John W. O\u27Malley: Scholar of Eloquence and Eloquent Scholar

ABSTRACT As the essays in this volume attest, John O’Malley, S.J., has been an intellectual force in the proud tradition of the erudite, generative, multi-lingual polymaths of the early Society. Reading the recent memoir on his rich scholarly life over several decades, The Education of a Historian (2021)i, viewing the wonderful Georgetown Interview (2021), and having had the chance to interview him in Baltimore on May 26, 2022,ii we are struck by his relentless curiosities across multiple fields of historical inquiry and his willingness to follow his questions over decades as they take on new forms and incarnations, both alone -- and with many others. We witness his meticulous and deep commitment to understanding original sources of the Renaissance on their own terms, his work to modernize the historiography of confessional and religious history, and his capacious analytic and synthetic prowess in bringing historical moments, movements, institutions, and figures “to life” to make more present pasts, and to participate in the present itself. In this epideictic piece (one of O’Malley’s favorite genres for analysis), we want to share some of the ways in which he backed into, participated in, and ultimately sponsored the emerging field of Jesuit rhetoric, nationally and internationally, over the last several decades, albeit somewhat unwittingly. While we appreciate O’Malley’s primary identity as a new historian of religious history, and his reluctance to call himself a rhetorician, we think it is important to acknowledge his serendipitous and fertile encounters with rhetorical studies. We briefly trace his changing relationship to rhetorical study, from his first efforts to use it as a frame for textual analysis, to seeing it as an enduring centering principle for Jesuit society and ministries writ large, and finally as a set of valuable principles that can be renewed for Jesuit education today. And we share the perspectives from a sampling of those who have been influenced by his work across these areas internationally and within an American higher education context

Are school-level factors associated with primary school students' experience of physical violence from school staff in Uganda?

BACKGROUND: The nature and structure of the school environment has the potential to shape children's health and well being. Few studies have explored the importance of school-level factors in explaining a child's likelihood of experiencing violence from school staff, particularly in low-resource settings such as Uganda. METHODS: To quantify to what extent a student's risk of violence is determined by school-level factors we fitted multilevel logistic regression models to investigate associations and present between-school variance partition coefficients. School structural factors, academic and supportive environment are explored. RESULTS: 53% of students reported physical violence from staff. Only 6% of variation in students' experience of violence was due to differences between schools and half the variation was explained by the school-level factors modelled. Schools with a higher proportion of girls are associated with increased odds of physical violence from staff. Students in schools with a high level of student perceptions of school connectedness have a 36% reduced odds of experiencing physical violence from staff, but no other school-level factor was significantly associated. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that physical violence by school staff is widespread across different types of schools in this setting, but interventions that improve students' school connectedness should be considered