The statement of Jean Paul Sartre (2004) we led with offers a way out of such misguided thinking, words that can remind us of the immensity of human potential and what that signifies for every person. Admittedly, Sartre’s existentialism is a harsh landscape barren of faith or hope beyond this world, yet even in his Godless realm the philosopher has found ground for exercising human freedom in a way that, though atheistic, contains profound insights and wars against any compromise of the human capacity that lies within each of us. The first insight involves Sartre’s conviction that every individual through conscious choice must determine who he or she will become. While Christianity would assert that we would have no choice at all were it not for a God who created us with free will, it would agree that each person, by virtue of that freedom, is called to fashion his or her own truest identity. As Peter Kreeft (1988) delineates, “God makes our what, we make our who.”Both for Kreeft, a Catholic theologian, and Sartre, the atheistic existentialist, there is no dispute about who is responsible for the “who” we become.
The ability to define
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In the submission of Sartre to which I assent, the extent to which you deliberate, choose and execute a plan is the fulfillment of yourself, your goal, and your future. The spirit of Sartre clearly resounds in the depth of individual students who, through free will and choice, play an active role in their own life and understand that God has equipped them with tremendous power, freedom to think, to plan, to create, to execute and to change or redirect their