In Bond Hill, a neighborhood in Cincinnati’s outer ring, northeast of downtown, St. Agnes Elementary School stood for many decades serving children and families, nestled beside the Church of the Resurrection on California Avenue. By the 1960s, Bond Hill had become a predominantly Black neighborhood, home to families who built lives, churches and institutions on its streets. When St. Agnes closed in 1993, its building sat empty for over 30 years, a Catholic school in a neighborhood with no Catholic school.
That absence was one of the things people named when the listening sessions began.
Neighbors, community leaders and longtime residents gathered to talk about what Bond Hill needed, what was missing, what they hoped for. Shahidah Akbar was one of them. She had been a member of the Church of the Resurrection since she was 16 years old. Her daughter attended St. Agnes. So did her nephew and her brother. When the sessions asked what the community envisioned for the old school building, she and others put a lot of things on the board. A school rose to the top. “We didn’t have money,” Akbar said. “We just had vision.”
The community also named something specific: by the time boys reached the third grade, young Black boys were already being left behind. They wanted a school that would meet that need directly, forming young men to be responsible, caring and capable of looking out for each other. After those sessions, the community invited the Jesuits in.
Fr. Nathan Wendt, SJ, XJA’s president, came to community council meetings. He talked to council members and neighbors. He asked what they wanted, what they needed. As Kyle Chandler, XJA’s principal, put it: “All too often you don’t have people that ask folks what they want, what they need. They do things for, but not things with. We weren’t just placating people. We were listening.”
Listening was a creative act. A deeper creative disposition that makes original, rooted solutions possible. Wendell Berry calls this fidelity to place. Ignatius might call it consolation. Community organizers call it the work.
Xavier Jesuit Academy (XJA) opened in August 2024 as Cincinnati’s first Jesuit Nativity model school, fully scholarship-funded, serving young men in grades three through eight. The model is built around the whole person: intellectual, emotional, physical, social and spiritual formation. Small class sizes. An extended school day. A community that stays with students for the long haul. The Church of the Resurrection, connected from the beginning, brought a vibrant parish community and continued partnership. The Reds Community Fund commissioned the hallway paintings. Xavier University, Bellarmine Chapel, St. Francis Xavier Church, the Jesuit Spirituality Center and St. Xavier High School all helped pave the way. The school that opened was a response grown from listening.
The Spiritual Exercises are an act of situated imagination: You place yourself inside a scene. You inhabit a specific moment. You let the particular form you. Discernment, for Ignatius, was always local.
Wendell Berry wrote that a community is “the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.” Berry argues that sustainable solutions are never imported; they are grown from intimate, patient attention to a specific place and its people. What the listening sessions named was the wound. What they asked for was repair rooted in the specific, living reality of this neighborhood and these children.
Berry also writes: “You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.” A serious claim about the relationship between place and identity, that selfhood is formed in particular streets, particular rooms, particular people who reflect you back to yourself.
St. Ignatius of Loyola understood this too, centuries earlier, practicing the same discipline through prayer. The Examen. Discernment. Finding God in all things, in the unrepeatable moment in front of you. The Spiritual Exercises are an act of situated imagination: You place yourself inside a scene. You inhabit a specific moment. You let the particular form you. Discernment, for Ignatius, was always local.
Central to Ignatian spirituality is a conviction about the imagination: We cannot move toward what we cannot first picture ourselves inside. This is not a metaphor. For Ignatius, the imagination was the threshold of transformation. In the Exercises, you are asked to see the scene, to smell the air, to feel the ground underfoot. You are asked to inhabit a possible world until it begins to form you from the inside out. The imagination, in this tradition, is how the soul learns what it is capable of becoming.
Walk the hallways of XJA and you feel that conviction is made physical.
The Reds Community Fund commissioned local artist Brent Billingsley to create the paintings that line the school’s walls. Boys in soccer jerseys. A boy in a lab coat. Boys becoming astronauts and engineers. The walls also hold portraits of Black Catholics who are saints in process: Pierre Toussaint, Thea Bowman, Augustus Tolton, Mother Henriette Delille, Julia Greeley, Mother Mary Lange. Their presence is a theological argument about who belongs in the story of holiness.
Billingsley worked alongside young artists, outlining the drawings himself and then inviting them to paint before adding his finishing touches. They were participants in making a vision of possibility. His message to the students carries its own conviction: “Be whoever you want to be, nobody else gets to tell you who you are.”
Chandler is clear about why that matters. The boys need to see themselves in the pictures on the wall, in the lab coats, in the many people who visit the school as Morning Meeting guests. The Ignatian imagination asks you to place yourself inside the scene. These walls ask the same of every boy who walks past them each morning.
Jace Sickles, a student at XJA, said it plainly when asked what the paintings mean to him. “It feels like what’s on the pictures is what we can be when we grow up. So as we work hard, we can achieve those dreams.” He wants to be a mechanical engineer or maybe an astronaut.
Akbar has watched it work. She volunteers in the cafeteria during lunch and has come to know the boys well. “They are hilarious,” she said. “They have huge personalities.” Lunchtime is her favorite because that is when the boys are free. “They can really just be who they are.”
Central to Ignatian spirituality is a conviction about the imagination: We cannot move toward what we cannot first picture ourselves inside.
Her great-grandson was in the inaugural fourth grade class. Her family helped build what became this school. When she describes what it means to the neighborhood, she said, “We just had vision. And ultimately God worked it out.”
Berry’s argument is almost structural: Sustainable solutions emerge from patient attention to a specific place. What works in the Appalachian hill country will not automatically work in Bond Hill. What works in Bond Hill may not translate to the neighborhood over. The people know the place, its history, its grief, and its stubborn hope.
The most radical creative act available to us is refusing the prepackaged answer. Listening. And then having the courage to act on what we actually heard, even when the answer surprises us.
The answer was already here. This is what it looks like when a community is taken seriously on its own terms, when imagination is treated as faithfulness, when listening is the first act of love.
Ignatius would recognize it. Berry would, too.
