Austin is the tech, music and political capital of Texas and a booming community for young adults. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the city’s major daily newspaper, Austin is ranked ninth on a top 10 list of U.S. cities that are attracting millennials—new residents between the ages of 25 and 44. Millennials are now just shy of 41 percent of Austin’s total population. That makes it a perfect locale for Jesuit educators.

“The Society of Jesus has always wanted to be at the place where there are major cultural movements, where the church needs to be present and active, and Austin presents a prime opportunity for that,” Matthew Baugh, S.J. Jesuits try “to be present in these kinds of cultural, intellectual contexts where you want to give people a chance to make some kind of point of contact [or] encounter with the church.”

Saint Louis University announced in July that Father Baugh, previously the director of S.L.U.’s Catholic Studies Center, will be leading the university’s new collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin. The Catholic studies program will offer S.L.U. classes at the Texas university that boasts more than 42,000 undergraduate students.

Why U.T. Austin? Father Baugh said that the university’s large enrollment, Austin’s significant Catholic population and high interest from professors, deans, students and the chaplain of the Newman Center signaled to the S.L.U. team that U.T. Austin would be a great place to pilot the partnership program.

Just about 90 percent of Catholic undergraduate students study at secular universities. Newman Centers and other Catholic campus ministry organizations are great places for students to receive spiritual formation, but Jesuits have been seeking ways to bring “rigorous, Catholic academic formation” into these non-Catholic spaces, according to Father Baugh.

Young adults are not the only demographic boom in the South. In May, NBC News reported that since 2010, the number of Catholics in the South and West had increased by six million and shrank in the Northeast and Midwest (which have historically been home to most of the country’s Catholics).

In Florida, one in five residents is Catholic. In Arizona, the share of the population that identifies as Catholic rose from 15 to 21 percent from 2010 to 2020. According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of Texans identify as Catholic.

“Across the board, involvement just in the different [Catholic] groups and organizations and things has grown,” according to the Rev. Jonathan Raia, the director of U.T. Austin’s University Catholic Center. “Our focus team was really proud that we passed 600 students who had come to a Bible study at least once, which is a huge benchmark for us.”

And Mass attendance on campus is up.

“We estimate that there’s about 10,000 Catholic students on campus…and this last Ash Wednesday, we had 3,500 here at the building,” he said. “So we figure we’ve reached about a third of the Catholics on campus, which is awesome.”

Austin’s Catholic students “get all excited about the different feast days and the memorials and all these things,” Father Raia said. “They’re very hungry—hungry for beauty, hungry for tradition.”

The heart of the new program is a five-course sequence, taking students from the second semester of their freshman year into the first semester of their senior year. The sequence, according to Father Baugh, centers on “Catholic philosophical thought and culture.”

The first course in the series, to be taken as a second-semester freshman, focuses on Catholic aesthetics. Father Baugh describes it as “the whole act of perceiving what there is in the world…that kind of philosophical act is the foundation for a Catholic, contemplative gaze about the world.”

“We feel really strongly about [including] this, given the cultural conditions of our age, [where] everything is short-form media. It’s TikTok, YouTube and all this,” Father Baugh said. “So the first thing you’ve got to do is help students lengthen their ability to [focus and] perceive deeply the remarkable phenomena of the world. That’s the essential foundation for a Catholic education.”

Sophomores will take a year-long sequence in metaphysics.The fall semester course tackles ancient and medieval Christian thought; the spring semester course covers modern Catholic philosophy.

Juniors will spend a semester studying “The Good Life,” according to Catholic ethics, examining the cardinal virtues and Ignatian methods of prayer, contemplation and discernment. Finally, seniors will take a course on the integration of their declared course of study with Catholic thought. Father Baugh emphasized that all of these courses will incorporate exploration of the experiences of poor and marginalized people in the Austin community, perhaps partnering with community initiatives in the city.

Immigration has become a hot-button issue in Texas. Father Baugh said the church’s presence provides students the chance to deeply reflect on the riches of Catholic social teaching and how it connects to the issue. Immigration is “one example of a place where we can amplify [a faith dimension] that’s not already present in these universities.”

According to Father Baugh, the concluding sequence was built with “two really big problems” affecting modern university life in mind: academic specialization and social compartmentalization. “How does my work in this little, narrow field that gets narrower and narrower as I go deeper and deeper, relate to everything else in the university? How does what I do in the classroom, in the academic world, relate to the rest of my life?”

“We shouldn’t think about the Catholic faith and Catholic practice as something that’s in a sphere of its own,” he said. “It has to interact with what I actually study and work on and eventually will do in the world in order to fulfill the mandate of Vatican II.”

Grace Copps is a student at Georgetown University and a summer intern at America Media.