Running the Ancient Ark by Steam: Catholic Publishing, 1880-1950

This essay highlights two aspects of Catholic culture related to books and reading between 1880 and 1940: the connection between.material objects and the printed word, and the role of authority in shaping both the institutional aspects and the content of Catholic publishing. It also emphasizes how, in their tumultuous but thriving print culture, U.S. Catholics adopted technically and organizationally advanced processes in the pursuit of religious and cultural goals that were, in the eyes of their contemporaries, perceived as largely modern

Global Connections and the Marianists

For the past ten or fifteen years, I have been waging a one-person stealth campaign—I guess I am going to uncloak it today. That campaign is to change the university’s motto from Pro Deo et Patria (For God and Country) to Pro Deo et Mundo (For God and the World). “For God and Country,” adopted in 1920, reflected the sense among many American Catholics right after the First World War that they were, in a new way, fully American. “For God and the World” reflects our deepening sense today that our commitments and our awareness need to extend beyond national borders, because our human connections already do. We sometimes speak (and therefore think?) as though the University’s Catholic and Marianist character are somehow distinct from the many things we mean when we say “diversity.” But, speaking from personal experience, I know that much of my awareness of the rest of the world stems from the global focus that is inherent in contemporary Catholicism. Today, we are painfully aware that the gospel imperative—to “go out to all the world and tell the Good News”—helped to cause, or at least did very little to stem, some grave and lasting abuses for which we are (or should be) still seeking ways to repent and make reparations. We should not turn our eyes away from this history, either as scholars or as believers, since neither have any reason to be afraid of the truth. But today I am very glad that the symposium’s organizers decided to include this topic as part of their opening welcome. I’m glad because I believe our global religious connections, specifically religious congregations like the Marianists, offer a resource on which I hope we draw more and more fully as we seek to deepen and extend international awareness on our campus

Maybe Irish Voters Actually Were Swayed by their Church

It’s almost always more incorrect than correct to say “Church” when you mean “hierarchy.” It’s especially misleading in the case of same-sex marriage, and Catholic support thereof. The vocal public insistence of much of the hierarchy (Vatican, Irish, US) on the impossibility and the danger of same-sex marriage represents a dead end in Catholic moral theology. This is not to undercut the entirety of the moral theology — far from it. The notion that humans are created for relationships, that the power of procreation is deeply and sacredly connected to the love between men and women, that stable, loving families are a crucial element of a healthy society and one of the best possible situations in which to bring up children — these and other aspects of Catholic teaching on human sexuality are a potentially great — even essential — gift to the world. For it is also hard to argue that contemporary society has given rise to a view of human sexuality that’s unambiguously conducive to human flourishing. The commodification of young bodies, whether in advertising or pornography or trafficking; the deep-rooted, vicious misogyny unleashed at the drop of a hat on every web site with a comments section; the widespread acceptance of the notion that sex need not involve real mutuality, commitment, even consent — these and other current realities disregard human dignity in favor of the unconstrained pursuit of some other ostensible good: profit, autonomy, pleasure, freedom. On these and other issues, I happily listen to the hierarchy teach the wisdom of Catholic tradition. But I have come to believe that in including the issue of same-sex marriage in this list, they are making a significant category error. It is not an error that invalidates the moral tradition from which it emerged. All traditions that have deep roots give rise to multiple branches and offshoots, and some of those shoots eventually become dead ends. They are connected to the original roots, but they do not themselves bear good fruit nor help preserve the life of the tree

Review: \u27Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism\u27

Sally Dwyer-McNulty\u27s Common Threads is a readable, useful study. The work\u27s scope is narrower than the title suggests, but it is evocative nonetheless. The book focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (more on the latter), the clothing of priests and female religious (sisters or nuns), and the uniforms of Catholic schoolgirls

Not All Autobiography Is Scholarship: Thinking, as a Catholic, About History

My premise in this essay is that the historian of religion who is a believer has a distinctive need for conscious reflection on this autobiographical connection. Without conscious reflection, it is too easy fall into cheerleading on the one hand or score-settling on the other. is even easier, perhaps, to lapse into self-indulgence-hence the caveat of my title, which is aimed primarily at myself. Thinking about the roots of my work as an historian has made me more consciously attentive to doing the work of the historian, as historian, well. Thinking about where that work has taken me not only as an historian but also as a believer has opened up vistas I never would have imagined seeing. I will offer below three examples of how this has happened is happening yet. The first has to do with the origins of my conscious awareness of the particular task of the believing historian who is a member of a tradition that makes historical claims; the second, with how self-consciousness, once evoked, continually opens up new dimensions of that original task. The third episode attempts to capture some sense of how this sustained integration- pursuing the scholarly intellectual tasks of the believing historian-has reinvigorated and deepened belief that helped prompt the intellectual journey

Catholic Studies in the Spirit of \u27Do Whatever He Tells You\u27

During the University of Dayton\u27s sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university\u27s Center for Social Concern performed a song he written for the occasion, Do Whatever He Tells You. At the reception after the celebration, a colleague still fairly new to the university, nonreligious but with an evident affinity for the university\u27s mission and commitments, commented that he thought the song was little odd; hadn\u27t something like do whatever he tells you been written over the gates of Soviet labor camps? My first response to the remark, phrased more wittily than I can recall here, was laughter, but I also felt the pull of the teachable moment

How Realistic Can a Catholic Writer Be? Richard Sullivan and American Catholic Literature

Despite the fact that Sullivan never achieved the fame he sought, the record he left behind reveals much about the way one writer handled the complicated personal and professional questions of regional, literary, gender, and religious identity. He was a regional author with national ambitions, a serious author who did not disdain the notion of popular success, and a male author whose primary focus was domestic life and relationships. He was also a Catholic author-that is, he belonged to a tradition that believed in normative standards for artistic value in an era when such a belief was considered by some to be inconsistent with, even inimical to, art. He held himself accountable to those norms while simultaneously refusing to concede that such accountability limited his scope as an artist. It was a position that he found himself defending on several fronts-against some of his fellow Catholics who thought his realistic depiction of contemporary life veered too close to naturalism as well as against some of his fellow writers and critics who thought including Catholicism made any depiction of contemporary life unrealistic. In the end, what characterizes Sullivan\u27s understanding of himself is his matter-of-fact belief in the natural coherence and rightness of the multiple facets of his identity. Richard Sullivan\u27s work and career reveal not so much an overlooked genius as an ordinarily complicated craftsman, a rich example not of timelessness but of timeliness. This essay is not an attempt to rehabilitate him, to present him as an undiscovered treasure in the archive of American literature, because, as Jane Tompkins (among others) has shown, mining literary history for examples that fit preconceived categories leaves much of literary history unexplored and useless. Rather, it is much more interesting to recover the terms of ordinary complexity in which a largely forgotten life was lived in order to highlight and to clarify those things that are remembered and preserved

What I Overheard in the Sesquicentennial Conversation

Catholic higher education is in many ways still responding to the challenge first articulated by John Tracy Ellis in his 1955 essay. In efforts to promote both a unique Catholic identity and a culture of excellence on par with secular institutions, Catholic universities can learn much from their historical context, founding religious communities, and contemporary experience. This essay suggests some practical applications for campus life and governance that might be culled from a university’s religious history

What I Overheard in the Sesquicentennial Conversation

Catholic higher education is in many ways still responding to the challenge first articulated by John Tracy Ellis in his 1955 essay. In efforts to promote both a unique Catholic identity and a culture of excellence on par with secular institutions, Catholic universities can learn much from their historical context, founding religious communities, and contemporary experience. This essay suggests some practical applications for campus life and governance that might be culled from a university’s religious history