and a heightened awareness of potential social consequences (Noelle–Neumann, 1993). The following subsections examine three interrelated dimensions of this phenomenon.

The (Un)social climate

Recent research shows that a lot of Gen Z students hesitate to participate in discussions involving controversial topics, particularly in the university/college setting. According to the Campus Expression Survey 2022, for instance, 58.8% of students reported being reluctant to discuss at least one controversial issue presented in the survey (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023), a hesitation that appeared closely connected to their perceptions of their social environment. In that same study, 63.2% of respondents agreed that the campus climate discourages people from expressing their beliefs because others might find those views “offensive” (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023).

When asked why, students often attributed their silence to anticipated negative peer reactions. Many admitted to censoring themselves during classroom discussions for fear of negative responses or even retribution from fellow students. The most common reason was the prospect of other students criticizing (or “bashing”) their comments among each other after class (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023). The practice of speaking openly, therefore, comes to be perceived as a good that comes at such a high social cost, discouraging open and easy participation in discourse.

Interestingly, though, the data suggests that these fears may in fact be exaggerated. Findings have shown that students tend to overestimate their peers’ negative reactions by approximately three times, which means that more than the actual hostility, it is the perceived social risk that plays a greater role in students holding themselves back (Zhou & Barbaro, 2023). Nevertheless, the climate is set: one in which students anticipate criticism and therefore limit their participation in difficult conversations.

These communication patterns spill over beyond the university setting. Research likewise shows that even Gen Z professionals feel a pressure to conceal or modify their personal beliefs in the workplace to maintain professional relationships and career stability (Humphrey, 2024). As a result, habits of cautious communication, developed during university years, may continue into early professional life.

Psychological fear: Cancel culture and conflict avoidance

If the previous subsection talks about social factors to explain Gen Z’s hesitation to engage in contentious discussions, this subsection explores psychological reasons to explain this risk avoidance. Humphrey (2024) talks about “leery conversationalists” in her study on Gen Z communication styles. She defines these as individuals who frequently choose to be silent rather than risk being caught in controversial dialogue. The behavior reflects a mindset that Humphrey describes as “protecting, not persuading,” in which individuals prioritize safeguarding relationships and reputations (theirs and others) instead of attempting to influence others through debate.

The main driver of this mindset is the perceived risk of social cancellation or ostracism, already mentioned above. This means that when the possibility of being criticized publicly or excluded from social circles goes up, so does the perceived cost – and the consequent fear – of expressing unpopular views (Humphrey, 2024). In other words, the more socially dangerous participation in open discourse feels, the worse psychological patterns of conversational restraint get.

External factors as well contribute to these negative psychological tendencies. Perhaps because Gen Z grew up in an era characterized by social instability and global uncertainty, they have developed a heightened level of risk aversion in social interactions. Some scholars have noted that Gen Z perceives emotional discomfort as comparable to physical harm, even as they consider adult social interactions even more threatening. Such an attitude explains, at least partially, why this generation prefers to avoid situations that could provoke confrontation (Moscrip, 2019).

The response of not a few universities has been to design “safe spaces,” supposedly to provide environments where students can express themselves without judgment (Moscrip, 2019). Critics of this approach, however, have argued that while such spaces may offer psychological support for the short term, they may inadvertently harm students in the long run since they reduce students’ exposure to the challenging exchanges necessary for robust intellectual discourse in the university that in turn prepares them for responsible interaction in the outside world (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018).

The screenvironment

Lastly, what may be considered Gen Z’s “reluctance for dialogue” also has an “environmental” explanation. Being the first generation raised with smartphones and social media as constant features of daily life, Gen Z is the generation that grew up in a “screenvironment,” a portmanteau term that we are proposing to mean a setting that privileges digitally mediated communication in place of face–to–face interaction (Gawda & Kosacka, 2025; Kuss & Griffiths, 2017).

One consequence and/or manifestation of having been brought up in this digitally saturated environment is what has now come to be known as “phubbing,” the act of ignoring people physically present in favor of engaging with smartphones (Katta & Jain, 2025). Phubbing, in turn, is explained by yet another phenomenon connected to social media, FOMO, the fear of missing out, i.e., on what may be happening with one’s peer group behind the screen. These behaviors have been associated with reduced relationship satisfaction and increased social withdrawal (Kuss & Griffiths, 2017; Katta & Jain, 2025).

In addition, overconsumption of digital media is considered a main negative factor in cognitive engagement. Researchers have linked the declining attention spans and reduced information retention of Gen Z to short–form, high–stimulus online content (Martínez–Estrella et al., 2023), which they frequently consume. The popular term “brain rot,” later recognized as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year, reflects concerns about the intellectual effects of excessive exposure to trivial online material (Owens, 2025).

One last concern along this environmental line is that screens are arguably not the optimum environment for human communication. Text–based exchanges lack nonverbal cues such as tone, gestures, and facial expressions, which are part and parcel of a human message. Without these, the risk of misunderstanding a message and “context collapse,” where messages are interpreted without sufficient context (Sernett et al., 2021), increases. It is true, of course, that many Gen Z individuals acknowledge the importance of face–to–face communication for building relationships, but digital interaction and the habits that follow in its train remain deeply embedded as a way of life.

Considering all that has been said above, we can see that Gen Z’s hesitation to engage in open discourse has come from a combination of social, psychological, and technological forces. A perceived climate of judgment, especially in the light of woke cancel culture, has encouraged self–censorship. As well, increased awareness of social risks and fear of confrontation have discouraged more spontaneous engagements with others in conversation. Lastly, prioritizing efficiency and convenience in a digitally mediated environment has reduced opportunities for practicing face–to–face dialogue, even if only unwittingly. The question now is what the consequences have been of having cultivated a generation that, despite being highly socially aware, is, ironically, increasingly cautious when confronted with difficult conversations.

Consequences: Silos, silence, isolation

The communication hesitation discussed in the previous section has not remained confined to individual or even small group interactions. Having been replicated across digital networks and social platforms, these patterns have contributed to broader social consequences which we are now experiencing. What we seem to be witnessing now is an increased polarization and social isolation among Gen Z amidst algorithmic media environments, identity–driven communities, and digitally mediated relationships.

Ideological silos

The digital age – and now, the age of AI – has opened the world to unprecedented access to overabundant digital information. But has that produced deeper engagement with public issues for Gen Z? The answer is “not necessarily.” A significant number of Gen Z adopt what scholars call a “news-finds-me” perception, the belief that important information will eventually reach them through social media feeds, online platforms, or word of mouth. It is a passive approach that discourages active inquiry and fosters reliance on “the algorithm” (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017). Although not an exclusive Gen Z phenomenon, this has a greater impact on Gen Z (and presumably the generation after it) as this negative phenomenon is affecting them while still in a vulnerable developmental stage. The upshot is fragmented and superficial knowledge.

This resulting type of knowledge, of course, is a feature rather than a bug of this dependence on social media algorithms. Considering that platform algorithms, bound as they are to commercial ends, are programmed to prioritize content aligned with a user’s past preferences and interactions and designed to maximize engagement by frequently promoting emotionally stimulating material that reinforces existing viewpoints rather than presenting diverse perspectives, typical Gen Z users then cannot help but be exposed over and over only to content that they prefer (content that they agree with and that please them). This is a process called “selective exposure.” As a result, contradictory or uncomfortable information is filtered out, producing what researchers describe as “filter bubbles,” i.e., digital environments in which users repeatedly encounter messages that validate their beliefs while rarely engaging with opposing views (Pariser, 2011).

This process naturally leads to confirmation bias, which is the tendency for individuals to seek information and sources that only support their existing beliefs while glossing over conflicting evidence. This is a process that eventually creates “echo chambers,” spaces – especially digital spaces – in which users circulate and affirm ad nauseam the same narratives. Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein (2018) affirms that the “echo chamber effect is dramatically higher on social media” (p. 116). No wonder that it is on these platforms that emotionally charged headlines, misinformation, and polarized rhetoric spread virally and erupt into the real world resulting in more intense hostility between ideological groups.

The upshot of the above phenomena is the formation of “ideological silos” in which individuals keep to themselves, further becoming insulated from alternative, possibly transforming perspectives. This phenomenon was seen clearly in the 2022 presidential election. Recent research on political communication in the Philippines highlights how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm reinforced the formation of these echo chambers and ideological silos. During the campaign, users who watched partisan political videos were increasingly shown similar content, creating distinct online communities supporting rival candidates and limiting exposure to opposing perspectives that only deepened social division in the country (Ong et al., 2022).

The spiral of silence

One of the most significant consequences of the rise of ideological silos is the sharp rise in youth’s sensitivity to social risks that accrue to non-conformity and dissenting opinions. Since users inevitably need to venture outside of their digital comfort zones to other virtual or physical environments that do not necessarily share their same opinions, ill-equipped with the needed openness or resilience to handle contradictions within these environments (Nguyen, 2020), many users adopt strategies of self-censorship to avoid stress or discomfort. For instance, approximately 63% of students report withholding their opinions online due to fear of negative reactions or social backlash (Weintraub, 2025).

Yet such dynamics can extend beyond digital spaces. For example, students whose online environment is consistently bombarded by only one ideological position are hardly prepared to voice alternative perspectives during classroom discussions. The upshot is a failed opportunity for meaningful dialogue and, ironically, an increased possibility for division despite the original intent to avoid conflict (Getreu, 2022, p. 17).

This pattern reflects the well-known “spiral of silence” (Noelle–Neumann, 1993), a phenomenon in which individuals refrain from expressing opinions they perceive as unpopular to avoid social isolation. The term is not gratuitous since the “vicious cycle” of silence does not remain on one plane, but rather directs itself inward and deeper: hence, a “spiral.” Moreover, this silence reinforces itself because when dissenting views remain unspoken, the actual extent of “dominant views” is externally exaggerated, which in turn further discourages open disagreement. In these cases, the “external majority” may not be the “real majority.”

Eventually, these patterns contribute to a broader cultural shift toward tribalism, i.e. first, virtual or digital tribalism; then, actual or socio-political tribalism, no thanks to the human being’s natural tendency (Greene, 2018). While this natural “groupish-ness” may have served the human species to progress from individualism to community (Haidt, 2013) political identities being increasingly tied to online communities and group affiliations produce ideological silos, which pose a true peril to social cohesion when they eventually make their way into actual society as they are wont to. Indeed, social media facilitates political engagement and identity formation, but they can also trap individuals within polarized communities that rarely interact constructively with opposing viewpoints, virtually or in the real world.

Connected yet isolated

The principle of double effect just mentioned, as applied to social media, brings us to what researchers call the “alone together” paradox: the same technologies that promise constant connectivity have also been associated with growing social isolation. Research by Kuss & Griffiths (2017) has shown that when individuals are continuously connected through digital platforms, they experience a declining emotional intimacy and social support. Yet the more they lose social connection, the more time they spend on the screen. In fact, the paradox is also another vicious spiral, a spiral of isolation.

How does this harmful spiral begin? Ironically, perhaps with something quite natural and otherwise benign: the tendency of the human brain to process social rejection with an intensity like physical pain, which then encourages individuals to avoid situations where they might experience criticism or exclusion (Bowler, 2020, p. 4). However, when this phenomenon is paired with the lure of online communication that allows rapid but relatively stress-free interaction as a readily accessible consolation from or, worse, a simple substitute for complex face-to-face relationships, the insidious dynamic begins. Because online connections often lack the embodied cues – tone, gesture, and shared presence – that sustain deeper interpersonal relationships, the user feels more vulnerable to rejection. The spiral then goes deeper.

Furthermore, as if handing users an extra spade to dig deeper into this tendency, digital platforms provide convenient alternatives to what otherwise could have been communal activities. For example, one can now order food online, join in online fitness sessions, or attend virtual gatherings, all of which promise to ease the loneliness of solitary living without the trouble of coordinated social interaction. While apparently harmless, over time, these conveniences encourage habits of withdrawal, and shared communal experiences are gradually replaced with solitary digital routines. They reinforce what Zaki (2025) describes as “social inertia.”

The above dynamic contributes to what some scholars describe as a “loneliness crisis.” Indeed, studies indicate that with their digital engagement often replacing time spent in face-to-face interaction, Gen Z reports higher levels of social isolation and loneliness, heightened anxiety, reduced social confidence, and greater vulnerability to depression than previous generations (Bowler, 2020, p. 1).

Solutions: Rebuilding dialogue

So, what now? Amidst the daunting psychological fear of cancellation, the “spiral of silence,” and isolating effects “ideological silos” is there a way out for Gen Z from digital alienation to authentic participation? We propose a “dynamically composite” framework that combines Karol Wojtyla’s Personalism and Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics (Cortes, 2026) since we understand that personal cognitive agency and virtues are key for young people to make that first leap in cultivating a positive counterforce that overcomes negative habits accumulated from overexposure to the “screenvironment.” However, since reversing the inertia of the “screenvironment” and reclaiming physical encounter are tasks impossible for individuals to do on their own, the framework also recognizes the necessity of interpersonal and institutional aspects.

The personal tier: subverting algorithmic agency

Because Gen Z’s hesitation to engage is deeply linked to the “curated comfort” of digital zones, any effective remedy must begin with individual awareness. Reclaiming personal agency requires transforming the passive “news-finds-me” perception mentioned above into a practice of proactive, critical media literacy (Li et al., 2025). What does it look like in practice?

To answer the question, we begin with Wojtyła’s (2008b) distinction between the “transitive” effect of an action (its external result) and the “intransitive” effect (how an action shapes the person inwardly) and draw out practical applications from the dynamic that exists between these two. For instance, when Gen Z users mindlessly consume content, the intransitive effect of this action is the reinforcement of cognitive passivity, personal biases, and tribalistic tendencies. The transitive effect is withdrawal from engaging with those who do not share one’s same ideas on the one hand, or violence against them on the other.

Subverting this algorithmic control requires exercising the classical intellectual virtues of prudence and temperance. On a practical level, we suggest the following concrete practices to cultivate these virtues:

• Diversifying one’s data consumption: Deliberately seeking out reliable, opposing perspectives on controversial issues and engaging with arguments based on logic rather than emotional reaction (utilizing services like Ground News to facilitate objective balance) even if they make one feel uncomfortable.

• Pausing to engage properly: Practicing temperance by reading an opponent’s online posts in full before reacting and pausing to verify if shared articles come from authoritative sources.

• Reconnecting with nature: Setting strict daily phone limits and actively replacing “doomscrolling” - spending excessive amounts of time watching short-form content or watching large quantities of user-generated content or news (Leskin, 2022) – with 30-minute walks alone or with a friend to “touch grass” and commune directly with physical reality.

Reclaiming personal cognitive agency is a prerequisite for dialogue, but human fulfillment cannot be achieved in isolation. The individual must step outward, applying these cultivated virtues to direct, face-to-face relational encounters.

The interpersonal tier: Face-to-face workshops and interpersonal communio

Once the person commits to dismantling the “screenvironment,” the second step is to engage in direct human relationships, already alluded to in the last practical suggestion above. As Stanford researcher Jamil Zaki (2025) proposes, this requires an intentional “leap of faith” back into face-to-face connections. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that the truest form of friendship requires “living together and rational converse,” as the virtuous person relates to his friend as “another self”.

To facilitate this practice, communities and organizations can organize structured dialogue workshops in which participants turn off the “inner debater” and learn to see opponents not as “morally flawed adversaries,” but as persons with valid underlying concerns. A highly effective tool, used by some organizations, is the L.A.P.P. (Listen, Acknowledge, Pivot, Perspective), which actively reduces affective polarization by teaching participants how to navigate tense verbal disagreements constructively (Forde, 2024).

A perfect complement to the principles above is Karol Wojtyła’s personalism, which views dialogue as a communio personarum (community of persons) – a mode of acting where individuals mutually affirm each other’s dignity (Wojtyła, 2008c). Thus, to enhance the effectiveness of these workshops, we suggest prioritizing “breaking bread” before discussing contentious issues. We thus create a relational context where the “other” is experienced as a person rather than a representative of an opposing ideology (Wojtyła, 2008a).

Beyond formal structures, simple, practical gestures are a powerful way of reinstating face-to-face interpersonal connections that remain the “gold standard” of human relationships. One example is inviting one’s classmates for coffee after class – especially those with whom one is not particularly familiar.

The institutional tier: The UA&P setting as exemplar

While resisting the screenvironment begins with personal and inter-personal remedies, institutional support is vital to sustain these efforts. By designing physical environments that decisively privilege face-to-face interaction over screens, schools and universities offer a solution to the problem that address a massive portion of a student’s day.

The policy and culture of the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) serves as a compelling exemplar of this institutional approach. UA&P has strengthened structural measures that not only align closely with the personalist and virtue-ethics frameworks required to rebuild dialogue but also directly reinforce its educational philosophy of prioritizing the “formation of the whole person” and cultivating “unity of life” through a strong liberal education curriculum.

Specifically, UA&P’s “Policy on Authentic Learning in the Age of AI” serves as an objective case study in disrupting digital isolation and “social inertia.” Central to this is establishing “gadget-free learning environments” as a general classroom rule. Despite potential resistance, intentionally carving out device-free spaces is a step in the right direction as they cultivate “sustained attention, meaningful conversation, and authentic human interaction.” This prompts students to develop habits of “careful listening” and “thoughtful dialogue” (University of Asia and the Pacific, 2026) otherwise eroded by “phubbing” and social media distractions.

Furthermore, UA&P counters Gen Z’s conversational risk aversion and the “spiral of silence” by privileging “direct classroom engagement” and “authentic assessment.” Emphasizing interactive, face-to-face methods – such as oral examinations, presentations, in-class writing, case discussions, and supervised exercises – simultaneously shifts students away from passive information consumption and strengthens academic accountability.

On one hand, these back-and-forth pedagogical approaches immerse students in constructive, face-to-face academic disagreement, teaching them that perceived social risks are exaggerated and that sharing their perspectives and listening to others is an act of self-fulfillment (Wojtyła, 2008d). On the other hand, supervised, interactive settings compel students to articulate their reasoning and defend conclusions in real time, making it far more difficult to rely on mindless, AI-generated outputs.

Ultimately, UA&P does not merely regulate technology; it actively preserves the conditions for authentic learning and interpersonal communio. By requiring students to take full responsibility for their intellectual output while engaging in embodied discourse, UA&P’s institutional culture provides a practical pathway for Gen Z to subvert algorithmic passivity, reclaim personal agency, and rediscover dialogue as a meaningful and “disinterested gift of self” (St. Pope Paul VI,1965).

References

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With the theme of “Building a Water-Secure Future: Local Solutions for Long-Term Water Security,” the forum focused on a simple but powerful idea: that national water problems are best solved through collective action at the local level. The forum showcased real-world success stories where local governments took charge of their water security: creating an effective and evidence-based water security plan as shown by the Provincial Government of Negros Occidental in partnership with the local communities; establishing a local economic enterprise to improve the service and sustainability of LGU-run water utilities in the Municpality of Narra in Palawan; and accessing innovative financing models to develop new water sources and construct water systems that will increase household access to safe drinking water, as shown by the Municipality of Sibonga, Cebu.

The forum gathered 150 participants from across 50 local government units (LGUs); national government agencies such as the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DEPDev), the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Subic-Clark Alliance for Development (SCAD); the private sector; academia; and the international development community.

“National water security is ultimately achieved through local action,” stated DEPDev Assistant Secretary Erik Planta, who noted that while there are many national policies and international agreements on water security, LGUs remain in the best position to create long-term solutions due to the unique needs in specific communities. “A whole-of-community approach is required to make any gains and to sustain them in the long-term. This is the only way the Philippines can meet its targets under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 6 for clean water,” Planta said.

The event also marked the official start of a new partnership between the CRC-ILD and the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP). ULAP is the primary national umbrella organization representing provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays in the Philippines, and works to champion local autonomy and good governance. “CRC and ULAP are working together on many fronts, including making this water security forum a success. We are looking forward to collaborating with ULAP and its network of LGUs across the country to unlock the full potential of local governments with the right knowledge, tools, and support, and make LGUs the key driver of growth for the Philippines,” said Dr. Bernardo Villegas, co-founder and research director of CRC.

(From L-R) UA&P and CRC President Atty. Philip Yeung; CRC Trustee Francis Sebastian; ULAP Secretary General and Batangas Vice Governor Hermilando Mandanas; and ULAP National Executive Officer and Philippine Councilors League Chairman Hon. Benjie Abalos present the Memorandum of Understanding between CRC and ULAP.

Over 150 high-level participants from national agencies and local government units, academia, private sector, civil society, and international development partners joined the Fourth Forum on Local Governance and Development to discuss local solutions that advance water security DEPDev Assistant Secretary Roderick Planta emphasized the importance of aligning local development plans with the Philippine Water Supply and Sanitation Master Plan (PWSSP), underscoring the critical role of LGUs in advancing water security across the country.

DEPDev Assistant Secretary Roderick Planta emphasized the importance of aligning local development plans with the Philippine Water Supply and Sanitation Master Plan (PWSSP), underscoring the critical role of LGUs in advancing water security across the country.

Mr. Albert Felizarto, Municipal Economic Enterprise and Development Officer (MEEDO) of the Municipality of Narra, Palawan, shares their LGU’s experience on implementing utility reform and operating an LGU-managed water supply enterprise during the Local Governance Forum.

They never taught us how to prepare for war.

We were taught how to prepare presentation decks, rehearse a thesis defense, and duck under our desks during an earthquake drill. But nobody stood at the forefront of a classroom and taught us what to do when a missile strikes your hometown.

On March 16, 2026, an Iranian missile struck the streets of my hometown, Abu Dhabi, killing a Palestinian expat, not too far from my father’s home.1

Until recent events, Abu Dhabi was simply home. It was the walk with friends from school to the nearest baqala (a local convenience shop) after our last period, complaining about the homework we had yet to start. It was the Lebanese bakery my dad would stop by every morning to get my siblings and me fresh manakeesh (Middle Eastern flatbread with cheese and toppings) before class, where the owner knew our orders by heart. It was the comfort in ordinary routines—the way a home is supposed to be. What’s deemed an ordinary life is fueled almost entirely on an assumed future; you build routines you’d never imagine losing.

My father, an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) of over 14 years, moved my family to Abu Dhabi to give us a better life—an act built on that assumed future. In many ways, it worked. Those very streets shaped who I am, molding my primitive years and embedding the very principles I carry with me today: to respect cultures unlike my own, to adapt alongside upbringings different from mine, and to see customs that once felt foreign as simply someone else’s normal.

Those were the very streets that shaped who I am—the Corniche I strolled along on the weekends, Arabic slang I picked up from classmates, and getting groceries at Al Wahda with my family after church. I thought I knew the roads like the back of my hand, knowing every corner of the very city that raised me. Yet after all those years, I never once questioned where the nearest safety shelter was.

Last June of 2025, Iran targeted the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, rattling the Arabian Gulf and shaking the lives of everyone in it.² I was in Abu Dhabi that summer. Weeks before the strike, I watched my childhood friends walk across the graduation stage in perfectly tailored dresses and suits, holding four years of academic life in a single diploma. After the ceremony, we talked in the venue’s lobby about what college might bring us in the next four years. The future still felt certain.

That was the last time our conversations belonged to the future.

After the strike, our group chat changed. Conversations shifted from the future to the present. A group chat once filled with memes, life updates, and heaps of inside jokes now opens to screenshots of news alerts, stretches of silence, and a friend asking how we’re holding up. Looking back, I don’t think this shift is merely about the news itself—it’s about what stability can give in places its absence cannot. Stability lends peace; it’s what allows one to think ahead: about the future, and for us, about college. Without stability, time turns into a luxury you can’t afford; and everything else collapses into the now.

The reality of everything—the Gulf states closing into open conflict—only started seeping in when the UAE and neighbouring countries closed their airspace, halting my family’s flight back to Manila and almost costing me UA&P’s freshman orientation program. My friends, on the other hand, had to rethink their move-in dates and campus tours. Even our very futures, it turned out, were only ever one closed airspace away from altering the plans we’d looked forward to.

Talking about evacuation plans with your family is something no lecture ever warns you about. And yet it is not uncommon. Families in Sudan, in Ukraine, across Gaza, and the wider Middle East don’t read about this in a headline—they live inside it, a constant present. Their realities are recalculated one day at a time, with almost no room to plan far enough ahead.

In the Philippines, most of us have never had to trade the future in for the present so directly. If anything, most students have grown up with enough stability that their futures were always assumed—a set major, a five-year plan, a life to build without first asking whether there’d be a country left standing in the first place. Not long ago, I was the one who couldn’t take that future for granted. Now I sit in a lecture hall assuming one, while my father is left calculating evacuation routes back home. It’s easy to forget that security is, in part, held up by familial sacrifice—in a parent, a sibling, a Tito or Tita who traded their own nearness for ours so that stability can exist at all. My father sacrificed birthdays, holidays, and simple Sundays, so we could plan our lives without flinching. That is his trade: his present for our future.

And even that trade of life is a privilege of its own compared to what “today” demands of others. For a mother in Gaza, it can mean wondering whether there will be enough clean water to feed her children before nightfall. For families displaced across Sudan and Congo, it’s the next meal, the next safe hour, and a comfortable place to sleep. Some of us worry about missing a flight home; others are only ever worrying about whether there will be a home at all.

War is not a distant concept—not for a country that has so many of its own out and in it. Filipino families don’t often make it into global headlines about war; we’re rarely the ones the world pauses for. But our spirit remains in nearly every crisis zone of the earth because we are the ones who left our homes to make other countries run—to keep hospitals staffed, homes cleaned, oil fields working, children raised. And when those countries catch a flame, it’s Filipino families who quietly tally the math: which flight still flies, which relative can quickly wire money, which embassy will actually pick up the phone.

That’s what the headlines don’t capture.

War is not just close for some of us—Filipinos have learned and grown, generation after generation, how to survive in other people’s wars because not all of us were given the luxury of staying within our own borders for a better life. It’s the sudden phone call in the middle of the night. It’s the group chat that goes eerily quiet, then suddenly floods all at once. It’s a father calculating which route out of the city is fastest—and a daughter, thousands of miles away, waiting to hear if he is alright.

We were never taught to prepare for war, but maybe that’s because no one has figured out how to prepare a person to lose their future tense. Maybe the least we can do is to stop assuming that it only happens to people far away, in some other headline someday, and start recognizing it as our own in the sacrifices of our kababayans.

In relatively recent years, the Japanese concept of ikigai or “reason for living” has been making its rounds in the public consciousness thanks to social media. From my rudimentary knowledge of the popular Venn diagram of the ikigai, is that we should find our purpose in the intersection of what we love doing, of what we’re good at, of what the world needs, and what we can be paid for.

A deeper dig into the history of the diagram would reveal that the diagram is inaccurate and misleading insofar as the original Japanese concept is concerned. The Venn diagram itself originated in 2009 from astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga, and it was originally called the Venn Purpose Diagram.1 His diagram was eventually adapted by business coach Marc Winn in 2014 in his blog post, where Winn replaced the word purpose with ikigai.2 Winn admitted later on in a 2019 podcast interview that he did not do a deep dive into the concept of ikigai and he was quite surprised how his diagram suddenly became viral.3

Even so, the Venn diagram is not wrong altogether in terms of finding purpose. If there’s anything worth highlighting, it’s the self-interrogation that the diagram invites us to do. That said, asking the right questions becomes crucial in this endeavor.

What I do want to propose is some further refinement from my own lens as a humanist, writer, teacher, and citizen: as a humanist, because it is my discipline; as a writer, teacher, and as a citizen, because those are the roles I play in our community. I do so because these are the circumstances where I attempt to walk the walk. For if we are to talk about life’s purpose, we must talk about life and living, not in a vacuum, but in the middle of the world and through time. And although I may use examples from life as a writer and teacher, I encourage everyone to think of your own circumstances, your disciplines, and the roles you play in our community. This way, despite our differences in our respective particulars, I believe that we will find that commonality in the broader strokes.

A Humanist’s Way of Facing Things

In a world that prefers the path of specialization, it is baffling for many why anyone would choose our brand of Humanities, the area where History, Philosophy, Literature, and Art intersect. Students and parents ask, “What career does this lead to?” and other specialists raise the concern that this interdisciplinary approach can leave the humanist raw in all four disciplines. On one hand, cases may be made for these concerns. On the other hand, it is also this interdisciplinarity that allows the humanist a firmer grounding for purpose. After all, History, Philosophy, Literature, and Art never exist in a vacuum either; it always has to be a History of something, a Philosophy of something, a Literature on something, and an Art on something. And it is in the intersection of these disciplines where we develop that opportunity to be better grounded.

Consider, for example, your own life: what is your history? What are your present circumstances? What are your aspirations? What are your means? These questions refer to the four pillars of the Humanities and, personally, these four pillars also move me to have my own spin on the Venn diagram earlier.

What you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you will get paid for are worthwhile considerations. At the same time, the articulation of these questions discounts the passage of time. Love, for example, is more than just willing the good; it is, in fact, preceded by the recognition of good. This reflects the classical Thomistic and Salesian principle that “nothing can be willed unless it is first recognized as good.”4 How can you will the good of something that you cannot first recognize?

And whatever you’re good at—without the context of history—is a reduction to innate talent; what about the skills that you hone and retool over time? And the world’s needs change constantly; will our purpose end once we’ve filled that particular need? Wasn’t that the great anxiety during the Industrial Revolution, or even now, at the age of AI? And is monetary compensation the only transaction that gives value to the pursuit?

Taking my inspiration from the philosopher Julián Marias, I find it helpful to ask about what we’ve been through and what our present circumstances are.5 Awareness of our history allows us to do a proper accounting and contextualization of our present circumstances, especially insofar as resources, opportunities, and limitations are concerned.

Back when I taught Philippine History, one of the first lessons I would teach my students was the Lesson of the Glass: is the glass half empty or half full? Optimism or pessimism has nothing to do with this, as this is a question of history: what was the glass before? If full, now it’s half empty; if empty, now it’s half full. And, while we’re at it, we should also ask: where did the water come from? How long has the glass been this way? Questions like these allow us to know what to do with the water and the glass.

It is this historical mindset that allows us to envision a reasonable future. As an example, it is a common mistake of many aspiring writers to start but not finish an ambitious project such as a novel. The general reason: a poor grasp of their own circumstances as opposed to what the project demands. Skill, in this case, may have nothing to do with it. Does one’s schedule and responsibilities permit the scale of such an ambitious project? Many times, the aspiring writer doesn’t even ask this question.

As we may intuit from Aristotle,6 we do not criticize a building under construction the same way we would a condemned building, any more than we would uniformly have the exact same expectations from both a budding professional and a professional past their prime. As circumstances develop over history, so do aspirations.

Insofar aspirations go, the role of literature is crucial. The stock and trade of literature is largely the irreal: here, we follow people that may have never existed, going through events that may never have happened. But towards what appeal? As what we can glean again from Aristotle,7 the irreal gives us the glimpse towards possibilities, both the exhilarating and the terrifying.

What possibilities open up given our present circumstances? While literature tends to be reduced as mere leisure or a source of wisdom, I find in my practice—more than just being a writer—that literature is a good way to develop one’s sense of future-orientedness. History and Philosophy will tell us that no earthly circumstance ever really lasts: no victory, defeat, prestige, or humiliation is forever; Literature gives us a sense of what can be beyond our present, and that the utopia and dystopia of our future largely rests on the decisions that we make. If Plot is indeed “character in action,” then our action allows us to calibrate away from distractions and towards our purpose.

And action does lead us to discuss the Arts. While the Arts have a much larger scope in the Humanities, what I find important in the reflection of one’s purpose is the aspect of Arts that focuses on craftsmanship. Upon further reflection,8 art is what makes irreality become real: the idea that becomes a poem, the vision that becomes a painting, the insight that becomes a performance.

I’d like to dwell on Art as Craft a bit longer, as I find this the bridge between History and Literature. A pleasure and bane I have as an artist is the general ignorance of the consumer to what goes on behind the craft process. Rarely, if at all, does a reader wonder how many drafts it took for a text to become a pleasant, coherent read; rarely do viewers pay attention to the time and community it takes to build a single film; or for a community to ask what it takes to coordinate a single school year.

“A haiku is just three lines with seventeen syllables,” someone might say. But a haiku has to be the right combination of seventeen right syllables in the right order. And that is just putting it lightly. The Japanese scholar Haruo Shirane was able to write a whole book on the haiku of Bashō,9 and this testifies to the possible richness in such a tight constraint. The practice isn’t easy. And even if there are some of us who can be prolific in our craft, such as writing, it helps to consider our history and our circumstances: a history of repeated practice and failures has helped us refine our process. And anyone who starts off trying to get everything right the first time usually ends up finishing nothing at all. This is true for writing and, I believe, for any practice.

This then leads us to Philosophy, without which we wouldn’t be even talking about purpose. While there are many angles from which we can approach purpose-finding, it helps to even just ask the basics of Aristotle’s four causes: How did it come to be? What is it made of? What is it for? What is it?10

Further reflection cements the contribution of History, Literature, and Arts in answering these questions: “How did it come to be?” is something History can answer; Art addresses the question, “what is it made of?”; and Literature opens the possibilities of answers to the question, “what is it for?”

These pillars together make for a robust contemplation on the question, “what is it?” What is “it”?

Definitely “it” can refer to purpose. But I’d rather think of “it“ as referring to our lives. And if we answer the questions about our lives in the order of History, Art, and Literature, we get a clearer understanding of our circumstances, the means and resources at our disposal and, from there, the possible trajectories that our circumstances, means, and resources can lead us to. All this gives us an idea of what we are… in the present.

Because, through time, our history continues to grow as we achieve and fail in our aspirations, as we wax and wane in our means and resources. As we live, our circumstances are bound to change, and it is important to remember: our actions move us to our victories and losses, and these further add to our history, thus further evolving our aspirations and our means to take action.

Given this, it is clear that we cannot just simply ask ourselves these questions, just lock in to our answers, and solve our problem of purpose once and for all. We ask these questions regularly and recalibrate regularly.

And, if we’re empathetic enough, we pay attention to how those around us answer these questions regularly as well.

An Account of Shakespeare in UA&P

With all the abstractions out of the way, I will, with my remaining time, demonstrate the way this purpose-finding works in a concrete fashion, mainly with a life in UA&P, with William Shakespeare as the throughline.

My first experience of Shakespeare was when I was still in elementary grade, when I would watch performances of Shakespeare by college students in Dizon Auditorium. The event, back then, was called Shakespeare Week. The impact of these student productions still lingers in my memory: a production featuring the crossover of various female leads in Shakespeare; or a production involving a live snake; or a Julius Caesar production featuring a Mercedes-Benz driving by what we now call The Nest. While I will never know the full context of what drove these students to be this intense in their productions, I believe that nobody can get to this intensity without an authentic love forShakespeare. And, as you can clearly see, these students had a profound influence in my younger years that echoes to this day: thanks to UA&P’s Shakespeare Week, I learned to approach Shakespeare even before I stepped into high school.

Unfortunately for me, Shakespeare Week disappeared when I entered UA&P as a student. But the enthusiasm for Shakespeare has not waned for some former students who stayed to work for UA&P. Thanks to them, I had a taste of performing Shakespeare myself, even in minor roles in The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing. This extensive exposure to Shakespeare shaped my craft and understanding of theatre, of writing, of teaching, and of leadership. This shaping then influenced my career trajectory. And by career trajectory, I am not talking about how I won the Don Carlos Palanca Awards eight times, among my other accolades.

Instead, I would like to highlight something more important. It is through Shakespeare and his UA&P fans that I appreciated that there is more to language than just its meaning, and that there’s more to theatre than just being a performance art. The joy of reading text out loud, feeling the words in your face: your ears, lips, tongue, throat, and lungs evokes an empathy difficult to replicate in any medium outside literature. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s text goes beyond mere literature, as it steps into areas of Philosophy and History in such a level that one must admire his craftsmanship.

As for theatre, its very nature of being live and collaborative made me more serious about the physical, educational, economic, managerial, and civic considerations: for everyone involved must learn the material; be practical and innovative in the allocation and use of one’s means and resources; and be clear that, more than just the dopamine hit, a production must leave everyone better than before they encountered the project. This transformative experience has led me to deploy various innovations in the classroom. One of them is the 10 Minute Shakespeare Program, which resulted in 10-Minute abridgments of Shakespeare’s scripts done only through deletions. Another is the 10-Minute Scriptwriting activity.

The 10 Minute Shakespeare Program—or 10MinSh—worked two ways: first, with students racing to abridge Shakespeare to a stageable 10-Minute version that keeps to the original text and the main plot. Then, with classes being divided into groups to perform 10MinSh to the UA&P community. 10MinSh taught these students more than just Shakespeare’s wisdom: it taught them to take care of each other as performers, of their audience, and of their rehearsal and performance spaces.

Thus, when they did the 10-Minute Scriptwriting activity, many of them applied what they learned in writing their scripts. Their scripts exercised care for their readership, for their collaborators, and for their audience.

I mention this because what I will show you next is, for me, quite notable:

Eleven of these scripts from the Scriptwriting activity made it to the 2015 and 2017 Short + Sweet Manila Theater Festival. At least three made it as far as to become crowd favorites, with two becoming finalists, and one getting nominated for best script and best overall production. From what I am aware of, at least one still gets staged from time to time in college and community theatre productions beyond UA&P.

10MinSh itself is even more notable. After the first UA&P staging of 10MinSh in 2014, we did the first abridged Shakespeare in the same year for Fullybooked and in the following year for UA&P. In 2016, we launched the full-brand Compact Shakespeare, with 10MinSh and four-actor and one-actor variants in UA&P. In 2017, we launched the website. Fast forward to 2026: as of

the end of May this year, after nine years, we’ve had over 188 inquiries requesting permission to use across 22 countries in 6 out of 7 continents. These abridgments reach performers, and these performers reach their community.

Today, as my current circumstances render me away from Shakespeare classes, I am happy to say that a junior colleague has picked up from where I’ve left off and, for the first time, someone from Ely, Nevada has followed what my students started: before the end of this year, we’ll be uploading his contribution of a 10MinSh abridgment of The Tempest. While I am hesitant to say that my Shakespeare journey is close to its end, it is still an honor to witness how others pick up from where I’ve slowed down.

If anything, I hope that this story repeatedly demonstrates what an intense and authentic pursuit of purpose does: the student generation who threw themselves into Shakespeare Week; the teachers and staff who brought Shakespeare beyond the classroom and into campus life; my own attempts inside the classroom and beyond; my students with their scripts and productions; and Shakespeare himself. While most of us involved don’t necessarily have Shakespeare as intensely in our lives now as in the moments mentioned, it is in those mentioned moments that our purpose at the time was clear: we discovered something good that we were compelled to share.

This echoes to me two things: The first is Pope Leo XIV’s statement in Magnifica Humanitas, “truth is not a territory to be defended but a good to be shared.”11 The second is Pope Francis’ statement in Evangelii Gaudium, “time is greater than space.”12

The expression of love for Shakespeare that I had the honor to witness and participate in over these decades was largely from a sincere impulse to share the good and not to protect Shakespeare because he is male, white, and dead. Furthermore, many of whom I got to witness did not have career, wealth, or prestige in mind in their pursuit of purpose. The UA&P College students and their teachers were not thinking of me when they did Shakespeare Week back then; nor did my students have an idea how their works would go way beyond the classroom; and Shakespeare probably had no idea of the reach he would have over time. Like true artists, we all focused on the aspiration of bringing form to the truth, the good, and the beauty we discovered.

The Bigger Picture

And the example I only have time for is our Shakespeare culture within UA&P. The bigger reality is, in the same way that my circumstances go far beyond Shakespeare, so too do your own lives go beyond your respective specializations and professions. We don’t just love one thing, as we recognize the good in many things over time; we are not just good at one thing, as we lose, acquire, and develop means over time; the world’s needs also change over time, as we address its needs and discover new ones; and getting paid for pursuing purpose, isn’t really so much the criteria, as it is making each endeavor sustainable for as long as it needs to be. While money may sometimes be a factor of sustainability, so are relationships, environment, and culture. I would argue that relationships, environment, and culture are greater factors than money.

Honestly, I am excited to hear each of your stories over time insofar as the discovery and pursuit of purpose is concerned.

Again, why limit purpose to profession? A good citizen would know that being a good professional is also paramount. The same cannot necessarily be said for good professionals. Examples of good professionals who are bad citizens abound.

We are more than our jobs: we are citizens of our families, our neighborhood, our workplace, our country, the communion of saints. In each, we all have our respective calling that calls for some unity of life. The calling in one area is also the calling in another. And it is not so much the ends achieved that will measure us, but our authentic fidelity, grit, and manner in which we exercise our purpose. It is about us faithfully ordering the goods of our life, throughout our lives.

To end, I would like to read to you this beautiful composition by John Henry Newman, who perfectly captures what I’ve been trying so hard to explore. This is entitled, “The Mission of My Life”13:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him; whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

“Long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes,
And the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,
And our work is done.
Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging, And holy rest, and peace at the last.”

Thank you.

References

Aquinas, Thomas. 1948. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English

Dominican Province. 5 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225-1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theolog iae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html

Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translated by S. H. Butcher. Project Gutenberg, 2008. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm.

Francis. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World. Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2013.

Kemp, Nicholas, host. “Marc Winn on Merging Ikigai with the Venn Diagram of Purpose.” Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, December 29, 2019. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast05/.

Kemp, Nicholas, host. 2020. “Interview with Andrés Zuzunaga.” Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, January 29, 2020. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast07/.

Leo XIV. Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Vatican City: Holy See Press Office, 2026.

Marías, Julián. Metaphysical Anthropology: The Empirical Structure of Human Life. Translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971.

Newman, John Henry. “Hope in God—Creator.” In Meditations and Devotions. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893. Accessed July 23, 2026. Newman Reader, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations9.html#doctrine1.

Shirane, Haruo. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Winn, Marc. 2014. “What is Your Ikigai?” The View Inside Me (blog). May 14, 2014.https://theviewinside.me/what-is-your-ikigai/.

Winn, Marc. “Marc Winn on Merging Ikigai with the Venn Diagram of Purpose.” Interview by Nicholas Kemp. Ikigai Tribe (podcast). Audio, December 29, 2019. https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast05/.