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More than any other recent U.S. president, Barack Obama has succeeded in puzzling the pundits.
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Lola Montez, mistress of King Ludwig I, trained her bulldog to attack Jesuits.
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When the organizers of a recent panel discussion about Catholic twentysomethings and pop culture asked me to participate as a representative twentysomething, I had to remind them that I’m thirty-five. Close enough, they said: they could tolerate the...
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It is now nearly forty years since the bishops of the Appalachian region of the United States published This Land Is Home to Me, a historic pastoral letter “on powerlessness in Appalachia.” Rarely has any official statement of American Catholic...
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A surprise in my morning e-mail: an article by my friend and colleague, Fr. Wilson Miscamble, CSC, criticizing his own academic department—History, where Miscamble is one of my predecessors as chair—and our own university, Notre Dame, for not hiring...
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Every now and again, I reflect on teaching and the relevance of the methods used by Jesus. Even without the miracles and the content of the message, some of Jesus’ pedagogical principles continue to stand out. Here is my list.
Integrate the...
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As the response to Christopher Ruddy’s recent Commonweal article on young theologians suggests (see, "Continuing the Conversation"), this is a time of great foment in the Catholic academic and intell
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Now that the American bishops have voted overwhelmingly to adopt the revised norms requiring the application of Ex corde ecclesiae to Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, it is instructive
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Last year some renegade members of the prolife group at John Carroll University, where I teach, placed signs around the quad that caused quite a stir. One of the signs read: “Vote prochoice-signed Satan.” The resulting uproar led to a...
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What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education...
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Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers Kwame Anthony Appiah Norton, $23.95, 196 pp.
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Having recently published a book on the idea of a Catholic university [see review, page 24], I was asked by the Chicago Tribune what role Catholic universities and colleges should play in the sex-abuse crisis enveloping the American church. The...
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By June 1, 2002, Catholic theologians who teach in Catholic colleges and universities are supposed to have received and accepted a mandatum from the local bishop.
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Ex corde ecclesiae will go into effect as church law for the United States on May 3, 2001. For most commentators, the fundamental issue concerning the implementation of Ex corde is the conflict between the ideals and practices of American higher...
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Christopher Ruddy ["Young Theologians," April 21] has written an intriguing and challenging essay on the state of academic theology and its relation to the church [see also, Correspondence, this issue, page 4].
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Editor's note: Frank Macchiarola, who served as president of St.
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“There are some ideas and some causes that a Catholic college campus cannot treat pleasantly,” wrote the outraged editors. “Doesn’t deliberate opposition to Catholic social doctrine come close to being anti-Catholic?”
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WASHINGTON — It’s the silent education crisis, the one we don’t talk about much because its existence undermines the story we like to tell about our country.
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In the twenty years since Pope John Paul II issued Ex corde ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”), his apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, progress has been made in articulating and reinvigorating the Catholic iden
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Dana Gioia, this year’s recipient of the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, is an award-winning poet, a controversial essayist, and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Economists have noted with some surprise that the United States is recovering from the “Great Recession” considerably faster than Europe. Since the crisis was more or less manufactured in America, pundits assumed that we would take the longest to...
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I recently returned from four days of imprisonment. I was trapped in a catacomb of exhibition halls, hotel suites, seminar rooms, and coffee vendors. Everyone knew that liberation would arrive on the fourth day, and yet the stress level of the...
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The most incisive reaction to Mitt Romney's disparaging comments about 47 percent of us came from a conservative friend who emailed: "If I were you, I'd wonder why Romney hates America so much."
A bit strong, perhaps. But the more you think about...
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What is the point of Barack Obama's second term?
A president who has been pondering that question for a while might find the best answers by consulting what just went on in the campaign.
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The Declaration of Independence proclaims the nation’s adherence to the principle that all men are created equal. Abraham Lincoln repeated the claim at Gettysburg, as did the United Nations in its Declaration of Human Rights. But is it true? Anyone...
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There was a good deal of justified outrage among Catholics, and presumably among all fair-minded people, when protests from faculty and students at Rome’s La Sapienza University caused Pope Benedict to cancel an academic address he was to give there...
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On leafy Stockton Street, a short walk from the Princeton campus, sits the Aquinas Institute, home to the university’s Catholic ministry program. Housed in the elegant residence once owned by the German novelist Thomas Mann, the institute...
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For shock value, the headline in the (March 5) New York Times—"Catholics Adopt More Liberal Attitudes During Their Years in College, a Survey Finds"—ranked up there with the latest press release from the Flat Earth So
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Strengthening and renewing the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities is a critical concern on many Catholic campuses. Reflection and planning on the topic have become more focused as the number of religious men and women teaching...
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Does biblical scholarship benefit the church? Such a question seems ridiculous at first glance, yet it has often given me pause. While the church has placed a premium on learning, and the work of Catholic philosophers and theologians over the...
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Perhaps the religious illiteracy of so many otherwise well-educated young Catholics is too familiar to bear mentioning again. One has come to expect that even at elite Catholic colleges and universities, entering students will not know what is...
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As the dean of a law school, I spend much time meeting our graduates. They have many stories about the colorful characters who taught them. The most popular story by far is about what one late legendary professor would say to his first-year...
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It was a memorable sermon, lacking any clear outline or notable linkage to the Scripture readings. It was a diatribe on the ills of modern Catholicism. The major culprits in this priest’s analysis were "so-called Catholic theologians." Since I have...
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The revised, and now Vatican-approved, local ordinances ["U.S. norms"] of the Catholic bishops of the United States for the implementation of the 1990 Apostolic Constitution Ex corde ecclesiae go into effect next May. They prescribe requirements...
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Only by using the word in its most Pickwickian sense would I ever call myself a "young" theologian.
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I can address only a few of Stephen Pope’s welcome questions. First, I agree that undergraduate teaching is a prime opportunity for theology to contribute to the life of the church and society. But has that opportunity really been taken advantage of...
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The fate of young theologians has been a recurring theme in the controversy surrounding Ex corde ecclesiae.
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Dennis M. Doyle, James Heft, John O. Geiger, Raymond L. Fitz, Terrence W. Tilley, Una M. Cadigan
The current generation in Catholic higher education has been one of growth, debate, and retrieval. It has given rise, especially in the past few years, to a widespread determination that the religious identity of American Catholic colleges and...
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In April, the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education unexpectedly returned to the American bishops, for a "second draft," the regulations that will govern the relationship between the hierarchy and U.S. Catholic colleges and universities (see...
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The last day of January, three hours out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and I am driving across a snowy Indiana landscape under a darkening sky to fulfill a speaking assignment.
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Predictably, spring brought the annual tussles about whether or not The Vagina Monologues ought to be performed at Catholic colleges and universities. I understand those who think the content and rhetoric of the play is inappropriate for a Catholic...
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Reading Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, $17, 320 pp.) reminded me of some advice I once got from a colleague.
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We numbered no more than fifteen participants—including me, the instructor-for the sophomore history seminar, and over the course of the semester, we came to know one another rather well. Almost too well. Our distinct personalities all gradually...
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Over much of the past decade, a celebrated and notorious play has set off a fierce debate at Catholic colleges and universities. The debate pits the values of Catholic identity against those of academic freedom, and invokes a broader battle for the...
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“There are some ideas and some causes that a Catholic college campus cannot treat pleasantly,” wrote the outraged editors. “Doesn’t deliberate opposition to Catholic social doctrine come close to being anti-Catholic?#8221...
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April is the cruelest month for college English departments, and not just because we’re fans of T. S. Eliot (yes, he still gets taught, if occasionally—Shakespeare, too, if we can fit him in).
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Tony Blair’s students no longer laugh when he is introduced as “Professor Blair.” Even Blair seems significantly more comfortable with the title than he was in September 2008, when the former British prime minister began teaching his seminar “Faith...
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Even as he battles economic woes at home and security threats abroad, President Barack Obama is advancing a bold strategy for improving the nation’s schools. His new budget aims to recast Washington’s role in education, shedding the regulatory...
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Do conservatives still believe in American greatness?
